Negotiators Pass Draft Rules to Overhaul College Accreditation

The approved draft regulations are designed to enact key principles of a 2025 executive order issued by President Trump. The order calls for the creation of new accreditors, prohibits policies supporting diversity, and requires a strict focus on issues like "intellectual diversity."

The committee approved the regulations following two weeks of public and closed-door negotiations, as detailed in reports by Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The panel's agreement means federal officials must now propose formal regulations that largely adhere to the negotiated draft before opening a window for public feedback.

While ED officials pitched the blueprint as an intervention to lower college costs and dismantle barriers to innovation, some critics have argued that the framework will weaken baseline accountability while simultaneously saddling campuses and accrediting agencies with new administrative and compliance demands.

According to U.S. Undersecretary of Education Nicholas Kent, the package is intended to introduce competition and choice into the system by making it easier for new accreditors to gain federal recognition. However, as Inside Higher Ed reported during the first week of negotiations in April, Kent explicitly stated that the goal of the reforms was to "upend higher education."

Jon Fansmith, ACE's senior vice president for government relations, told IHE at the time that ED's top-down approach and the exclusion of major stakeholders from primary roles signaled a politicized agenda that bypassed the traditional collaborative spirit of rulemaking.

Added Mandates and Shifting Responsibilities

The draft framework extends the core responsibilities of accreditors into complex and politically sensitive areas. Under the approved draft, accrediting organizations will be required to oversee institutional policies on several fronts:

Intellectual diversity and viewpoint assessments: Accreditors must oversee policies ensuring a range of different political positions on campuses. This includes developing mechanisms to measure student and faculty perceptions regarding the range of viewpoints offered, though institutions with explicit religious missions are exempt.

Elimination of diversity standards: In alignment with the administration's policy directives, the proposal prohibits accreditors from mandating or requiring policies that support racial diversity, tying compliance baselines narrowly to federal civil rights definitions.

First Amendment and civil rights policies: In a modification from ED's initial stance, accreditors will not directly assess whether a college has violated constitutional law or civil rights statutes. Instead, they will be forced to verify that institutions have explicit policies addressing these areas and that they are consistently enforced.

Research misconduct: Agencies will be tasked with creating procedures to evaluate the integrity of academic research, specifically monitoring for plagiarism, citation manipulation, and the misrepresentation of findings.

Operational hurdles for programmatic accreditors: The package places limits on the standard-setting and decision-making structures of specialized agencies, forcing programmatic accreditors to sever formal organizational ties with related professional membership groups and trade associations.

The department backed away from its initial more prescriptive proposals on the transfer of academic credits, removing a mandate that would have forced colleges to automatically presume incoming credits should be accepted without factoring in institutional selectivity.

Instead, the consensus draft shifts the regulatory focus toward consumer transparency, requiring institutions to provide students with clearer, upfront disclosures about how transfer credits are evaluated, the specific reasons for any denials, and the available appeals processes.

Next Steps

The near-unanimous final vote required support from 12 of the 14 primary negotiators, with the representatives for both students and veterans ultimately choosing to abstain.

ED aims to publish and finalize the regulations by November. If federal officials hit that target, the accreditation overhaul will officially take effect in July 2027. Given the unprecedented expansion of the federal role into institutional operations, higher education leaders anticipate the regulations will face significant legal challenges before that implementation deadline.