The organizations that accredit colleges and universities by definition influence much of what institutions of higher education do and how they do it. For example, in the case of law schools, the accrediting agency is the Council and the Accreditation Committee of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar of the American Bar Association. This ABA body sets standards for legal education, imposing requirements that full-time instructors teach most classes (standard 403(a)), that a credit hour is not less than one hour of class time and two hours of outside-of-class time for 15 weeks (standard 310(b)), and plenty of other obligations.
This brief essay explains why accreditation matters, then examines the process for selecting and, importantly, deselecting accreditors. This is an arcane area of federal law and regulation—if you go looking for law review articles on the subject, you will not find much, and if you go looking for cases that have involved disputes over aspects of accreditation, you will not find too many.1 Until now, accreditation has not been very high profile.
The Trump Administration, though, has changed all that. After confronting several universities individually over their practices and policies over the past year—including Harvard University, Columbia University, Brown University, and the University of California, Los Angeles, to name a few—the Department of Education has announced plans to overhaul accreditation, which would affect institutions en masse. Installing an accreditor that shares the Administration’s policy goals can thus enable a more efficient, mass overhaul of higher education. While President Trump referred to accreditation as a “secret weapon” to use against higher education, with an executive order calling for changes to accreditation and the Department of Education’s regulatory initiative, it is not really secret.
Why Accreditation Matters
Under the Higher Education Act of 1965, only accredited institutions can participate in federal student financial assistance programs, which Congress created in Title IV of the Act. Students cannot use federal student loans or federal grant funds to pay for their education at institutions that are not accredited. For many, probably most, postsecondary schools, student access to this aid is essential; according to the College Board, students took out more than $88 billion in federal loans in the 2024–25 academic year and received more than $38 billion in Federal Pell Grants. Students need federal loan and grant money to pay, and most of the institutions they attend need that money to operate.
At a more abstract level, accreditation matters because the organizations that perform this task are the “authorities regarding the quality of education or training offered by the institutions or programs they accredit.” Accreditors are gatekeepers and in theory, at least, they ensure that federal largesse is not wasted on postsecondary programs that are of poor quality, however that is defined. Quality is defined by the accreditor, but more on that below.
How Accreditors Are Selected
Federal regulations require that, with some exceptions, the accreditor must be “separate and independent,” meaning the people who make accreditation decisions are not selected by the board of any affiliated trade association, professional organization, or membership organization. The accreditor must also have sufficient staff to do its job, as well as “[c]lear and effective controls, including guidelines, to prevent or resolve conflicts of interest.”
Not surprisingly, the accreditor “must demonstrate that it has standards for accreditation, and preaccreditation, if offered, that are sufficiently rigorous to ensure that the agency is a reliable authority regarding the quality of the education or training provided by the institutions or programs it accredits.” The standards must set “clear expectations” regarding student success, curricula, faculty, facilities, administrative capacity, student support, admissions practices, and other factors. Authority for these and other regulatory requirements is 20 U.S.C. § 1099b, which limits the term of departmental recognition of an accreditor to five years.
Accreditors Must Operate Independently of the Federal Government
Perhaps most importantly, when Congress last addressed the accreditation regime in 2008, it protected the independence of the accreditor. As a result, federal law expressly limits the role of the Department of Education in specifying what accreditation standards require. The Secretary of Education may not “establish any criteria that specifies, defines, or prescribes the standards that accrediting agencies or associations shall use to assess any institution’s success with respect to student achievement.” (That is in § 1099b(g).)
As if that language were not clear enough, lawmakers explicitly prohibited the Department from “promulgat[ing] any regulation with respect to the standards of an accreditation agency or association” involving standards for assessing student achievement—that’s § 1099b(o)—and specifically identified the standards that are off-limits: those relating to the curriculum, faculty, facilities, administrative capacity, student support services, and recruiting and admissions, among others. That’s § 1099b(a)(5), which § 1099b(o) cross-references.
Because the statutory language that protects the accreditor’s independence in setting standards is so important, it is worth digging into the legislative history of the § 1099b(o) prohibition. Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, championed that provision because he feared that without it, there would be “additional federalizing of our 6,000 autonomous institutions.” Senator Alexander went on to place in the record letters from leaders of Vanderbilt University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina, and in those letters, the university administrators voiced their opposition to and fear of the federal government making accrediting entities into their agents to advance an agenda.
