Rebalance education toward quality, away from DEI by reforming accreditors

The Trump White House has taken a hammer to the skin-deep, equity-focused “antiracism” that was a hallmark of the Biden administration. But the evangelists of diversity, equity, and inclusion endure, continually demanding identification of and opposition to supposed instances of racism by weighting the scales of equality toward the balance of “equity.”

This is all, of course, in defiance of a raft of executive orders to the contrary.

Because of this, President Trump has set his sights on what some may deem an unlikely culprit: college accreditors. These organizations have wielded significant power in shaping the face of higher education since the 1960’s. And that power has brought with it a host of discriminatory ills that have done nothing to improve the return on investment of a modern college education.

The college accreditation process is a formal recognition that an institution meets specific standards of educational quality and academic rigor — or so we are told. But increasingly, the power wielded by accreditors to certify programs, colleges, and graduate schools across the country bears less of a relationship to academic rigor, and more to shaping higher education in the mold of race essentialism. 

That’s not just bad for the colleges under scrutiny, it’s bad for higher education overall.

To understand how easily radical ideologues can manipulate the accreditation process requires a basic understanding of the process itself. 

Generally, states control their own educational institutions. But institutions of higher education operate with much independence and autonomy. As a result, they can vary widely in the quality and rigor of their programs.

Accounting for this, Congress enacted the Higher Education Act of 1965, which gives the Department of Education the ability to formally recognize various non-governmental entities (together with a handful of state governmental agencies) as accreditors. These accreditors oversee and ensure academic quality for institutions and programs of study across the country.

For students to receive federal student aid from the U.S. Department of Education for postsecondary study under Title IV of the Higher Education Act (such as Pell Grants, work study programs, and federal student loans), they must attend an institution accredited by a "nationally recognized" accrediting agency. And to earn accreditation, higher-education institutions must prove they meet wide-ranging standards covering everything from mission and faculty to admissions and programming.

Last year, the federal government doled out $120.8 billion in loans, grants and work-study funds to more than 9.9 million students. So although accreditation is theoretically voluntary, access to billions of dollars of Title IV aid annually is a carrot impossible to resist for most institutions. What’s more, graduation from an accredited school or graduate program is often a requirement for certain employers and the granting of certain professional licenses — such as a license to practice law.

By yielding this kind of power, accrediting agencies — private educational associations — not only get to establish their own evaluation criteria, but can also can do it according to political preference, ideology, or worldview. This has allowed them to shape higher education in their own image. And of late, the mantra of accreditation has been “less rigor, more race.” Recent history bears this out.

The American Bar Association, for example — the only recognized accreditor of American law schools — requires schools consider diversity in hiring and admissions and provide “substantial opportunities for training and education in bias, cross-cultural competency and racism as well as professional identity development.”

Consider also the 10 accrediting bodies for graduate medical and healthcare education programs that reference the value of "diversity" in their accreditation standards or impose DEI requirements on the programs they accredit. The standards of these bodies range from explicit requirements to maintain DEI offices and programs to more indirect encouragement of efforts to achieve certain diversity-related outcomes.

But the tide may be going out for DEI-happy accreditors.

On April 23, President Trump signed an executive order titled, “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education.” It directs the Secretary of Education to investigate accrediting agencies which require DEI practices for accreditation, investigate manners in which to increase competition among accreditors, and ensure that the provision of a quality education is the central qualification for accreditation of any higher education institution.

Within a few short days, Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) introduced the Fairness in Higher Education Accreditation Act — a bill which, if enacted, would formally codify Trump's executive order to tighten requirements for formal Department of Education recognition of accrediting agencies.

The legislation specifies that in order to secure formal departmental recognition, accrediting agencies or associations must not impose requirements, establish standards, conduct investigations, or make recommendations concerning the race, color, sex, or national origin composition of the student body, faculty, or staff of any given institution for which approval is being sought.

Together, these efforts chart the path forward on accreditation by increasing competition, requiring value-neutral criteria in assessment of institutional applicants, and increasing the value of higher education in America overall — a proposition long in need of re-evaluation.

Eliminating race discrimination means — as the Supreme Court recently reminded Harvard and the University of North Carolina — eliminating all of it. The time for accreditation reform is now.

Sarah Parshall Perry is Legal Director for PDE Action.