New rule directs accreditors to review intellectual diversity on campus
The U.S. Education Department has rewritten the federal rules that govern college accreditation — the system that determines which colleges and universities are worthy of millions, even billions, of dollars in federal student loans and grants. President Donald Trump called the accreditation system his “secret weapon” in a 2023 campaign video, and the department has now carried out the overhaul he promised. The new rules are set to take effect in July, ahead of the 2027-28 academic year.
Under the changes, accreditors must now evaluate school policies on intellectual diversity, “ensuring that students are exposed to a range of viewpoints,” according to a department press release. The department says the overhaul will foster innovation and lower costs.
Accreditation is the gatekeeper for federal student aid. Colleges pay membership dues to third-party, nonprofit accreditors, which then review schools across categories that include curriculum quality, faculty qualifications, physical facilities and the soundness of their finances. An accreditor’s job, essentially, is to make sure students are getting good value — and to stop schools from pocketing taxpayer dollars without delivering quality degrees.
Congress decided decades ago that accreditors would sit outside the federal government. “Congress wanted accrediting agencies to be independent of the federal government. It wanted agencies to set standards independent of the federal government,” said Antoinette Flores of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. Federal law does require accreditors to assess schools in key areas such as student achievement, faculty and curriculum, and it gives the department oversight — but the law lets accreditors decide what standards a school must meet to determine its worthiness, Flores said.
Critics say the new rules upend that arrangement. “This rule gives [the Education Department] the authority to meddle in the internal affairs of colleges and universities in ways that they never have been able to in the past,” said Bob Shireman, an accreditation expert and former top official in the Obama Education Department.
The intellectual diversity requirement, Shireman said, opens a new channel for federal pressure. “For the first time,” he said, “you will have an avenue for the federal government to go in at least to an accreditor, but through accreditors to colleges, and tell them what balance of points of view the federal government thinks they should have.” The department could then, conceivably, threaten a school’s accreditation and, ultimately, its access to federal student aid if it considered the school out of balance. PEN America, a nonprofit dedicated to defending free expression, warned that the change “is part of a plan to weaken [higher education] and its historic protections for the freedom to think, teach, research and learn.”
The Education Department argues it is doing the opposite. Ellen Keast, communications director for the under secretary, said in a statement to NPR that the requirement is “a commonsense step toward restoring intellectual diversity by … creating an environment where differing perspectives can be debated openly and fairly.” “The regulations do not mandate any specific policies,” Keast added, “nor do they give the Department any authority to police speech. Instead, they reinforce a fundamental principle: truth emerges through rigorous debate, not enforced consensus.”
Even some conservatives have expressed anxiety over the expansion of federal power. Beth Akers, an economist and senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, supports much of the overhaul but said this particular change goes too far. “[It] does put the administration sort of in a seat of judgment over the institutions, over the accreditors, about whether or not they are appropriately teaching ideology. And that is something I’m uncomfortable with,” Akers said.
The department insists the regulations cannot police political speech on campus. In his 2023 campaign video, though, Trump pledged to “fire the radical-left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxists, maniacs and lunatics” — the same video in which he said, “The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left” and “Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system.”
Not all of the changes are controversial. Emily Rounds, senior higher education policy adviser at the center-left think tank Third Way, said the push to make accreditors give more weight to student outcomes enjoys some bipartisan support. “How much are they going to be earning? What are the licensure pass rates for certain programs? What is the graduation rate? Does an institution retain students year to year or are students dropping out?” she said, describing the questions accreditors will now weigh.
The accreditation overhaul is one piece of a broader remaking of federal education policy. The administration has cut the Education Department’s workforce by roughly half, canceled research funding, uprooted special education staff, upended student civil rights protections, overhauled student loan repayment plans and scaled back graduate school loans. Because the accreditation changes were made through the traditional rulemaking process, it will be difficult for Democrats to undo them.
Political tension over accreditation began building during the Biden administration, between Republican-led states and accreditors they considered too powerful and too liberal. “The way in which [accreditors] are exerting their authority has really rubbed people the wrong way when it came to these ideological standards they’re putting onto institutions,” Akers said. Florida and North Carolina actively clashed with their accreditors over issues including diversity, equity and inclusion and viewpoint diversity on their public university campuses.
“When we said, ‘No DEI,’ the accreditor was telling our universities, ‘Oh no no, you’re not gonna get accredited unless you do DEI,’” Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, said in June 2025. “Who the heck are they to say what our universities have to do?” DeSantis pushed for the creation of a new accreditor to replace the longstanding accreditor of Florida’s public universities, saying he hopes to “upend the monopoly of the woke accreditation cartels.” Five other state university systems — in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — have also said they will switch to the new accreditor, the Commission for Public Higher Education.
Another stated goal of the overhaul is cutting red tape and making it easier for schools and even states to create new accreditors. “The rule promotes greater competition and innovation,” the department said in its press release. Competition, the administration argues, will let schools shop around for an accreditor that best fits their needs and lower costs for schools and students alike. If a school does not like its accreditor, it will be easier to switch midstream. The changes are set to weaken traditional accreditors and strengthen schools.
Akers argued that is not a bad thing, and that the shift will empower schools to innovate and take chances. “We’ve been teaching students the same way for a very long time. Come sit in a lecture, take a test and then after you’ve sat there long enough, we give you the credits,” she said. Under the new rules, she hopes, schools will be freer to experiment with everything from the value of a credit hour to how much time a student actually needs to spend inside a classroom.
Shireman warned that forcing accreditors to compete for the schools they audit will not increase quality. “One person’s red tape is another person’s consumer protection: Checking to see if the fire extinguishers have expired is red tape,” he said. Making it easier for colleges to jump from one accreditor to another could weaken student protections, he added. “If one [accreditor] starts identifying problems, [schools] simply shift their weight over to another accreditor. And so it becomes whack-a-mole in terms of oversight of colleges, and we fail to catch problems soon enough.”