Hello and welcome back to The Markup, your one-stop shop for all things higher ed policy. I’m your host, Katherine Knott, Inside Higher Ed’s news editor who can’t believe it’s already November.
What a week. Borrowers who attended institutions that closed say the Education Department isn’t discharging their loans. The Justice Department charged five people for allegedly stealing federal student aid as part of a “ghost student” scheme. And, minority-serving institutions aren’t flagged anymore on the College Scorecard.
But let’s dig into some key developments from the week that was.
1. Accreditation rules advance. We’ve talked a lot about the Trump administration’s push to overhaul the rules for college accreditors—a powerful tool in the president’s broader effort to reform higher ed. Now those rules are final and will take effect next July, pending any court challenge.
Among other things, the rules will speed up the process for new accreditors to gain federal recognition, make it easier for institutions to switch accreditors and require accreditors to set new standards around things like credit transfer and research integrity. We’ve already seen at least one agency propose a standard related to intellectual diversity, and several other new accreditors are working to gain recognition.
Higher ed associations had urged the administration to rethink its accreditation proposal, arguing that the changes amounted to executive overreach and would threaten institutional autonomy. But ED officials didn’t substantially change the rule in response to the submitted comments. (ED wrote 45 times that they disagreed with points made in the comments.)
“Taken together, this student-oriented final rule realigns the Secretary’s recognition of accrediting agencies with a high-quality, high-value education that is free from unlawful discrimination and other violations of federal law,” ED officials wrote in the final rule.
Reactions to the final rule mirrored what we’ve heard since ED first proposed the changes in the spring. Critics argued the administration could “weaponize” accreditation to control colleges and universities. A former ED staffer called the regulations a “significant shift in federal accreditation policy, with provisions that extend federal influence beyond accreditor recognition.”
