Students Lose as Trump's Order Turns Accreditation Into a Political Tool

Last week, President Donald Trump issued an executive order claiming accreditors—organizations that gauge whether colleges offer quality programs—have abused their power.

Accreditors, when approved by the U.S. Department of Education, have the ability to unlock federal financial aid for colleges. When those accreditors decide an institution meets their standards, that college can then access aid like Pell Grants and student loans.

But Trump’s order seeks to short-circuit the accreditation process, improperly giving the executive wing more authority to decide standards that accreditors should enforce and how they should evaluate colleges.

One of the Trump administration’s targets is obvious: policies that accreditors maintain on diversity, equity, and inclusion. The White House has attempted to weed out DEI efforts not just within the federal government, but also society itself.

The executive order mandates that accreditors abandon DEI policies. This, and other of the order’s provisions, are naked attempts to force accreditors, traditionally somewhat independent from government, to align to a far-right political agenda.

The Trump administration has often trampled constitutional and academic freedoms as it attempts to erase DEI initiatives from American education. For one, the Education Department published a public letter in February that ordered K-12 colleges and schools nationwide to nix all programs that factor in race, a directive legal experts widely panned as overreach of executive power. Federal judges have already temporarily blocked that policy.

Trump’s executive order also seems to be unconstitutional in trying to control what policies accreditors can enforce. The order demands that accreditors dump what it calls their “unlawful” DEI requirements, and suggests the Education Department will investigate and terminate agencies that do not.

Instead, the order states, accreditors should direct that their colleges prioritize “intellectual diversity.”

This is a euphemism, and in reality is an attempt to police colleges’ faculty hiring and force more right-wing voices into academe, a space that Republicans have derided as overly liberal.

Education Department officials have already attempted to take over Harvard’s hiring and admissions processes, threatening to revoke its federal funding if the institution did not meet its demands, which included that it set up an auditor who would review the campus for “viewpoint diversity.”

“Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity,” the Education Department wrote in a letter to Harvard. “Every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.”

Harvard did not cave to the Trump administration’s coercion, which then led to the federal government freezing billions of dollars of its grant money and threatening to revoke its tax-exempt status. It subsequently sued the administration for violating federal law and the Constitution.

The executive order is also likely illegal, according to New America’s analysis. The Higher Education Act, or HEA, limits what the Education Department can demand of accreditors. Specifically, the law bars the U.S. education secretary from creating new accreditation standards not already required by the HEA — including anything that defines how colleges must measure student success.

"Intellectual diversity" is not mentioned anywhere in the HEA, and thus trying to force accreditors to impose that tenet on colleges would likely exceed the Education Department’s legal authority.

The Trump administration is so averse to actual diversity in education that the executive order also forbids accreditors from considering disparities that emerge in student achievement data.

Accreditors could not break down that data by race, gender, or ethnicity, according to the order—even while the Trump administration demands that colleges use granular levels of information to evaluate progress in student outcomes, like graduation rates.

And so the executive order undermines one of accreditors’ primary purposes, which is that they ask that their colleges continually improve in accreditation standards.

For instance, if colleges have problems with their student outcomes, then a first step is often picking out which populations might be struggling from data. Blocking accreditors and colleges from examining academic performance across race, ethnicity, or gender would effectively prevent them from identifying problems.

Disaggregating data across demographics is important, given what research has revealed about equity gaps in higher education.

National data shows that only 40 percent of Black students earn a four-year college degree within six years, compared to 64 percent of white students. At one college, no Black students graduated for five years in a row. Similar gaps exist for other groups, like students from low-income backgrounds.

To address this, some accrediting agencies require colleges to break down data by student group to make sure institutions are supporting all of them.

That’s also why colleges constantly analyze and disaggregate student success data.

Colleges also break down data based on whether a student is a veteran, a first-generation college student, from a rural area, and more.

When the federal government started breaking down graduation rates by Pell Grant status, it revealed major gaps between low- and high-income students.

At another college, about 70 percent of students without Pell Grants graduated within six years, but only 9 percent of Pell recipients did — a 64-point gap. Without disaggregating their data, colleges like this one, or the one with a 0 percent graduation rate for Black students, might appear to have strong overall graduation rates while missing that some groups of students were being left behind.

The federal government should be encouraging accreditors and institutions to ask questions about disparities among student populations, not prohibiting them from seeing data that could help ease equity gaps in higher education.

The order also wants to facilitate the Education Department recognizing new accreditors, under the guise of bolstering competition among the agencies.

However, colleges already have their pick of accreditors, as the Education Department recognizes more than 60 of them. Institutions can also select accreditors outside those the Education Department greenlights, but those agencies can’t approve colleges for federal aid.

The order is merely trying to pave the way for the administration to recognize accreditors more friendly to its political agenda—entities that would potentially provide little oversight over their colleges.

One of those aspiring accreditors, the National Association for Academic Excellence, is being led by officials who either formerly worked for predatory for-profit colleges, or the accreditation agencies approving them. NAAE, in an analysis of the executive order Monday, wrote that new accreditors "have an opportunity to demonstrate alignment with emerging policy priorities."

"Turmoil and uncertainty about legacy accreditation is now a factor in the strategic planning of many institutions," NAAE wrote. "Quality assurance resources that were stable and low-profile have now been thrust into positions of controversy, deserved or not. Incumbent providers may be facing greater scrutiny in seeking recognition than ever before."

Republicans have already publicized their vision for an anemic accreditation vision. The GOP-led College Cost Reduction Act, for example, would allow the Education Department to recognize new accreditors with as little as one year of experience working with colleges. That would make it easier for unreliable accreditors to rubber-stamp low-quality colleges.

The executive order also creates opportunities for the Education Department to remove recognition from accreditors that don’t bend to the administration’s political whims. This could also push colleges to fly-by-night accreditors.

A couple of states, Florida and North Carolina, have already passed laws that force their public colleges to regularly switch accreditors, burdening them with significant administrative work merely because lawmakers didn’t like the actions of those organizations.

This is a weaponization of accreditation that won't make colleges more accountable. Instead, by letting colleges shop around for multiple accreditors, it creates artificial competition that could lower standards. Accreditors may feel pressure to approve colleges quickly and superficially just to win more business. In the long run, this would undermine the entire point of accreditation: to make sure colleges offer a quality education that actually helps students succeed.

The Trump administration’s executive order clearly isn’t about improving higher education — it’s about forcing colleges into submission. By undermining accreditor independence, banning the use of critical data to address inequities, and inviting low-quality oversight in the name of "competition," the administration’s actions threaten to dismantle a system designed to protect students and taxpayers.

True accountability requires independent accreditation focused on educational quality and student success, not political loyalty tests. If the administration succeeds in reshaping accreditation this way, it will ultimately harm students, particularly those who are already marginalized.