On April 23, President Trump signed a long-speculated executive order around accreditation. While presidents haven’t traditionally gotten involved in the weeds on this leg of the Triad serving as a gatekeeper for federal financial aid, Trump signaled in a campaign video his plan to “reclaim” higher education’s status through his “secret weapon” of reshaping accreditation.
As expected, the first part of the EO focuses around ending DEI practices within standards of accreditation, specifically calling out the American Bar Association, the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education for standards around enrollment of diverse and underrepresented populations. The first part of the EO calls on the Secretary of Education “as appropriate and consistent with applicable law” to hold accreditors accountable, including through potential termination, for DEI initiatives.
The second part of the EO focuses on “student-oriented accreditation,” which directs the Secretary to move forward a number of initiatives around accreditation, including:
- Removing barriers that limit institutions from advancing credential completion as well as help start new models. W/A Sr. VP Noah Sudow said, “This language is written broadly and could potentially include both a focus on innovation, as well as helping campuses end internal barriers to learner completion, including practices around accepting transfer credit and aligning schedules with learners’ needs.”
- Increasing competition through recognizing new accreditors and streamlining the process for institutions to change accreditors.
- Require institutions to use program level student data to improve outcomes (although without referencing race, ethnicity, or sex).
- Improve the efficiency of accreditor recognition and reauthorization review processes, including through better use of technology.
Experimental Site Initiatives: A Blast from the Past
Notably, this section also directs the Secretary to open a new Experimental Sites Initiative (ESI) to create “new flexible and streamlined quality assurance pathways” for institutions. Newbies to higher education policy may not be as familiar with the ESI policy tool as it was not used under the Biden administration. ESI is meant to test out new innovations related to disbursing financial aid by enabling ED to waive existing statutory and/or regulatory requirements. This far-reaching policy tool was used in the first Trump administration around the Federal Work-Study program to help support students working at private companies as well as advancing the Second Chance Pell experiment started under former President Obama.
The Obama administration was no stranger to using the ESI, leveraging it to advance a number of topics, including competency-based education, prior learning assessments, and perhaps most relevant to this week’s EO, the Educational Quality through Innovative Partnerships (EQUIP) ESI. EQUIP sought to enable new partnerships with non-accredited actors (it was launched around the rise of coding bootcamps) and included a new concept of a “Quality Assurance Entity” (QAE), meant to serve as an external validator and evaluator of programmatic success beyond the accreditor.
Stay tuned: We’ll be tracking closely what happens next with this ESI and if ED will launch other sites through this broad-based policy tool.
