President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday prohibiting college and university accreditors from engaging in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) discrimination by requiring schools to imbibe the ideology in order to receive accreditation.
Trump’s order requires that accreditors abide by federal anti-discrimination law, which the Trump administration considers to include DEI as it creates advantages and disadvantages based entirely on race, sex, or claims of different gender identities.
“A group of higher education accreditors are the gatekeepers that decide which colleges and universities American students can spend the more than $100 billion in Federal student loans and Pell Grants dispersed each year,” the order reads. “The accreditors’ job is to determine which institutions provide a quality education — and therefore merit accreditation. Unfortunately, accreditors have not only failed in this responsibility to students, families, and American taxpayers, but they have also abused their enormous authority.”
“Some accreditors make the adoption of unlawfully discriminatory practices a formal standard of accreditation, and therefore a condition of accessing Federal aid, through ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or ‘DEI’-based standards of accreditation that require institutions to ‘share results on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the context of their mission by considering … demographics … and resource allocation,’” the order continues.
It also points to a number of accrediting bodies that lay out expectations for schools to adhere to the discriminatory ideology, like the Liaison Committee on Medical Education. The committee is the “only federally recognized body that accredits Doctor of Medicine programs,” and it forces institutions to “engage[] in ongoing, systematic, and focused recruitment and retention activities, to achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes among its students” in order to be accredited.
Likewise, the only accreditor for allopathic and osteopathic medical residency and fellowship programs, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, has an expectation that “policies and procedures related to recruitment and retention of individuals underrepresented in medicine,” such as “racial and ethnic minority individuals,” be followed.
“The standards for training tomorrow’s doctors should focus solely on providing the highest quality care, and certainly not on requiring unlawful discrimination,” the order states.
DEI rot in accreditation extends beyond the medical field as well. The American Bar Association’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar — the only accreditor of Juris Doctor programs acknowledged by the federal government — demands that law schools “demonstrate by concrete action a commitment to diversity and inclusion” and “commit[] to having a student body [and faculty] that is diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity.”
The order notes that the ABA Council said that it is reviewing revisions and has “suspended its enforcement” but added that “this standard and similar unlawful mandates must be permanently eradicated.”
Trump has long pointed to accreditation as a “secret weapon” to rein in the far-left ideological capture of colleges and universities.
“I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” Trump said on the campaign trail. “We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once for all.”
The order aims to make ideological diversity more prominent at American institutions of higher education, as well as open an accreditor marketplace to make it easier for schools to switch accreditors.
“The existing accreditation monopoly raises costs, contributes to the ever-increasing tuition and fees faced by American families, favors legacy four-year institutions, blocks new accreditors from the market, interferes with states’ governing board decisions, and pushes universities in ideological directions when they should be focused on core subjects,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a press release. “The result is more bureaucracy, less innovation, sprawling DEI administrative complexes, and burdensome oversight by unaccountable accreditors rather than state education leaders and duly appointed governing board members.”
Accreditors are not typically part of the political conversation about education, but they have an enormous amount of power in the operation of universities. They set standards for schools to receive federal financial aid, as well as admissions policies, faculty quality, and programming.
Although they are supposed to hold the schools accountable, they rarely ever pull accreditation and appear to allow schools to dive further into far-left, useless programming and sell students bad degrees that do not translate into jobs that can pay off the loans taken to obtain them.
“Accreditors routinely approve institutions that are low-quality by the most important measures. The national six-year undergraduate graduation rate was an alarming 64 percent in 2020,” the order states. “Further, many accredited institutions offer undergraduate and graduate programs with a negative return on investment — almost 25 percent of bachelor’s degrees and more than 40 percent of master’s degrees — which may leave students financially worse off and in enormous debt by charging them exorbitant sums for a degree with very modest earnings potential.”
Breccan F. Thies is a correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
Jesus Christ is King
