The New Accreditation Rules Explained

The Pressing Need for Accreditation Reform

U.S. higher education is broken. College costs are out of control, rising at more than twice the rate of inflation. Students, parents, and taxpayers are strapped with nearly $2 trillion (about $6,200 per person in the US) dollars in debt for degrees that often do not generate earnings sufficient to repay the loans that funded them. Experts expect one-fourth of the colleges in the United States to close in the decades ahead.

The college degree wage premium—the earnings bump associated with college attainment—is also declining. Unsurprisingly, the share of students going to college is also declining, now reaching its lowest rate since 2001. More and more American families reach the conclusion that higher education is not worth the price, and more than 70% of Americans believe it is headed in the wrong direction.

The unfolding meltdown of America’s higher education sector serves as a powerful indictment of the processes the federal government has established to ensure quality in higher education. These processes—centered on how we accredit universities—have failed to adequately hold our institutions accountable to the public purposes that fueled the public’s massive multi-billion-dollar annual investment in the sector.

Accreditation serves a critical role in the American educational system. Our accreditors’ primary role is to ensure the quality and stability of America’s universities and colleges. They are part of a process of regular review and evaluation that helps our colleges continuously maintain and improve the quality and value of their educational experiences. Accreditors also serve a consumer protection role—ensuring that programs and institutions are not only delivering quality, but that they will be around to deliver it and that students are protected when that is not the case. Finally, and perhaps most important to the institutions themselves, accreditation serves as the “gatekeeper” for access to federal student aid programs and dollars—institutions must be accredited by a Department of Education-recognized accreditor to pursue and receive access to student loans, Pell Grants, and other federal aid programs.

Over the past two months, the Department of Education convened a six-week process called “negotiated rulemaking,” where policy experts and stakeholders are brought together with government decisionmakers to improve and enhance the Department’s proposed rules around important policy issues. The focus during this round was accreditation. The Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM Committee) met for nine days of negotiations in two week-long sets, meeting April 13-17, 2026, and May 18-21, 2026, at the Department’s offices in Washington, D.C. The public was invited, and all the materials, including videos of the sessions, can be found on the Department’s Negotiated Rulemaking for Higher Education 2026 website.

The experts came together representing a wide range of perspectives, so the conversations were, at times, spirited. As the designated negotiator representing the American taxpayer and the public interest, I had the privilege of working with negotiators representing students, veterans, accreditors, nascent accreditors, public and private institutions, the Department of Education, and a range of other interests to improve, create, and streamline the standards and rules that regulate our accreditors across the nation. Despite the presence of multiple constituencies with conflicting incentives and agendas, our nine full days of discussions and deliberations produced consensus in support of a set of rules that boldly refocused our accreditation processes back on the public interest. This paper explains the several dimensions of these rule changes that advance that interest and work to strengthen the quality of America’s higher education system for students, families, and taxpayers alike.

Protecting Constitutional Rights

One of the key challenges negotiators faced was how to reinsert the American public’s priorities back into a review process that had meandered far from its original intent. Our quality control processes for the academy, much like medicine and law, are built around “peer review”—the idea that the domain is so specialized that only experts in it can help maintain its quality.

Accreditation is built around a peer review model, reflecting both this desire to seek expertise and its own origins as a branding strategy for educational quality. Unfortunately, these insider-driven processes tend to emphasize the parochial and niche concerns of the participants and to lose sight of their original charter over time. In the case of accreditation, when these tendencies are repeated year after year, they self-reinforce and leave the broader and more common-sense interests of the American public further and further behind. They instead become increasingly captured by the elitist fads of the day.

When political agenda and culture-war-driven ideologies amplify these effects from the outside, they can become even more problematic. Suddenly, university presidents cannot even call out obvious evil as evil, as we saw in the horrific testimony in December 2023 by the three Ivy League presidents before the House Workforce and Economic Development Committee about the October 7, 2023, Massacre. Affirmative action processes intended to bring a range of viewpoints and experiences to campus become permission to discriminate against ideas you do not like. Merit-focused standards (like getting the right answer) become inherently racist. Histories get rewritten to reflect agendas and the pre-determined biases of the authors instead of reviewing the available facts to pursue understanding.

