This week, the Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) Committee completed its first week of negotiations on the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) draft regulatory proposals reforming the U.S. accreditation system.
The negotiations opened with presentations from ED on the history of accreditation and consisted of broader discussions around key issues ED intends to address with the new regulations as well as specific line-by-line discussions about the proposed language.
- The lengthy proposal tackles a broad range of issue areas from reforming transfer credit process, to new language on accrediting agencies ensuring institutional compliance with federal and state law, to adding program-level student success evaluations to accreditation standards.
On Friday, the AIM Committee adjourned its negotiations and will not meet again until the week of May 18, when it will conclude negotiations. In the interim, committee members and ED will work to revise currently proposed language based on this week’s discussions. The goal of revising the proposal is to draft language that all Committee members feel comfortable voting in favor of (i.e., reaching “consensus” on).
What’s Next
Following the May negotiations, ED will look to publish a draft set of regulations in the Federal Register for a public comment period later this year, followed by a final draft of the regulations. If the rules are finalized before November 1, 2026, the regulations would go into effect on July 1, 2027. If the deadline is missed, the earliest they could go into effect would be July 1, 2028.
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