The Department of Education on Wednesday announced a new rule that would allow more organizations to accredit universities, stripping the left of one of its most potent tools for enforcing its worldview through higher education.
President Donald Trump set his sights on going after accreditors early in his second term, saying having more accreditors — or limiting current accreditors’ ability to inject left-wing ideologies into the official standards for accreditation —is the “secret weapon” to breaking their stranglehold on American universities.
“At a time when Americans have lost trust in higher education, the Trump Administration’s proposed changes to the accreditation system are intended to reorient our quality assurance framework so that accreditors prioritize student outcomes rather than bureaucratic processes or the promotion of divisive and unlawful ideological agendas,” Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent said in a Wednesday press release. “Instead of ensuring institutions offer high-quality educational programs that justify the time and cost of a college education, the antiquated accreditation system has contributed to inflated tuition, administrative bloat, and ideology-driven mandates on college campuses. The Department’s proposed changes to our higher education quality assurance system will improve college affordability, reconnect education to workforce needs, strengthen accountability, and restore confidence in our accreditation system.”
The proposed rule comes after Trump signed an executive order in April 2025 directing the reformation of the accreditation system. The order noted the accreditation groups’ entrenchment in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) ideology, and the ever-increasing costs of going to college.
“A group of higher education accreditors are the gatekeepers that decide which colleges and universities American students can spend the more than $100 billion in Federal student loans and Pell Grants dispersed each year,” the order reads. “The accreditors’ job is to determine which institutions provide a quality education — and therefore merit accreditation. Unfortunately, accreditors have not only failed in this responsibility to students, families, and American taxpayers, but they have also abused their enormous authority.”
“Some accreditors make the adoption of unlawfully discriminatory practices a formal standard of accreditation, and therefore a condition of accessing Federal aid, through ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or ‘DEI’-based standards of accreditation that require institutions to ‘share results on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the context of their mission by considering … demographics … and resource allocation,’” it adds.
Wednesday’s proposed rule will make it easier for the secretary of education to recognize new accreditors and diminish the power of private trade associations to control accreditors. According to the Department of Education, the rule will also “promote academic freedom, intellectual diversity, and research integrity.”
Academic freedom, intellectual diversity, and research integrity may be at all-time lows right now, as plagiarism and fake research scandals have rocked academia for years, while many conservative-minded academics are shut out of consideration for prestigious positions.
As The Federalist reported, accreditors for medical and law schools have inflicted significant damage on both professions, requiring things like diversity quotas, racialized trainings for students, and more.
For the medical profession in particular, trust in physicians is at an all-time low. Coming out of the DEI regime enforced by some accreditors and promoted by the Biden administration, some professional medical organizations advanced the idea of “racial concordance” for doctors, meaning they wanted to race-match patients to doctors.
Academics essentially argue that non-white patients must have doctors who have the same skin color to obtain proper treatment. Racial concordance benefits “minoritized” patients, they say. The argument is a back door to artificially pumping the numbers of non-white students accepted into medical school and thus among the overall number of doctors.
Artificially pumping those numbers in most cases means lowering standards, which is untenable to most Americans who rely on doctors to have the requisite merit to actually be doctors. A similar argument can be made for lawyers, many of whom will be responsible for defending clients against overreach by government entities or corporations.