Our colleges as learning environments have moved progressively further left—not only crowding out voices from the middle or right by demanding ideological conformity in hiring and promotions but also by, in many instances, actively banning them outright. Heckler’s vetoes, open threats, overt discrimination, anti-Semitism, and speech-targeted violence have become normalized on many campuses while trustees and leaders do little to stop it and sometimes even encourage them.

Students, administrators, and faculty become afraid to raise any dissenting opinions—afraid for their grades, careers, and personal safety—even when they have the Constitution, the law, and common sense on their side.

The UCLA Medical School, for example, has just been found by the U.S. Department of Justice to continue to violate prohibitions that were imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling in 2023. This is in a state that imposed those same prohibitions in its state’s constitution in 1996.

Through all of this, accreditors have remained silent—taking few or no actions to demand that universities enforce laws against discrimination or even asking their institutions to create spaces and open learning communities where the actual open debate and discourse that taxpayers expected when they wrote their checks can happen. At this time, accreditors do not hold institutions accountable for providing any level of intellectual diversity on their campuses. In fact, many accreditors, such as the American Bar Association (ABA), have actively advanced oppressive monocultures that silence debate through their standards and policies.

Sometimes, even as accreditors strike illegal standards (like using race in admissions), their other actions contradict their stated intent. On the very day the headlines focused on the ABA’s Accreditation Council’s vote to eliminate their Standard 206 on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), they were advertising their 2026 ABA Virtual Equity Summit, where one of the stated goals is “turning commitments of equity and fairness in the legal profession and justice system into measurable, future-ready impact.” They also feature their DEI Center and their DEI Advisory Councils at the event and offer Continuing Legal Education credits for participation. They also left intact language in Standard 303(c), which has been used by activists to mandate and advance the DEI agenda in our law schools.

Publicly, political pressure has already been brought to bear on accreditors to take action to reverse these distortions of the public intent from their standards and processes. But the response has been inconsistent, with some repealing standards, some doubling down on their commitment to the ideologies like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that exacerbate these trends, and others claiming it was never their policy, even as their peer review processes pressured member institutions to conform to their unwritten norms.

The new accreditation rules supported in rulemaking directly confront this inconsistency by prompting accreditors to ask institutions to show compliance with federal and state laws, including protecting free speech and avoiding unlawful discrimination. Opponents decry this, inconsistently claiming it is inappropriate for accreditors to consider compliance with these laws even while they argue the law already requires universities to do it (so it is already covered).

The new rules also reinforce the existing commitments to academic freedom—ensuring that scholars and students have the right to conduct research and engage in debates that foster the pursuit of knowledge and truth. They encourage a focus on this core principle that undergirds the academic enterprise, and more clearly defines what it is and what it is not, thereby ensuring that the Department, accreditors, and institutions are using the same meaning when evaluating it.

Fostering Quality through Intellectual Diversity

Creating an environment where students and faculty are free to discuss and propose any idea is at the heart of the academic enterprise. Thus, the new rules also address intellectual diversity—the idea that not only should all ideas be acceptable for orderly review and discussion, but that students should be exposed to a range of perspectives on campus. Building this civic skill set is the very essence of why Congress and taxpayers agreed to fund higher education in the first place.

As President George Washington argued in his first Congressional address in 1790 for the establishment of a national university, it is critical for citizens “to know and to value their own rights” and to “discern and provide against invasions of them.” To learn to discern, students must be exposed to a range of ideas—something that is distressingly less common on today’s college campuses.

The loss of a diversity of intellectual perspectives on campus has fueled the collapse of its perceived and actual quality. The new rules address this directly, asking accreditors to hold institutions accountable for the quality and volume of civil debate and discourse on campus. It does this by specifying that intellectual diversity on campus is an essential dimension of quality about which institutions should be intentional and asks accreditors to hold them accountable in pursuing it.

