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This feels like an inflection point. For years, academics, policymakers, and students alike have called for stronger accountability in higher education. Graduation rates are too low. The return on investment for students is uneven. Too many institutions are financially unstable. There is real urgency for reform, but that urgency is not a license for overreach.
At its best, accreditation is a neutral referee — a mechanism to ensure educational quality, institutional integrity, and student protections. At its worst, it is a politicized reward for ideological allies and a cudgel with which to punish dissent. Impartiality gives accreditation its value, and losing that is something no institution, left or right, can afford. This debate doesn’t need more outrage. It needs clarity. And strangely enough, accreditation might be one of the few places where there’s still room for common ground.
Calls for greater accountability in higher education aren’t just politically expedient, they’re often valid. Retention, timely graduation, and return on investment are essential outcomes, and too many institutions fall short on all three. The national retention rate is around 75 percent, and it slowly ticked upwards from 2013-2022, but challenges persist: Community-college retention is just over 50 percent, and students over the age of 21 have a retention rate under 50 percent.
Second, there’s trouble with graduation rates. The commonly reported six-year graduation rate stems from federal policy, specifically the 1990 Student Right-to-Know and Campus Security Act, which
Strangely enough, accreditation might be one of the few places where there’s still room for common ground.
defines success as completing a degree within 150 percent of “normal time.” It’s a pragmatic benchmark, but it doesn’t tell the full story. Four-year graduation rates more directly measure institutional efficiency and cost containment: The longer students stay enrolled, the more debt they often accumulate, and the lower their financial return on that degree.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 64 percent of first-time, full-time students who began a bachelor’s program in 2014 completed it within six years. But only about 45 percent complete within four years — a sobering gap that disproportionately affects students at public and open-access institutions. Private nonprofit colleges saw six-year completion rates closer to 68 percent, while for-profits hovered around 29 percent. While the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act expanded reporting requirements to include graduation rates at 100, 150, and 200 percent of normal time, the six-year rate continues to dominate policy discussions, institutional marketing, and accreditation reviews — often at the expense of more timely and meaningful measures.
Then there’s ROI. A recent study from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity found that a third of federal student-loan funding goes to programs with no ROI. Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce reached similar conclusions: In their analysis of 4,600 colleges, the value of a degree varied drastically by program and institutional type. The think tank Third Way’s “Price-to-Earnings Premium” offers one of the most accessible metrics: It calculates how long it takes students to break even on their degree. While students at most public and nonprofit institutions recover their investment within a decade, nearly half of for-profit programs studied showed no ROI.
These aren’t fringe data points. They reflect real risk — especially for low-income, first-generation, and underrepresented students, who are most vulnerable to poor outcomes. That’s why true reform should push accreditors to focus more intentionally on improving retention, four-year graduation rates, and the financial return of the degrees their institutions confer.
As Kathleen deLaski argues in her book, Who Needs College Anymore?, higher education must also reimagine what “return” means in a rapidly shifting economy. Increasingly, students — especially so-called “new majority learners” — seek shorter-term credentials, work-integrated experiences, and skills-first pathways that aren’t always reflected in traditional ROI metrics or accreditation standards. If we’re serious about outcomes, we need accreditors and institutions to account for this broader spectrum of value — not just degrees conferred, but career readiness delivered.
But we also need to be honest: The current system isn’t equipped for quick intervention. Accreditors often catch financial instability or academic decline only during reaffirmation cycles, which happen every 8 to 10 years. Even annual financial monitoring, where it exists, is often limited in scope and too slow to catch early warning signs. When students are left with unpaid refunds, shuttered campuses, or degrees employers don’t respect, the damage has already been done.
Most striking is the directive to expedite recognition of new accrediting agencies while removing barriers for institutions that want to switch accreditors. Some institutions are already exploring new options. The University of North Carolina system, for instance, is considering the creation of its own accrediting agency, in partnership with other “major” public university systems — potentially the first of its kind — as a way to exert more local control in a changing regulatory environment that many feel is increasingly burdensome. At the same time, for many colleges it’s still too soon to act, and their moves will depend upon whether the Department of Education adopts formal rule changes or clarifies how the executive order will translate into enforceable guidance. In theory, changes could increase competition. In practice, however, it will likely open the door for inexperienced, ideologically aligned agencies to gain approval. Even more concerning, the order threatens to revoke recognition from existing accreditors that fail to comply with the administration’s priorities.
