In the political fray over the future of higher education, one critical authorizing power is potentially wielding more influence over campuses today than students, professors, administrators, and even university presidents — the gatekeepers of federal student aid, higher education accreditors.

Calls are growing to scrap the current system of accreditation, under which critics say nongovernmental accrediting agencies abuse their quasi-regulatory authority to sway colleges ideologically. The state of Florida is launching a first-of-its-kind challenge to the system of accreditation that has built up over decades. It seeks to break up what Governor DeSantis sees as an all-powerful, increasingly political “accreditation cartel.”

Accreditors of institutions of higher education are charged with determining the allocation of taxpayer dollars to colleges that abide by the standards they set. In recent years, they have created accreditation standards that require schools to promote or require diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. They’ve also worked to stop conservative reforms at some American colleges and universities. 

“After 2020, nearly all accreditors started turning the screws on DEI,” an advocate for education reform, Adam Kissel, who previously served as deputy assistant secretary for higher education programs at the Department of Education, tells the Sun. “Right now we’re in the area of fear that the accreditors will turn the screws farther and make DEI into real requirements.”

An accreditation standard for the National League for Nursing, say, mandates that each nursing program demonstrate “an inclusive organizational environment and resources supportive of recruitment, retention, and flourishing of diverse faculty.” This standard, though relatively ambiguous, could lead institutions to violate civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of one’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in hiring, promoting, and other aspects of employment. 

Hillsdale College, a private, conservative, Christian institution in Michigan, is accredited yet chooses to refuse federal funding so it can regulate university life independently — meaning it can determine diversity on its own terms rather than through Title IX regulations.

Without accreditation, it is difficult for colleges to build themselves up into large research universities. That’s because they rely heavily on federal grants, a generally bigger source of revenue than alumni donations, and struggle to get loans on the open market. Unaccredited schools also struggle to be authorized to operate in a state, Mr. Kissel says. 

The state of Florida is suing the secretary of education, Miguel Cardona, and other top education department officials on the charge that it is unconstitutional to delegate decisions about federal aid eligibility to private accreditors. The Florida suit is taking aim at an accreditor that has intervened in several of the colleges under its jurisdiction across 11 southern states — the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

An “accreditation cartel” is how Mr. DeSantis described SACS, arguing against the agency’s government-like ability to veto the state legislature despite functioning like an elite club or membership organization. He signed legislation in 2022 to undercut its power, asserting in a statement that “Florida’s students deserve a quality, affordable education and don’t need ideological activists and political organizations determining what they should learn.”

The Department of Education merely requires that an accreditor’s standards be “sufficiently rigorous to ensure that the [accrediting] agency is a reliable authority regarding the quality of the education or training provided by the institutions or programs it accredits.” In other words, it’s up to the accreditor to determine whether a school is upholding a certain “quality” of teaching. 

Yet it appears that student outcomes are not their priority: Accreditors have failed to hold accountable the more than 100 colleges with four-year undergraduate graduation rates below 20 percent, according to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Some accreditors have sought to interfere with university governance. To take one example: In January 2023, the board of trustees at the University of North Carolina voted to create a new School of Civic Life and Leadership intended to promote debate between “people of diverse backgrounds, experiences and viewpoints.” The president of SACS, Belle Wheelan, subsequently suggested that she would get UNC to “change” the new school or else “the institution will be on warning with [SACS], I’m sure.”

That led Congresswoman Virginia Foxx and nearly the entire Republican congressional delegation in North Carolina to scold what they saw as a flagrant abuse of authority. “We expect accreditors not to pre-judge actions of governing boards, follow normal processes, be attentive to such matters of public importance, and act in accord[ance] with federal and state law,” they wrote in a letter to Ms. Wheelan.

The model of accrediting agencies is inherently flawed, Mr. Kissel says. Although they were designed to provide a voluntary, peer review-based system of quality assurance, they reinforce the same ideologies by voting in new members. Mr. Kissel paraphrases a famous line by Winston Churchill: “Peer review is the worst form of academic review, except all the others that might be tried.”

Another issue with the current system is that “it has cartel power,” Mr. Kissel says, “because it’s hard to start a new accreditor.” It’s a catch-22: To be federally recognized as an accreditor, an agency must prove that it has accredited institutions. A former secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, had made it easy for any regional accreditor to operate anywhere in the country so that historically regional accreditors could operate as national accreditors. 

Mr. Kissel urges for a return to this system of flexibility and a move away from “the politicized monopoly accreditor.” Advocates for reforming the current accreditation model also argue that the accreditors would be better positioned to perform their expected role of quality improvement if they were not gatekeepers of federal student aid.

Accreditation, meanwhile, is having the opposite effect in the legal academy. The traditionally left-leaning accreditor of law schools, the American Bar Association, has looked to bolster free-speech protections at the schools. Schools that do not comply would risk losing their accreditation, meaning that students would not be able to take the bar exam and become lawyers. 

This development is a flip from the ABA’s prior position of pushing for a diversity in law school admissions, which critics saw as an interference with institutional academic freedom. “ABA overplayed its hand,” Mr. Kissel says. “A bunch of attorneys pushed back. The free speech side won.”