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Maestro College, the for-profit school that carried out instruction almost exclusively with an AI chatbot, is set to lose accreditation in mid-October, cutting it off from accessing federal financial aid. 

The decision by its accreditor follows �鶹������ý’s six-month investigation into Maestro, published in July, which revealed that an AI system taught students their lessons and administered their final exams, skirting real faculty completely. Most students told me they had never been in contact with any Maestro employee, creating barriers to basic services colleges offer, like disability accommodations. Maestro, in how it set up this model, appears to be violating not only its accreditor’s rules, but also federal laws and regulations, including those that mandate faculty interactions with students in distance education programs. 

The school also markets itself as free, but in reality is draining students’ federal financial aid, which is limited, to pay for a chatbot-delivered degree. 

Maestro, which last year advertised itself as “the AI University,” needs to be accredited to access that federal aid. Because it relies on the funding as a primary revenue stream, losing accreditation would likely shut it down. A large portion of the school’s roughly 7,000 to 8,000 students pay for their Maestro education through Pell Grants, the pool of aid benefitting low- and middle-income households.

However, Maestro representatives have said publicly they are planning an appeal to the school’s accreditor, the Council on Occupational Education, or COE, setting up a potentially drawn out battle over its future. It is slated to lose accreditation on Oct. 13, and is urging students to remain enrolled and continue their studies.

COE should closely scrutinize the appeal. Maestro has seemingly built its operations to maximize how much federal money, taxpayer dollars, it can extract from students while providing them as little as possible in return. It should not have an entry point to federal aid. 

Maestro also does not seem like it’s being completely forthright with students about all of the problems COE has flagged with the school. 

In , a Maestro representative wrote that “the one issue” was that the college wasn’t following COE’s policy that at least 25% of students take classes face to face, measured by full-time equivalencies. That’s true, the college did run afoul of that rule. The school presented a plan to the accreditor to come into compliance with the policy within 18 months, which COE turned down, according to a letter its president, Kirk Nooks, sent to Maestro officials. 

Allowing the school to be in violation of that rule for a year and a half would be “inconsistent with the Council’s eligibility expectations and accreditation requirements,” Nooks wrote. 

COE has identified other problems with Maestro, though, including inconsistencies “between its stated proctoring and monitoring practices and the policies published in its enrollment agreement and student catalog,” Nooks wrote in the letter.

The Reddit post did not reference this, nor the fact that the accreditor had denied Maestro’s first proposal for how students could finish out their credentials. Maestro submitted the teach-out plan to COE after the accreditor in June blocked the school from enrolling new students, as it considered whether to revoke accreditation. 

Maestro must submit a new plan to COE, the letter states.

The U.S. Department of Education may also be looking at the Maestro case. Trump administration officials they’re interested (and society broadly).

But more important is the Education Department’s role as an overseer of colleges in the new AI age.

On Maestro, the Education Department must first rebuff any attempts from the college to jump to a new accreditor, a common tactic of predatory schools that want to maintain their federal aid link. Current regulations do not allow colleges sanctioned within the last 24 months by their accreditor to switch, though the Trump administration is aiming to remove that guardrail.

The department should also determine whether COE was adequately monitoring and sanctioning the school. Maestro was able to completely overhaul its name, branding, and main instructional mission, while it was on the precipice of financial meltdown, and COE’s only requirement in this process was that it be notified. Its breakdown in supervising Maestro warrants questions by the Education Department, as well as from the federal advisory board NACIQI, formally called the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. 

NACIQI makes recommendations on which accreditors that the federal government should allow to be gatekeepers of federal financial aid—and COE is up for consideration and its meeting next week.

But this saga should serve as a cautionary tale not just for higher education’s regulators, but also the sector at large. 

Colleges must acknowledge that students find AI in the classroom appealing. Several Maestro students told me they had felt mismatched with more traditional colleges, but that turning to the AI “tutor” allowed them to understand the lessons at their own pace, and in their own way. They didn’t feel “dumb,” as they had in a brick-and-mortar classroom. This type of instruction, coupled with the promise of free tuition, proved to be an alluring pitch, and sent Maestro’s student numbers skyrocketing. Under its previous name, Peloton College, fall enrollment in the past few years often wouldn’t reach 100 students, but as Maestro, it was taking in thousands.

Students may want AI-integrated instruction—but they deserve it from a college that isn’t gaming the system to siphon off their financial aid.