President Trump signed an executive order taking aim at college accreditors Wednesday, describing the agencies as lax in ensuring academic quality and “improperly focused on compelling adoption of discriminatory ideology” — meaning standards that require colleges and programs to address diversity, equity, and inclusion.
“The accreditors’ job is to determine which institutions provide a quality education — and therefore merit accreditation,” the order states. “Unfortunately, accreditors have not only failed in this responsibility to students, families, and American taxpayers, but they have also abused their enormous authority.”
In addition to demanding that accreditors abandon goals for diversity, equity, and inclusion, the order seeks to make it easier for institutions to change accreditors and to expedite federal approval of new accreditors.
The order, essentially a statement of the president’s policy goals, also warns that the administration will seek to remove accreditors’ federal recognition should they fail to adhere to its aims. And it admonishes the agencies against encouraging or forcing institutions to violate state laws.
An association of major accrediting groups said its members “firmly reject President Trump’s mischaracterization of accreditors’ role” but welcome discussion of several policy changes that they support, such as making it easier for colleges to switch accreditors. The proper way to change those policies is through negotiated rulemaking “that considers voices and insights from the broader public,” said Heather Perfetti, president of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, in a news release from the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions, a group of seven accreditors that oversee the vast majority of the country’s public and private nonprofit colleges.
Perfetti also pointed to legal constraints the administration would face should it seek to remove an accreditor’s recognition. “The Higher Education Act, along with corresponding regulations and case law, establishes a clear system of due process for the recognition of an accreditor,” Perfetti wrote. “Ultimately, concerns about accreditor recognition can be escalated to federal court.”
The order on accreditation was one of several the president signed Wednesday as part of an ongoing campaign to shift the trajectory and ideology of higher education. Other orders pledged to promote private-sector partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities, form a plan to create more apprenticeships, and tighten requirements that colleges report gifts and contracts from foreign governments.
The accreditation measure is consistent with the president’s agenda and his statements about accreditation during his 2024 campaign, when he pledged to “fire the radical left accreditors” and create agencies that require a focus on Western civilization and nationalist values.
Education-reform advocates on both the right and left have called for changes to the accreditation system, which serves as a gatekeeper to more than $100 billion in federal student aid annually. Colleges must be accredited by a federally recognized accreditor in order for them to receive federal student-aid money.
But critics of the Trump administration are concerned about both the order’s aims and the ways the U.S. Department of Education might try to act on them. Will Del Pilar, senior vice president of the Education Trust, an advocacy group for students of color in higher ed, said “allowing new accreditors in the name of innovation is a straw man argument; what you mean is that it stifles a standard.”
He also criticized the order’s intention to remove a federal requirement that colleges disaggregate student-outcome data based on race and sex, which will hide the inequities hurting groups that have been historically underrepresented, he said.
In the Oval Office Wednesday evening, Will Scharf, White House staff secretary, described the order as a way to force accreditors “to be focused on the merit and the actual results that these universities are providing, as opposed to how woke these universities have gotten.”
Trump spoke briefly before signing the accreditation order, referring to colleges “allowing people into school — they can’t do math. And yet kids who’ve worked really hard and number one in their class at a high school someplace in New Jersey or in Mississippi, they can’t get into the best schools.”
With Trump was Linda McMahon, education secretary, who said the executive order “gets to your policy, sir, of meritocracy, that we should be looking at those who have real merit to get in and we have to look harder at those universities that aren’t enforcing that.”
Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, said the real culprit that prevents new accreditors from joining the fray is not existing accreditors, but federal law and regulations, which set the process for recognizing new accrediting agencies. Those processes are completely reasonable, he said, considering accrediting agencies’ responsibilities in safeguarding federal financial aid.
The law also mandates that accrediting agencies set clear standards for colleges across 10 different criteria, including student success, curricula, faculty, student support, and systems for recording and tracking complaints about the college.
Accreditors are also allowed to set standards that are not required in statute, Fansmith said, but it’s not clear if the government could legally prohibit certain kinds of standards. Many of the changes proposed in the order, he said, would require a change in the law.
Most major accrediting organizations set standards on matters like institutional integrity, autonomous governance, and financial viability. Several smaller accrediting organizations also have standards that apply to faith-based colleges, requiring the institutions to adhere to particular religious tenets.
Among the seven major college accreditors, formerly known as regionals, five now include standards that broadly require institutions to address DEI. Institutions often meet this standard by disaggregating data on student performance and demonstrating how they seek to improve outcomes for groups that perform below average.
Within that group, only the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges has never created a standard on DEI. The WASC Senior College and University Commission considered eliminating its DEI requirements, but its members quickly rejected that move.
In June, the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits nearly a thousand colleges across 19 states, revised its standards, removing explicit mentions of equity and inclusion from its standards on “mission” and “teaching and learning.”
But accreditors have also given their member institutions wide latitude to determine whether and how to respond to federal guidance and the more than a dozen state laws barring public colleges from having staff or programs that promote DEI goals.
“To the extent any accrediting agency has standards related to diversity, equity, or inclusion,” Perfetti said in the statement, “they are predicated on institutions implementing such requirements in accordance with applicable state and federal laws.”
