Trump Administration Diverted Student Aid to Accreditors Unlikely to Ever Serve a Federal Purpose

Late last year, the U.S. Department of Education declared it would reroute tens of millions of dollars that Congress had reserved for student-support grants, including those for basic needs like food and housing.

Instead, the Trump administration said that taxpayer money would flow to its own favored projects, like those involving artificial intelligence, or college accreditation.

This policy maneuver prompted outcry. Not only was the Trump administration yanking money that’s a lifeline to some of the country’s most vulnerable students, but it also clearly was sprinting through the grant process, truncating the time it would spend vetting proposals and distributing funds into mere weeks.

The consequences of that rush job are becoming evident after the Education Department announced grant recipients this month. It’s throwing about $10 million in taxpayer money to potential new accreditors, but it’s unlikely most of them would be able to serve the federal government in any way.

The Education Department had specifically sought to fund new accreditors who would become gatekeepers of student financial aid or other federal money, through the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, or FIPSE, grant. They become these financial gatekeepers through a process known as the Education Department “recognizing” an accreditor. Only recognized accreditors assess the financial and academic health of higher education institutions and college programs to determine whether they should have access to federal dollars.

Becoming a department-recognized accreditor is an arduous, multiyear process, with strict rules about which ones can join the federal aid system. But only a couple of the aspiring accreditors the Education Department funded likely meet these requirements.

This raises questions about whether the administration truly considered how to meet the accreditation goals it set out, and thoroughly reviewed grant applications—or instead is engaging in political peacocking by investing millions into projects that will generate buzz but are likely to accomplish little for the government.

All but two of those FIPSE grant recipients are potential programmatic accreditors. A programmatic accreditor vets only one type of program, often in industry areas with state licensure requirements or prescriptive training standards, for example, nursing or speech-language pathology. Under regulations, the Education Department can recognize these accreditors only if they already play a role in administering another federal program—in other words, if their approval is already required somewhere else in the federal system.

For instance, The American Psychological Association serves as a programmatic accreditor with "links" to several federal entities, including the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the government prison system, whose employees must graduate from APA-accredited programs to qualify for certain internships and jobs. The American Occupational Therapy Association also functions as a programmatic accreditor whose seal of approval is required for institutions to access a National Institutes of Health grant program.

It’s not obvious what the federal “link” would be for most of the FIPSE grantees. One of the recipients, the University of Texas at Austin plans to stand up an accreditor specializing in programs for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics educators, and would house it in its Center for Space Research. However, it has no clear federal connection, so it falls outside the legal architecture governing recognition of accreditors.

At a moment when American higher education is floundering financially — and the Trump administration has intensified those pressures, cutting off grant funding streams to scores of institutions, pulling back money for minority-serving institutions — the department is devoting limited government resources to accreditors that may never serve any federal purpose.

Other accreditors the department favored raise their own set of concerns. One of them, which received $1 million in FIPSE money, has zero experience in higher education administration or accreditation, as The Chronicle of Higher Education reported this month.

Another, the Commission for Public Higher Education, or CPHE, is being spearheaded by conservative state officials, among them Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has described the contemporary model as “woke accreditation cartels.”

CPHE thus seems less about constructing an accreditor for public colleges and more about tightening control of state institutions. As the advocacy group PEN America noted in a new report, CPHE has not made its academic-freedom standards public, and DeSantis’ involvement is a “worrying sign,” given his record on free expression. It too received a $1 million FIPSE grant.

Ultimately, the Education Department seems to be barreling forward with the Republican issue du jour, accreditation, with such speed that it has failed to ensure the projects it is funding can actually be realized. The accreditors the Trump administration has elevated through the FIPSE grant may have no standing to become sentinels of federal funds, if they get off the ground at all.

The Trump Education Department should be more deliberate in handing out taxpayer money. It will otherwise continue to run into policy obstacles that should have been obvious from the start.