The President of Duke University at the time, Richard H. Brodhead, specifically noted in his letter that the autonomy of institutions of colleges and universities helped to enable the “unique success of American higher education,” and urged that Congress “fully close the door on the [Department’s] ability to dictate the measurement of standards that should remain outside the scope of the federal government’s responsibility.” It is clear from comments like these, and from the statement of Senator Alexander, that the concern that animated inclusion of what became § 1099b(o) was fear of federal hijacking of institutions of higher education.2
Of course, accreditors are not immune to federal authority. The Secretary of Education can terminate federal recognition of an organization as an accreditor if that organization has not complied with the law. The governing statute requires “notice and opportunity for a hearing,” as well as a period of up to twelve months for the accreditor to make itself compliant. (That’s § 1099b(l).) The statute entrusts the determination of noncompliance to the Secretary.
What Does All This Mean?
Resetting accreditation standards to enforce an explicitly political agenda is exactly what the Trump Administration would like to do. The accreditation executive order criticizes “accreditors [that] make the adoption of unlawfully discriminatory practices a formal standard of accreditation, and therefore a condition of accessing Federal aid,” for example, in a clear allusion to any accreditation standard that requires efforts to pursue diversity. Targeting of accreditors that have imposed such standards thus is part of the Administration’s broad effort to “get[] rid of woke.” The writing is on the wall: The Department wants to use accreditation to change what is taught, by whom, and potentially to whom.
Further evidence of the intentions of the Administration came when the Department of Education in January 2026 announced plans to overhaul rules governing accreditation. The Department specifically solicited comments to inform its “[r]eview of the role that accrediting agency standards have played in promoting violations of Federal law, including unlawful discrimination by member institutions under the guise of accreditation standards for diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “[e]xpansion of current regulations on accreditation standards for faculty to include support for and appropriate prioritization of intellectual diversity amongst faculty.” Ominously for current accreditors, the notice also contemplated “[r]evision of criteria and related regulations used . . . to recognize accrediting agencies, including emphasizing criteria and standards requirements that effectively focus on student achievement and outcomes, high educational quality, and high-value programs” and “[a]mending requirements for accrediting agencies’ standards.”
There are clear indications that the Department intends to try to ease the path to recognition of new accreditor organizations, which colleges and universities could then select; switching accreditors would not require deselection of the prior accreditor by the Department. In December 2025, the Department published in the Federal Register a request for information seeking input on possible changes to its Accreditation Handbook, which spells out the steps an aspiring accreditor should take to receive recognition from the Department.
If the Department of Education attempts to remove accrediting agencies that the Administration disfavors, federal law provides the procedure the agency must follow. Importantly, federal regulations explicitly allow an accreditor to sue the Department over deselection—although this has not happened often. What is probably the most recent dispute over a deselection culminated in the 2018 decision of Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges & Schools v. DeVos, after the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools sued the Secretary of Education at the time, Elizabeth DeVos. The Council alleged that Secretary DeVos acted arbitrarily and capriciously in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to consider, among other things, evidence that the accreditor could bring itself into compliance within twelve months as contemplated by the statute. Secretary DeVos reinstated the accreditor and a subsequent review by the Department led to termination of the accreditor for a second and apparently last time.
A critical takeaway from this case is that an effort to remove an accreditor can take years and, if the accreditor fights back in court, the accreditor may well prevail. The Department could try to overhaul its regulation that permits an accreditor to mount a legal challenge to its deselection, but the underlying statute does require the Department at least to have rules that “provide procedures . . . for the appeal of the Secretary’s decisions.” An accreditor battling deselection on the basis of implementation of a standard that requires pursuit of diversity, for example, might be in a stronger position than the accreditor in the Accrediting Council case because statutory language explicitly protects the accreditor’s authority to set standards.
However, the law does not protect an accreditor that engages in unlawful conduct, which the Department’s more recent notice mentions; that is the alleged “unlawful discrimination” in the January announcement. An accreditor facing deselection on that basis would still have recourse to the judicial branch. Such litigation could set up courtroom battles over two significant questions: whether the Administration used a claim of discrimination as subterfuge to get around federal law governing deselection when its true target was the accreditor’s standards and, if the answer to that question is no, whether the accreditor’s standard really did call for unlawful discrimination. I offer no predictions on a judge’s likely conclusions.
The stakes are high. That is why Congress attempted to enshrine protection of accreditors’ independence in federal law. And congressional concern makes sense: the federal government should not dictate, directly or indirectly, aspects of college and university operations that relate to their core missions of teaching and learning—the pursuit of truths. But as always and law notwithstanding, the pursuit of truth is a dangerous task.
* Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley. I would like to thank my research assistant Paola Vazquez for her work on this Essay, as well as the editors of the Harvard Law Review.