Trump's 'Secret Weapon' to Police Colleges Is a New Accreditation Rule Taking Effect Next July

The Trump administration has changed a lot about education policy in plain sight, from cutting the Education Department's workforce by roughly half to overhauling student-loan repayment. The latest change is quieter, and President Trump has called it his "secret weapon," NPR's Cory Turner reported: an overhaul of college accreditation, set to take effect in July ahead of the 2027-28 academic year.

"The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left," Trump said in a 2023 campaign video. "Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system." Accreditors are the third-party nonprofits colleges pay to review curriculum, faculty, facilities and finances. They are not part of the government — Congress wanted them independent, said Antoinette Flores of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation — but they determine which schools can receive federal student loans and grants. Federal law already requires them to assess student achievement, faculty and curriculum and gives the department oversight, while leaving the precise standards largely to the accreditors.

A new test for 'intellectual diversity'

The department says the rewritten rules will foster innovation and lower costs. Critics worry they will let the government punish schools it dislikes and police campus speech. "This rule gives [the Education Department] the authority to meddle in the internal affairs of colleges and universities in ways that they never have been able to in the past," said Bob Shireman, an accreditation expert and former Obama Education Department official.

Most notably, accreditors must now evaluate school policies on intellectual diversity, "ensuring that students are exposed to a range of viewpoints," according to a department press release cited by NPR. "For the first time," Shireman said, "you will have an avenue for the federal government to go in at least to an accreditor, but through accreditors to colleges, and tell them what balance of points of view the federal government thinks they should have." The department could then, conceivably, threaten accreditation and federal student aid.

PEN America warned that the change is "part of a plan to weaken [higher education] and its historic protections for the freedom to think, teach, research and learn." Ellen Keast, communications director for the under secretary, told NPR the department is doing the opposite, calling it "a commonsense step toward restoring intellectual diversity" and saying the rules "do not mandate any specific policies, nor do they give the Department any authority to police speech." Even some conservatives are uneasy. Beth Akers of the American Enterprise Institute supports much of the overhaul but said this piece "does put the administration sort of in a seat of judgment over the institutions, over the accreditors, about whether or not they are appropriately teaching ideology. And that is something I'm uncomfortable with."

Outcomes, new accreditors and a hard-to-unwind rule

One change enjoys some bipartisan support, said Emily Rounds of Third Way: pushing accreditors to give more weight to student outcomes such as earnings, licensure pass rates, graduation and retention. The department also wants to make it easier to create new accreditors and for schools to switch among them. Florida, after clashing with its accreditor over DEI, has pushed a new one, the Commission for Public Higher Education; university systems in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas have also said they will switch, NPR reported. Gov. Ron DeSantis said in June 2025 that he hopes to "upend the monopoly of the woke accreditation cartels."

Akers argues more competition will let schools innovate. Shireman warns that "one person's red tape is another person's consumer protection" and that if one accreditor flags problems, schools could "simply shift their weight over to another," weakening oversight. Because the changes went through traditional rulemaking, NPR reported, they will be difficult for Democrats to undo even after they take control of Congress.