Higher education accreditation is an arcane but vitally important target for reform in the new administration. Accreditation is used to ensure colleges meet a minimal level of quality—colleges without an accreditor approval do not have access to federal financial aid programs like Pell Grants and student loans.
But accreditation is broken. As I lay out in a new report, Should College Accreditation Be Replaced or Reformed?, published by the Defense of Freedom Institute, there are severe problems with accreditation that fall into three buckets: foundational problems, public choice problems, and operational problems.
The foundational problems with accreditation keep accreditation from being able to succeed. The most damaging flaw is that accreditors are tasked with quality improvement—helping colleges improve—and quality assurance—making sure colleges meet a minimum quality threshold. But these roles are incompatible:
The role of quality improvement means that accreditors function as consultants. The role of quality assurance means that accreditors function as regulators, holding colleges accountable when they fail students and taxpayers, but it is not possible to be effective as a consultant and a regulator at the same time. A college will share its weaknesses with a consultant so the consultant can help devise a remedy, but a college will downplay or hide its weaknesses from a regulator to avoid sanctions. Because consultants and regulators have different purposes, reliance on a single organization to fulfill both roles typically results in conflicting advice and requirements, essentially guaranteeing failure. This is exactly what we see as accreditors are widely viewed as failing both their quality improvement and quality assurance roles.
Accreditation also suffers from public choice problems. Accreditors can and have abused their power. While this is a common concern whenever governments have coercive power, it is even worse for accreditation because accreditors are shielded from public accountability since they are “private” entities, as well as market accountability, since colleges are required to purchase their services.
[RELATED: Is Accreditation a Scam? The System Fueling Ideology in Higher Ed]
Another public choice problem is that accreditation operates like a cartel, protecting incumbent colleges while erecting enormous barriers to entry for new colleges. Existing colleges often only need to seek approval once a decade and are rarely in danger of losing accreditation, whereas new colleges need millions of dollars and years of operation before they can become accredited.
Regulatory capture—when the supposedly regulated capture the regulatory process and ensure it functions to their benefit—is another public choice problem accreditation suffers from. The clearest evidence for this is that
the dominant accreditors in 1952 are still the dominant accreditors in 2025, largely because in 73 years, the federal government has not recognized a single new institutional accreditor to compete with the original accreditors without placing severe restrictions on what types of colleges they can accredit.
There is also a host of operational problems with accreditation. The main one is that accreditation is structured for the quality improvement role. As opposed to the quality assurance role, it focuses on a recipe of inputs and processes rather than outcomes, which has the severe drawback of suppressing innovation and increasing costs.
While these problems are severe, there aren’t viable replacements for accreditation. Some have argued that a federal government accountability system should replace accreditors. Others have argued that accreditation should just be scrapped entirely, letting market discipline take over. But both of these replacements would likely be worse than the existing accreditation system. (See pages 15-19 if you need convincing).
Instead, the focus should be on reform. Some relatively easy reforms would improve accreditation, including moving away from binary decisions and increasing transparency. Other worthwhile reforms would need more Congressional and executive support. Of the ten areas accreditors are required to have standards in, half should be eliminated to reduce redundancy and allow accreditors to focus on areas where no other entity is focused.
There is also a strong case for shifting from input and process requirements to outputs and outcomes.
The basic approach of accreditation … is follow the recipe and everything’s fine. But a much better system would reverse this approach, by being tight on ends but loose on means—in other words, if your outcomes are solid, it doesn’t matter if you look and behave like a traditional college. If a college’s students learn a lot or achieve success in the labor market, it doesn’t matter whether the college followed the traditional recipe to do it. Under this approach, the message to colleges is follow any recipe you want so long as the outcomes are good.
Another desirable reform would be to increase competition among accreditors by increasing the number of accreditors. Currently, the Department of Education (ED) is the only entity that can approve accreditors, and they thoroughly botch the job. There’s a strong possibility that a judge will declare the process ‘arbitrary and capricious’ in the coming years. While fixing the ED’s rules and processes is necessary, relying on a single point of failure is unwise. We should introduce alternative methods for accreditor approval. I advocate for two pathways:
The first pathway would be the establishment of a bipartisan, independent agency to recognize and monitor accreditation agencies. The members of such agencies typically serve staggered terms, and some also have their members appointed by the majority and minority parties in both houses of Congress. There is often a supermajority voting requirement as well to make sure actions have bipartisan support. These features serve to make it nearly impossible to rapidly alter the status quo, which helps temper partisan passions and focuses energy on forging lasting compromises…
[RELATED: Florida Leads Fight Against Politicized Accreditation]
A second pathway would let groups of states approve accreditors. These two pathways would provide safety valves to ensure that a rogue ED can’t unilaterally make drastic changes to accreditation.
A final potentially worthwhile reform would shift from college-wide accreditation to accreditation for each program within a college. Programmatic accreditors could establish more detailed and meaningful standards that are unique to a particular field of study. They would also be able to police their fields more effectively since denying accreditation would only affect one program rather than condemning the whole college to financial death.
With all the problems that accreditation suffers from, it is time for dramatic accreditation reform.
Image by relif — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 176360412
