The Trump administration just stripped the left of one of its most powerful weapons for forcing woke ideology on American colleges.
The Department of Education announced Wednesday a new rule that would allow more organizations to accredit universities — breaking the stranglehold left-wing accreditation groups have held over higher education for decades.
President Trump called going after accreditors the “secret weapon” to dismantling their control over American universities early in his second term.
“At a time when Americans have lost trust in higher education, the Trump Administration’s proposed changes to the accreditation system are intended to reorient our quality assurance framework so that accreditors prioritize student outcomes rather than bureaucratic processes or the promotion of divisive and unlawful ideological agendas.”
Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent made that statement in Wednesday’s press release announcing the overhaul.
Kent said the antiquated accreditation system has contributed to inflated tuition, administrative bloat, and ideology-driven mandates on college campuses. The proposed changes will improve college affordability, reconnect education to workforce needs, strengthen accountability, and restore confidence in the system.
The rule follows Trump’s April 2025 executive order directing the reformation of the accreditation system.
That order exposed how accreditation groups control which colleges and universities American students can attend using the more than $100 billion in federal student loans and Pell Grants dispersed each year.
The accreditors’ job is to determine which institutions provide a quality education. Instead, they’ve abused their enormous authority.
Some accreditors make the adoption of unlawfully discriminatory practices a formal standard of accreditation through DEI-based requirements. Those standards force institutions to share results on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the context of their mission by considering demographics and resource allocation.
Wednesday’s proposed rule will make it easier for the secretary of education to recognize new accreditors and diminish the power of private trade associations to control them.
The Department of Education says the rule will promote academic freedom, intellectual diversity, and research integrity.
Academic freedom and intellectual diversity may be at all-time lows right now.
Plagiarism and fake research scandals have rocked academia for years. Conservative-minded academics are shut out of consideration for prestigious positions.
Accreditors for medical and law schools have inflicted significant damage on both professions — requiring diversity quotas, racialized trainings for students, and more.
For the medical profession in particular, trust in physicians is at an all-time low.
Coming out of the DEI regime enforced by accreditors and promoted by the Biden administration, some professional medical organizations advanced the idea of racial concordance for doctors. They wanted to race-match patients to doctors.
The argument pushes that non-white patients must have doctors with the same skin color to obtain proper treatment.
Academics claim racial concordance benefits minoritized patients. The argument is a back door to artificially pumping the numbers of non-white students accepted into medical school and among the overall number of doctors.
Artificially pumping those numbers in most cases means lowering standards.
That’s untenable to most Americans who rely on doctors to have the requisite merit to actually be doctors. A similar argument applies to lawyers — many of whom will be responsible for defending clients against overreach by government entities or corporations.
The Trump administration is dismantling the DEI apparatus one accreditor at a time.
