On April 23, President Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to reshape the independent agencies that accredit U.S. colleges and universities.
Trump’s conservative allies praise his action as a long-overdue correction of anti-conservative bias, while his critics — including many in higher education — see this as another attempt by the president to force his agenda.
In “Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education,” Trump’s order says he wants to bring greater meritocracy into college accreditation and restore conservatives’ confidence in educational institutions. He demands that accreditors engaging in “DEI” standards should face investigation and potential termination under federal law.
Trump’s conservative allies praise his action as a long-overdue correction of anti-conservative bias.
On April 22, the day before the executive order, 150 university and college presidents signed on to a public statement condemning “undue government intrusion” against schools amid the administration’s ongoing hostility toward higher education.
Trump has been notably at war with Columbia University and Harvard University, forcing concessions from Columbia that in turn drew the ire of others in the academic community. Harvard has said it will not bow down to Trump or give him control of the university. He has threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status in revenge.
His executive order notes accrediting agencies “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.”
He claims these accreditors have “abused their enormous authority.”
Attack on DEI
That is evident, he says, in low graduation rates and enormous student debt, but also by accreditors’ advancement of diversity, equity and inclusion ideologies as required standards. Trump and his cabinet officials have been on a campaign to purge every American institution of DEI.
For example, he says, the American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar “has required law schools to ‘demonstrate by concrete action a commitment to diversity and inclusion’ including by ‘commit(ting) to having a student body (and faculty) that is diverse with respect to gender, race and ethnicity.’”
Trump claims such a standard violates a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. In that case, the court ruled race-based affirmative action programs in most college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
He similarly says the Liaison Committee on Medical Education “requires that an institution “engage in ongoing, systematic and focused recruitment and retention activities, to achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes among its students.” And he says the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requires institutions to implement “policies and procedures related to recruitment and retention of individuals underrepresented in medicine,” including “racial and ethnic minority individuals.”
Joel Webbon
Echoing a long-time sentiment of political conservatives, Trump declares: “The standards for training tomorrow’s doctors should focus solely on providing the highest quality care, and certainly not on requiring unlawful discrimination.”
Calvinist pastor Joel Webbon said on his “Theology Applied” podcast last year he would always choose a white doctor over a Black doctor because “if one of them was not qualified and was given a free pass, it’d be the Black guy.”
Attack on debt and graduation rates
Trump also claims there’s a crisis because the national six-year undergraduate graduation rate “was an alarming 64% in 2020” and “many accredited institutions offer undergraduate and graduate programs with a negative return on investment … which may leave students financially worse off and in enormous debt by charging them exorbitant sums for a degree with very modest earnings potential.”
He then connects that back to DEI.
“American students and taxpayers deserve better, and my administration will reform our dysfunctional accreditation system so that colleges and universities focus on delivering high-quality academic programs at a reasonable price,” his order states. “Federal recognition will not be provided to accreditors engaging in unlawful discrimination in violation of Federal law.”
Trump’s concerns about graduation rates and student debt are shared across the political spectrum. Conservatives and liberals differ on how to solve both problems.
Whether pressuring accrediting agencies is a productive way to solve any of these challenges is also a point of contention.
Whether pressuring accrediting agencies is a productive way to solve any of these challenges is also a point of contention.
What Trump’s critics say
The Washington Post explains the nation’s 60 recognized accreditation organizations are “little-known but powerful organizations” that play a major role in federal funding. They do take diversity and a welcoming atmosphere into account alongside financial and student achievement issues in their assessments. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on one’s political views.
Already, the American Bar Association and American Psychological Association have reduced their diversity requirements in response to Republican pressure.
Robert Shireman
Senior Fellow Robert Shireman of the Century Foundation told the Post there are good reasons for schools to collect data on students’ race, gender and backgrounds. “Gathering and reviewing data regarding students’ backgrounds and their retention and graduation helps colleges to do a better job serving all students,” he said. “Phrases like intellectual diversity, if judged by the government, will inevitably be weaponized to pursue political goals and punish enemies.”
Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors told NPR: “Trump’s goal is to manipulate accreditors in order to force colleges and universities to do his bidding and punish them when they resist. He is weaponizing the accreditation process to gain the leverage he seeks.”
MSNBC contributor Ja’han Jones also warned: “These were deranged plans, but Republicans are now in position to act on them. … College accreditation is the kind of topic that might put many Americans to sleep upon first mention. But there’s a reason Republicans are so obsessed with it in their war on American universities, which Vice President JD Vance has characterized as ‘the enemy.’ While campaigning for president, Trump said the accreditation system would be the GOP’s ‘secret weapon’ to “reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left.’”
What Trump’s defenders are saying
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk praised the executive order as a means to force grad schools and law schools “to jettison woke ideologies in favor of merit.”
Similarly, Education Secretary Linda McMahon praised the order: “Today’s executive orders pave the way for critical innovations — inviting more competition in the higher education accreditation system, ensuring transparency in college finances, supporting new technologies in the classroom, and more.”
She further commented, “We should be looking at those who have real merit to get in, and we have to look harder at those universities that aren’t enforcing that.”
Hillsdale College has been a leader in conservative causes in education, and its accreditation director pushed back against Shireman’s claims.
“The implicit premise here is that higher education’s status quo is value-neutral and purely rational and that conservative would-be reformers — not, say, Shireman and his colleagues at the progressive Century Foundation — are the extremist radicals,” said Samuel Negus.
Last summer, Trump claimed higher education is infected by “Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”
National Review Online contributor George Leef similarly dismissed schools’ concerns, saying progressive faculty and staff are too invested in the status quo: “Now that there’s an administration hostile to ‘progressivism,’ the scary stories about what could happen are circulating in the sympathetic press.”