The following is a modified excerpt from “Higher Education in America: It’s Worse than You Think” (Encounter Books, 2026).
On the campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump called college accreditation a “secret weapon” that he planned to use in his efforts to reform universities.
Since then, the mainstream media, including USA Today and Bloomberg, along with a left-leaning interest group representing faculty, the American Association of University Professors, responded to the president’s commentary, expressing surprise that reform was even needed for the quality-assurance guarantees that postsecondary accreditors provide to universities.
Yet therein lies the problem: College accreditors have decidedly not guaranteed quality and routinely bury colleges in paperwork. Accreditors have foisted ideological conformity on colleges and universities through the accrediting process, becoming gatekeepers over the kinds of courses and ideas allowed in the halls of academic buildings.
Accreditation, the process by which an institution or program is evaluated by an independent third party to assess quality, was originally a voluntary peer review process. In the late 1800s, voluntary associations were formed to distinguish between high schools and colleges and to require specific evaluation processes for institutions to become members of these voluntary associations.
It wasn’t until passage of the Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1952 (the second GI Bill, which provided federal assistance for service members to attend higher education institutions) that lawmakers required institutions to be accredited to enroll students using federal loans to pay tuition costs.
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In 1965, after the passage of the Higher Education Act, the role of accreditors was expanded in an attempt to promote academic quality among accredited institutions. At this point, federal student loans were granted to the general population regardless of area of study or military service—if the school that enrolled the student was accredited.
The accreditation model that developed in the ensuing years, however, failed to provide transparency to taxpayers or guarantee that a college’s diploma was a signal of a student’s skill and abilities. In fact, by 2014, the Government Accountability Office found that “less than 1 percent of accredited institutions lose accreditation” and, in 2022, the Postsecondary Commission found that “less than three percent of accreditor actions involved penalizing an institution due to poor student outcomes or academic programming.”
If schools never lose accreditation and the accrediting process does not focus on academics, then what is the purpose of accreditation? Only a select few institutions face meaningful consequences for subpar educational offerings or financial responsibility.
By any measure, college accreditation is not credibly protecting students or taxpayers. A recent report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and Third Way found that “more than 35 percent of accredited colleges fail to graduate half of their students, and those schools receive more than $20 billion in student aid annually.”
In June 2025, the House Education and Workforce Committee advanced two accreditation-related bills out of committee, moving the proposals closer to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives for a full vote. HR 2516, the Accreditation for College Excellence Act (ACE), prohibits accreditors from mandating that institutions support, oppose, or commit to supporting or opposing a specific partisan, political, or ideological viewpoint or belief. H.R. 4054, the Accreditation Choice and Innovation Act, creates a new accreditation marketplace by allowing states to designate industry-specific accreditors and directing accreditors to focus on student outcomes in their quality-assurance reviews.
To break the cartel of existing accreditors, Congress should consider proposals stating that any business or institution can become a recognized accreditor. Receiving accreditation from one of the largest accreditors hardly demonstrates excellence, only that institutions can complete the necessary administrative work to satisfy bureaucratic institutions. Lawmakers should also require existing and new accreditors to focus on academics. Federal policy should require accreditors to evaluate schools’ core curricular requirements. Accreditors should demand quality and measure schools’ offerings of civics, American history, rhetoric, and logic.
Higher education has been in need of an external indicator of quality for decades. A combination of federal reform, state leadership, and institutional innovation has coalesced at just the right time to update accreditation for the benefit of students and institutions.
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