This is not reform, it’s political realignment. Under the new framework, accreditors are not simply asked to improve graduation rates and post-graduate employment. They are now prohibited from using demographic indicators to assess institutional performance. The Department of Education’s guidance makes clear that factors such as race, ethnicity, or income level cannot be part of an accreditor’s evaluation criteria, even when those indicators are essential to understanding disparities in access, persistence, and outcomes.
When accreditors are barred from even acknowledging persistent disparities in student outcomes ... they are not freed from bias — they are shackled by denial.
This is a significant blow to equity-driven institutions and the student-centered policies they implement. Accrediting agencies have historically allowed colleges to define mission-driven priorities, whether that includes serving first-generation students, promoting diversity, or aligning with religious values. Colleges that prioritize access and success for historically marginalized groups — such as HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, tribal colleges, and regional public universities serving large numbers of first-generation or low-income students — often define their mission around reducing barriers to completion and opportunity. That mission is frequently enacted through programs like need-based scholarships, bridge initiatives, mentoring, and wraparound support services. The new rules risk delegitimizing both the missions and the methods of these institutions, replacing context-aware accountability with one-size-fits-all metrics that ignore the structural conditions shaping student outcomes.
Meanwhile, the federal infrastructure needed to support meaningful accountability is being dismantled. The recent gutting of the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Center for Education Statistics has left critical gaps in how we track student outcomes and institutional performance. We are now in a paradox: Accreditors are being told to enforce outcomes, but not to consider the factors that shape those outcomes. They are tasked with promoting accountability while the federal government destroys the very systems that make accountability possible.
This isn’t an accident. It’s a deliberate shift in how educational legitimacy is defined and who gets to define it. And if the new model takes hold, institutions could find themselves evaluated not by their ability to serve students, but by their willingness to conform to a particular ideological framework.
The Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions and the Higher Learning Commission have, to their credit, pushed back. In public statements, they reaffirmed their commitment to institutional autonomy, mission diversity, and rigor without partisanship. But how long will those commitments hold under mounting federal pressure?
But there’s nothing neutral about the alternative being offered. The prohibition on using demographic indicators in accreditation reviews does not remove ideology — it replaces one perceived ideology with another. When accreditors are barred from even acknowledging persistent disparities in student outcomes based on race, income, or geography, they are not freed from bias — they are shackled by denial.
The stakes are high. As the American Association of University Professors and the Education Trust have warned, banning demographic data from accreditation decisions will not eliminate inequities, it will simply make them harder to track and address. Critics of DEI often frame these efforts as assaults on tradition or merit. But in doing so, they gloss over a deeper fear: that expanding access may disrupt the privileges historically afforded to dominant groups. The backlash against DEI is not simply about freedom of expression, it is also about preserving hierarchies of power.
The administration’s language around academic freedom rings hollow when paired with punitive threats to revoke the recognition of accreditors who deviate from the new orthodoxy. Freedom of thought doesn’t just mean the right to question DEI frameworks, it also means the right to pursue them without fear of federal retaliation. True academic freedom includes the liberty to explore diverse missions, identities, and values — even those that challenge prevailing political narratives.
We need accreditation to be honest, rigorous, and student-centered. That means ensuring institutions are held accountable not just for outcomes, but for the environments and structures that shape those outcomes. It means making room for diverse institutional missions without diluting academic standards. And it means rejecting attempts by any political faction to weaponize accreditation for partisan ends.
There is still a reasonable, bipartisan path forward. Policymakers on both sides of the aisle should be able to agree on a few essential reforms. First, accreditors need better tools — and perhaps clearer mandates — for monitoring financial health and student outcomes in real time, not just during 8- or 10-year reaffirmation cycles. Second, we need to invest in federal education-data infrastructure, not dismantle it. Third, we need to improve transparency around institutional ROI, retention, and graduation rates — but also allow for the use of demographic and contextual data to interpret and act on those outcomes responsibly.
None of these reforms require choosing sides in a culture war. They require choosing students.
