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This analysis is part of Mythbusting Accreditation, a written and multimedia series from Â鶹¹û¶³´«Ã½â€™s Education Policy program. It features insights from experts across multiple fields to cut through false narratives about a crucial higher education accountability system.

Jeremy Bauer-Wolf: College accreditation has entered the media sphere in a way we haven’t seen in memory. Headlines about accreditors have become common. Politicians all the way up to the likes of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida and President Donald Trump have attacked the system publicly and labeled it as woke. 

But what are accreditors? They are, in essence, the gatekeepers of federal financial aid. They assess colleges by their standards and then determine whether those institutions should qualify for aid, which is a $120 billion annual funding stream. This is money that most colleges need to keep their doors open. Accreditors are not always portrayed accurately, though.

Welcome to Mythbusting Accreditation. This is a Â鶹¹û¶³´«Ã½ multimedia series where we’ll be discussing the truth about accreditors and how the system actually works. Today, on a special episode, I’ll be discussing the Education Department’s upcoming negotiated rules session with my colleague, Antoinette Flores.

Bauer-Wolf: Welcome, Antoinette.

Antoinette Flores: Thanks for having me, Jeremy.

Bauer-Wolf: The department completed their first week of negotiations last month in April and we are gearing up for that second session. We have a better sense of what the department wants to do with accreditation now. We have an updated proposal. Could you walk me through some of the top lines here, what is the department trying to change?

Flores: The department has a wide range of goals it wants to accomplish during this rulemaking. They want to increase competition in the accreditation marketplace.There’s a question about whether accreditation is a marketplace, or whether it should be a marketplace, but that has been expressed as a goal. And the way that they hope to achieve that is by speeding up the process for new accrediting agencies to enter the field. 

They want to make it easier for institutions of higher education to change accrediting agencies. They want to ensure that institutions are following federal law, state law, civil rights laws. There are specific reasons for why that is a goal. Then finally, they have said that they want to increase the focus on student achievement. Those are the broad goals. The actual details of how they get there and what those policies mean are something very different.

Bauer-Wolf: First, could you tell me why it is problematic for the department to want to speed up this process for getting new accrediting agencies into the door and also sort of weakening the barriers for institutions jumping from accreditors? Why would that be kind of a bad thing for the field?

Flores: The department has framed this as the field is stagnant and they want to introduce innovation. There are some protections written into the Higher Education Act that are intended to provide some guardrails.

As you mentioned in the opening, accrediting agencies are gatekeepers to billions in federal student aid. And before an agency becomes recognized and serves in that role as gatekeeper, you would want to ensure that they are and have a record of ensuring quality. The department’s approach here is to eliminate many of those guardrails.

The department also wants to make it easier for institutions to switch accrediting agencies. There is another legal protection that requires the secretary to essentially sign off on institutions looking to switch accrediting agencies. And for good reason, there has been a history in the aid system where a school that is facing sanctions or investigations because it is not providing value to students just finds a new accrediting agency. You want some kind of restrictions on institutions switching accrediting agencies to ensure that it is not used as a tool to just avoid oversight entirely.

Bauer-Wolf: What are some of the big changes you’ve identified so far from the initial text that was put out by the department to what we’re looking at now?

Flores: If I could categorize the initial text that was discussed during the first session, it is sweeping. These are sweeping changes to the accreditation system and to higher education writ large.

Some of the proposals that we saw were very prescriptive policies and processes that institutions themselves are expected to have— things around faculty and faculty review, for example. We also saw very prescriptive changes around credit transfer.

The interesting thing about those policies is not only are they potentially significant burdens on institutions, but the department has a number of restrictions on what it can actually regulate. For example, the department has restrictions on regulating any policies or procedures around institutional personnel. This seems to come into direct conflict with that restriction.

Much of the first session was spent around trying to understand what these changes are, why they are being proposed and what they would mean. There was a lot of focus around whether the department has the statutory authority, the legal authority to even propose these kinds of changes. There was a lot of focus on what the changes would mean for institutions. And there was also a focus on whether accrediting agencies can even accomplish many of these changes. For example, enforcement of civil rights. That is not something that accrediting agencies typically do or have the capacity to do.

Bauer-Wolf: You’re saying here that the language that they are including in this proposed regulation would actually sort of give the government a check here on the kind of faculty, for instance, that colleges are hiring?

Flores: Yeah, it gets to both faculty and curriculum by directly regulating what faculty can teach in the classroom. It has to be considered germane to the topic. It cannot be an issue unrelated to the topic, but that raises a bunch of important questions of who defines what is germane to the topic and what does that look like in implementation. 

Bauer-Wolf: Headed into week two of negotiations, what insights do you think you can provide?

Flores: This one is pretty different from the other negotiated rulemakings that we have seen during this administration because the majority of the other ones stem directly from changes in the law. Those are much easier. This one is purely political. And what we’ve seen so far is the department is unwilling to move very far from its initial proposal. Negotiators have raised a lot of significant concerns. And so we’ll have to see how this plays out over the next week. But the goal here is to give a little, take a little, and get to in order to get to consensus. So far, there has not been a lot of give and take.