The Fight over the Future of Accreditation & the Fracturing of Higher Education
I listened to the National Association of Scholars (NAS) recent webinar on the “Future of Accreditation” to learn why conservative leaders have been trying to take down the higher education “accreditation cartel” and what they are trying to replace it with. The four speakers were host David Randell of the NAS; Robert Manzer of the American Academy of Liberal Education (AALE); Peter Wood, the President of NAS; and Jenna Robinson, President of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. I also read a related report on defending Christian higher education by Manzer.
The most interesting speaker by far, who offered the most well-developed thoughts on the movement, was Robert Manzer, who was joining the webinar from a room at the condo of an unnamed “business partner” in Sarasota, Florida. Manzer majored in political science at Carleton College and got a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago. He is a reputable scholar with research about David Hume’s political thought published in top political science journals. More importantly for the subject of accreditation, Manzer is President of the American Association for Liberal Education (AALE), “the higher education/charter school accreditor focused on supporting traditional, text-based, and classical liberal education.” In the higher education space, the AALE “works with universities on a programmatic basis,” Manzer said in the webinar, citing the core curriculum at the University of Dallas, where he once worked. The AALE measures how well student learning outcomes reflect a commitment to liberal education, which provides, in his view, a higher national standard than the regional accreditors.
In a related report, Manzer framed accreditation reform as a defensive move to protect the practices of Christian colleges and universities from potential new federal regulations that could put them out of business or in an inferior market position. Yet the insurgent side of the movement, led by Jenna Robinson of the Martin Center for Academic Renewal and Chris Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, sees it necessary to go on “offense,” too, with moves to inject conservative academic centers into public institutions and top-down political “takeovers” of state universities through new appointments on college boards of trustees.
It’s worth noting that “takeovers” in red states are happening in places where university boards of trustees have been appointed by conservative leaders for decades. In many ways, the fight over higher education today is a fight among conservatives, particularly business conservatives more narrowly focused on economic and job outcomes, compared to social conservatives more interested in Christian education and value propagation. The fight over the future of accreditation could make for some strange political bedfellows, so long as segments of left-leaning education movements want to keep fighting for models of liberal arts education and civic virtues over a greater emphasis on job outcomes, while others in the equity movement on the left stress skill-based attainment over college degrees in filling government and corporate jobs.
Overall, the social conservative reformers express a mix of optimism and pessimism about their movement. Backed against a corner, they want to inject more “decentralization” and market forces into the system to preserve what dwindling institutional power they have and to try to claim more. They have had powerful allies at the federal level in Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in the Trump years and allies at the state level in Florida and North Carolina today. But the pace of reform is incredibly slow and they are looking for results, in some cases, out a decade or more, if they are to work at all.
In an April 2024 report for the Greenville, South Carolina-based Center for Academic Faithfulness and Flourishing, “Accreditation at the Crossroads: Threats and Opportunities for Christian Colleges and Universities,” Manzer notes that a bipartisan federal consensus is emerging that threatens Christian colleges and universities. Manzer explains that some regional accreditors, particularly those of Western and Northwestern states, now include DEI standards that require programmatic changes and equity-minded data collection practices, impeding institutional autonomy. He suggests that the bigger threat to Christian colleges, however, is a movement to tie federal financial aid to clear quantitative metrics related to jobs, which could hobble their market position and make it difficult to attract students.
Manzer explains, “With very few exceptions, Republicans and Democrats now seek to amend or replace accreditation with outcome thresholds or ‘bright line metrics’ such as retention, graduation, and federal loan repayment rates” (p. 7). Manzer points out that the Biden administration is set to approve new rules toward this effect in 2024, to be implemented in 2025. He says we don’t know what the rules will look like yet, but noted a movement toward providing federal financial support for non-degree-based programs (“short-term Pell” grants), skills-based programs, and measuring institutional quality by a “mathematically sophisticated statistical ‘value-added earnings’ (VAE) metric” (p. 15).
Manzer’s concern for Christian colleges is that these changes could lead to Title IV federal financial aid being tied to job earnings post-degree. He explains that the broader suite of changes would also be a watershed in higher education in that federal financial aid has always previously been tied to accredited degree programs, whereas short-term, skills-based programs growing in popularity are not accredited degree programs. This change, he argues, puts accreditation agencies in a position of losing oversight over the growing market for non-degree programs at universities. If adopted, such rules, he says, would also put the federal government in a new position of providing funds for study at non-accredited degree programs.
