2019: Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos issues new rules governing the accreditation, allowing regional agencies to accredit academic institutions outside their region. Critics warned that this would allow colleges and universities to shop around for the least stringent regulators, a change understood as benefiting the for-profit university sector still reeling from Obama-era regulations (Kelderman 2019).
April 2022: Florida Governor DeSantis signs SB 7044, requiring that state higher education institutions use a different accrediting agency each accreditation cycle.
February 2023: SACS raises concern that the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill “violated its accreditation standards” when it created the School of Civic Life and Leadership outside the process of shared governance.
October 2023: North Carolina passes a budget bill that includes a provision, like Florida’s SB 7044, requiring that public schools change their accreditors each cycle.
July 2024: The American Enterprise Institute hosts an event bringing together officials from North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia to discuss efforts to transform the accreditation process.
April 2025: Trump releases an executive order on accreditation. This order includes fast-tracking the “accreditor recognition review process” and “streamlin(ing) the process for higher education institutions to change accreditors to ensure institutions are not forced to comply with standards that are antithetical to institutional values and mission.” This executive order also mandates that accrediting agencies should promote “intellectual diversity.”
June 2025: DeSantis announces the Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE), calling it an effort to "upend the monopoly of the woke accreditation cartels," and announcing buy-in from the Florida State University System, the University System of Georgia, the University of North Carolina System, the University of South Carolina System, the University of Tennessee System, and the Texas A&M University System.
August 2025: The CPHE releases Draft Standards of 24 proposed accreditation standards for public comment by September 16.
September 2025: CPHE receives 450 pages of public comment, including from the AAUP, raising concerns about the lack of academic freedom protections and the imposition of “viewpoint diversity.”
October 8, 2025: CPHE releases its Revised Accreditation Standards, which do not meaningfully address these concerns. A side-by-side comparison can be found here.
February 4, 2026: CPHE issues Draft Evidentiary Guidance for Accreditation Standards for public comment by March 4.
March 4, 2026: Public comment period for Draft Evidentiary Guidance closes.
April 13-17 & May 18-22, 2026: The Department of Education will convene a negotiated rulemaking committee charged with proposing changes to the process for recognizing accrediting agencies.
At some point in the future: CPHE will begin the process of accrediting the first ten schools.
After that: CPHE will use that experience to start the process of receiving recognition from the Department of Education.
As part of that process: The National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) will make a recommendation about whether or not the Department of Education should recognize the CPHE.