It is also important to note what the new rules do not do—they do not promote or mandate any ideology. Institutions are asked to evaluate what they do to promote intellectual diversity and do not prescribe any particular outcome. Opponents are trying to frame this requirement as biased and ideological, arguing that it favors introducing new exposure to conservative ideas. Interestingly, the only way that asking for intellectual diversity on campus could be construed as forcing conservative ideas onto campus would be if they were not present in the first place—undermining their very claim that intellectual diversity is not a problem on campus.

That said, serious reviews of intellectual diversity by most campuses discover that there is indeed a problem. Yale University’s April report on Trust in Higher Education, for example, found problems in this regard and made recommendations for how they could foster better intellectual pluralism, as they called it. Some institutions are seriously embracing this issue without the new rules because it is so essential to a quality education.

Some critics disingenuously argue that accreditors will not be able to enforce a focus on intellectual diversity. The reality is quite the opposite. To comply, accreditors need only add one word to the question they have been asking institutions for decades, moving from “How do you promote diversity on campus?” to “How do you promote intellectual diversity on campus?”

The resulting dialogues will focus campus communities on this core element of educational quality. Many institutions already do this to some degree, and most claim they do. As described above, the resulting intellectual diversity on campus has been disappointing, with many campus intellectual climates dominated by administratively reinforced monocultures. This change to the rules is perhaps the most important contribution of this rulemaking process to the future quality of American higher education.

Protecting the Integrity of our Quality Control System

Imagine a world where Consumer Reports was owned by Kitchen Aid as it prepared evaluations of their refrigerators. Consumers would have little reason to trust their reviews. The reviews likely would be skewed to favor Kitchen Aid’s products over those of their competitors, and the recommendations would almost certainly advance the features that their designers created.

For many programmatic accreditors, this is precisely the situation. They are controlled by, unduly influenced by, or obligated to other organizations—especially trade associations—who have a vested (often financial) interest in their policies, standards, and outcomes. In many instances, they share governing board members, fundraisers, accountants, auditors, staff, and even offices. Additionally, these conflicted relationships are anti-competitive, giving the accreditor with this special relationship monopoly powers and preventing competing accreditors from forming.

While the conflicts are obvious, they are allowed under the current regulatory framework for programmatic accreditors—including those who regulate some of our most important professions like law, medicine, and psychology. For those who provide accreditation to institutions overall, this issue was addressed 34 years ago in the Higher Education Amendments of 1992. The proposed new rules address this threat to the integrity of our quality control system by applying a separate and independent standard to all accreditors.

These conflicting interests undermine the very purpose of the quality control and accountability processes of accreditation—to provide credible, independent reviews of the quality of educational programs. The new rules restore public confidence in this area by creating common-sense requirements that the backbone of our accountability system—our nation’s accreditors—be separate and independent from interest groups that have a stake in their reviews and decisions.

Encouraging Institutional and Accreditor Innovation

Concomitant with these separation requirements, the new rules also create a streamlined review and approval process for the creation of new accreditors. One of the major accomplishments of the first Trump Administration was the elimination of regional institutional accreditation monopolies that held the fate of universities located within their geography. This reform allowed universities to seek accreditation for federal purposes from any recognized federal accreditor.

This competition between the formerly regional accreditors has already resulted in improvements to institutional quality and saved costs. Not only can institutions now work with accreditors who better understand them and their enterprises, but it also puts pressure on accreditors to reform their processes to be more responsive to the institutions that participate with them and efficient in how those processes operate.

When I helped launch the University of Austin (UATX), I was told by accreditors it would take at least 4.5 to 5 years for UATX to achieve candidacy for accreditation—a key step in becoming eligible for federal funds. Because of the competitive pressures on the accreditor to be agile and focus their reviews and processes on the essential, we achieved candidacy after only 10 months. This not only reduced the costs for everyone but also resulted in a cleaner process that focused the time that was spent on the real issues we needed to improve, rather than constructing a bureaucratic leviathan.