Christian colleges and universities could understandably worry about what could happen if jobs- and earnings-based metrics were tied to federal financial aid. If their college graduates work for churches or nonprofits, go on evangelizing missions, or adopt roles as unpaid homemakers upon marriage, that could adversely affect the metrics for their universities and potentially their universities’ federal financial aid. They might also shrink at comparing Christian college graduates’ incomes to those of the Ivies and other top public and private institutions. Whose graduates are getting the best-paid jobs in the tech and finance industries? Probably not the Christian colleges and universities, though they would have a point that there is more to the “good life” than tech and finance jobs and outcomes in the marketplace in general.
Manzer noted in the webinar that in 2025, we could see a scenario where nonprofit universities that offer Master’s degrees, if they don’t meet new federal quantitative “up-or-down” outcomes, would have to send letters to students that their programs “don’t measure up to the federal standards.” Manzer characterizes this trend as replacing “higher” education based on high-quality classical liberal values with “hire” education focused on jobs. Manzer says that Republicans didn’t used to embrace this kind of federal role in regulating higher education, but now they do, following the Democrats’ turn to a consumer protection model safeguarding student investments’ in their own higher education by cracking down on exploitative for-profit schools.
Manzer’s 2024 report puts the potential implications for Christian colleges and universities starkly: “The accreditors’ gatekeeper role is now quite precarious, putting at risk uninterrupted access to federal financial aid and, in turn, the solvency of most Christian colleges and universities” (p. 5).
The NAS webinar participants all noted one recent federal change approvingly, however — new rules that Trump administration Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos implemented in 2020 breaking the “accreditation cartels.” Under these new rules, the seven regional accreditation bodies no longer have monopoly control over their own regions and thus are no longer even, strictly speaking, “regional accreditors,” in their view. This rule change opened the way for states like Florida and North Carolina to pass new laws saying that their state universities and colleges must now switch accreditors every accreditation cycle.
Manzer notes that the DeVos rule changes also move accreditation away from a “one-size-fits-all” situation to one where there could be different kinds of accreditation bodies for different kinds of higher education institutions. He questioned why Harvard and Suffolk Community College, for example, have the same accreditation standards, parenthetically adding “not that there’s anything wrong with community colleges.”
Here I paused to wonder whether Manzer was really interested in breaking with the jobs and vocational model of higher education after all, at least for the vast number of students who attend community college. What would be the purpose of dividing institutions of higher education in this way? Was he trying to imply that community colleges should be about vocational skills education and institutions like Harvard should focus instead on the liberal arts model?
The trouble with this kind of artificial divide is that community colleges are important feeders to four-year institutions of higher education, providing an essential liberal arts foundation for majors and minors at four-year colleges and universities. These are strongly linked sets of institutions, knit together most closely by the idea of a degree credit for transfer. Are conservative movement leaders interested in breaking that model? The implications would be breathtaking — and devastating for access to the best schools and jobs for poor, low-income, and underrepresented racial and ethnic groups.
Jenna Robinson also discussed the rise of accreditation by national accreditors such as Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACCS). North Carolina, for example, now gives private colleges the option to choose these kinds of accreditors instead of the old regional monopolies. This type of change would supposedly protect private Christian institutions from new unwanted mandates and help them market a different model of “quality” higher education than the jobs-focused model. The quality proposition offered here is a classical liberal education grounded in “Western” values favored on the right.
Several of the NAS webinar participants noted that disciplinary accreditors play a role in shaping university programs, especially in fields such as law, engineering, medicine, etc. They argue that these accreditors have also been “captured” by groups forcing progressive agendas like DEI on colleges and in some cases act like quasi-unions in helping professors demand things like extra office space. The webinar participants would like to see more deregulation in this area as well, but noted that it would be extremely difficult so long as jobs require degrees from professionally-accredited programs of study.
The conservative webinar participants also attacked the even rather tepid role played by traditional regional accreditors to stifle conservative politicization of higher education in red states. Robinson complained that SACS publicly criticized university boards of trustees in North Carolina (and it’s happened in Florida, too) for actions that SACS leaders have perceived as politicizing the institutions, e.g., considering a candidate for university president who was currently sitting on the Florida state board of education. Robinson regards SACS’ statements as political “interference” by the accreditors in work by publicly appointed trustees following the outcome of a democratic political process, closely following the language of right-wing activist Chris Rufo on this subject.
Many academics would point out that, yes, this is exactly why we need the traditional regional accreditors — to have nonpartisan professional pushback against Victor Orban-style authoritarian takeovers of higher education in red states.
But this is the crux of the fight itself — who controls the universities and who *should* control them? Should university administration be a hands-on, politically-driven project by Republican leaders to secure Christian conservative electoral support, to implement degree programs grounded in the values of “Western civilization,” and to build new patronage networks for peers in their party? Or should university administration follow a more traditional shared governance model with trustees merely providing oversight for the mission and operations of universities run principally by professional administrators and faculty?
Yet the fight over the future of higher education puts nearly everyone back on their heels. Professors who fear a right-wing takeover of higher education find themselves defending the traditional accreditation regime they have so often complained about; many might even agree with Manzer’s critiques about the “hollow” nature of accreditation to measure student learning outcomes. University boards of trustees shaped by previous generations of conservative governors and legislatures find themselves fighting with insurgent Republicans about whether higher education should be more about finding jobs for graduates or political patronage. And even new insurgent conservative movement leaders, as seen in this webinar, while optimistic about changes in the long run, remain stymied in the short run about whether anything will come of the reforms anytime soon.
Manzer himself had a somewhat pessimistic overall appraisal of where this movement is potentially going and what the alternatives might be. He noted that after Florida passed a law forcing public universities and colleges to switch to a new accreditor, moving away from the Southern regional accreditor SACS, the Midwest-based Higher Learning Commission (HLC) is now heavily courting Florida schools. Manzer said he was “skeptical” about the movement because the HLC, in his view, is “not much better” and it’s a “colossal” expense for universities to change accreditors. He said that there was a real chance that Florida public universities and colleges could put themselves through a “colossal amount of work with no real improvement,” and he has communicated that to Florida chancellors.
Manzer thinks it was a salutary thing that DeVos “broke” the “accreditation cartel,” but that you will need new accreditors, not just the “one-size-fits-all” model we have right now, to fundamentally change anything. Presumably, he means we need more accreditors like the AALE that he runs. Webinar participants also mentioned the possibility of four red states — Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee — coming together to form a new accrediting body.
NAS webinar leaders seemed to agree that higher education disruption is inevitable. NAS President Peter Wood proclaimed that higher education is “facing a moment of historic change.” He says we’ve entered an era of institutional decline propelled by a number of factors, including the declining size of future cohorts of traditional college-age students due to a falling number of children. He claims that we’re entering an era where schools will be “fewer in number, smaller than they are, and ferociously competitive.” Accreditation will by necessity change due to market forces, he argues.
The political stakes are, ultimately, the fracturing of higher education in America between and within red and blue states. These reforms, if unabated, will propel increasingly separate, parallel education institutions for a conservative Christian sector in the United States, as well as potentially for any other religious or ideological group that seeks the same. Manzer sees no serious alternative to the accreditation model of peer review by fellow faculty members from other universities, however. He points out that in other countries, top-down Ministries of Education define and apply standards for higher education. The U.S. model has always been radically — and rightly, in his view — decentralized due to the peer-review accreditation system.
Although Florida was not mentioned much in the NAS webinar, the state sits at the heart of fights within the conservative movement over the future of higher education, accreditation, and the future of the GOP more broadly. Under previous Republican governors, especially Governor Rick Scott, the Florida state university system tied university funding to metrics for job and salary outcomes for graduates, and even under Governor Ron DeSantis previously, the Board of Governors developed goals for diversity initiatives at Florida public colleges and universities after the murder of George Floyd by a racist white Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
Yet that seems like a lifetime ago now, with the dramatic “hostile takeover” of New College of Florida on January 6, 2023 and subsequent state higher education legislation to dismantle DEI offices and gender studies programs, and to empower university boards of trustees and presidents over faculty administrators. Christian conservative and nationalist forces are guiding this fight, and Governor Ron DeSantis has made allies of them in his bid for the presidency, throwing money profligately at their projects and reshaping the Florida state university system along the way. But even in Florida, where conservative fiscal watchdogs still roam at night, the fight will inevitably go on.