While more competition across accreditation is good for the accreditors and institutions alike, one of the key benefits of enabling new accreditors is that we can move away from the previous one-size-fits-all model of regional accreditation. Between declining enrollments, disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence, and a rapidly changing economy that demands an evolving workforce, higher education will change dramatically in the years ahead. This will mean mergers and closures for some, major program reinvention and redesign for others, and an army of new institutions and programs that leverage those changes to create better, more custom educational experiences and value for students.

This evolving educational landscape will, in turn. require new accreditors who can focus on the specific institutional models and provide the necessary specialized support and accountability. Much like online education has already redefined higher education and forced legislative and rule changes, artificial intelligence and new technologies will demand a redefinition of “best practices” that institutions will need to pursue to succeed and respond. The expanded focus on results and outcomes as measures of quality in the new rules will serve as a strong foundation for ensuring quality and protecting students in this new higher education ecosystem.

A great example of how this will work is the development of the new Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE)—an accreditor that has launched to accredit large, public research universities. This accreditor has developed standards, processes, and accountability specific to the needs of this critical group of institutions. This focus will allow accreditors to zero in on issues like retention, the competing interests of research and faculty on campus, the challenges of their large scale, and managing public accountability to their respective state governments, which are unique to who they are. Specialized accreditors like CPHE will become even more essential in the future as increased workforce integration and new learning paradigms (e.g., using AI for remediation) unfold that require specialized knowledge, skills, and expertise. Not every accreditor can or should attempt to be everything to everyone.

Reducing the Cost of Higher of Education

Included in the new rules are also provisions to reduce surging higher education costs. As numerous studies have shown, the number of new bureaucrats on campus has outstripped enrollment growth for a long time. Accreditors are asked in the new rules to create an increased focus on cost savings, cost-benefit analyses, and shared information as ways to bring the cost down.

The new rules also emphasize transparency about student earnings outcomes to help drive down costs. Consequently, families will be less willing to pay for degrees that do not provide economic value to the student’s future. Accreditors are asked to require institutions to provide more in-depth data and information on prospective students’ expected rates of return for a given degree program using real data from their institutions. This is done by asking them not only to make the data available but also to provide more detailed metrics on what students can expect to gain relative to the money they will be expected to pay and the debt they are expected to assume.

One of the biggest breakthroughs in the new rules that will help save students, institutions, and taxpayers money is the new presumption of transferability for students changing institutions. When students transfer between institutions, they frequently receive little or no credit for the units they have already completed toward their degree in their new institution, meaning that the last two years of work were functionally squandered. These lost credits can account for as much as 30–40% of the overall cost for the degree—"wasted” credits that force students to spend money on additional, unneeded classes. Not only does this result in a significant additional cost to the student who must now pay for additional courses, but it also increases the likelihood they will choose not to finish the degree, thereby further undermining the value of the future returns to the investment the student already made.

The new rules place a burden on institutions to presume that credit units count toward degree requirements at the new institution unless there are specific, substantial reasons they should not. This presumption of transferability requires institutions to justify these costly decisions to students rather than the reverse. Given the millions of students who transfer courses throughout their education, even minor increases in transfer credit recognition will result in substantial savings for students, families, and taxpayers while also helping more students successfully complete their degrees.

Final Observations

Accreditation is one of the more tedious and maligned processes in the academy, but it serves the critical role of preserving quality and the public interest. This is especially true with respect to its gatekeeping role of providing access to billions upon billions of dollars of public monies. The new rules that resulted from this round of negotiated rulemaking are a major step toward protecting that public interest and helping higher education to better respond to today’s unique political, economic, demographic, technological, and social changes.

The final stage of the rulemaking process invites the public to submit comments to help Department officials refine the final rules. It is essential to preserve the progress that this month’s rulemaking negotiators made in advancing the quality and integrity of the sector while creating the flexibility and agility to respond to our rapidly shifting social and economic context. America depends on its higher education institutions to equip its future citizens and leaders with the skills to protect our civilization and to be the intellectual infrastructure on which the next 250 years of American leadership and progress are built.