Who decides what makes a good university?

The new framework – which is still subject to public comment before it is officially implemented – also seeks to get accreditors to focus more on outcomes such as the rate at which students pass licensure exams or land jobs that justify the money they spent on a degree.

“Accreditors have often held institutions to unnecessary or perfunctory standards, such as the number of books in a library collection or the date on a syllabus, rather than focusing on meaningful student outcomes,” the Education Department stated in a May 2026 announcement. The proposed changes will “refocus accreditors on outcomes rather than inputs that increase the cost of higher education without improving student learning or post-graduation results,” the department stated.

But Doyle and other practitioners and observers of accreditation say they are concerned that the proposed changes could make the field too narrowly focused on outcomes that don’t fully capture the complex work that institutions perform with students who enter college at different starting points.

They also worry about lowering the barriers for entry into the accreditation field.

“The quality assurance accreditation provides would be undermined by the recognition of inexperienced accrediting commissions created by the institutions they are meant to evaluate,” said Paul Gaston, III, a higher education reform expert and Emeritus Trustees Professor in the Department of English at Kent State University.

Gaston criticised the Trump administration’s plan to make accreditors more responsible for academic freedom and rooting out what it sees as illegal diversity, equity and inclusion — or so-called DEI — initiatives on campus, arguing that accreditors are “poorly equipped” to take on the regulatory burden.

“Accreditation has resolutely avoided acting as thought police for member institutions,” Gaston said. “To mandate that role would replace a consultative and collaborative relationship with an adversarial one.”

Antoinette Flores, Vice President of Federal Policy and Government Relations at the Council for Higher Education Accreditation, or CHEA, is more measured and reserved in her remarks on the proposed framework, saying it’s still early in the process.

However, Flores said as an organisation, CHEA will be watchful for how the rules affect accreditor autonomy. She said it is important to understand that the accreditation system in the US functions as “a non-governmental peer review system that is intended to ensure educational quality and public confidence”.

“Overall, we will be evaluating the rules on whether they ensure that they strengthen educational quality and whether they preserve the independence and integrity of accreditation,” Flores said in an interview with QS Insights.

Allowing more accreditors into the field could boost competition, Flores added, but offered the caveat that quality assurance is still paramount.

“A key question is not whether there is more competition on its face, but whether any framework is going to maintain the public confidence through rigorous review and effective oversight,” Flores said.

Gaston said he wasn’t all that concerned about “accreditor switching” that some critics of the new framework predict, such as the left-leaning think tank New America,.

“Some institutions will seek a more lenient accreditor to avoid challenging requirements or unfavourable judgments, but, as a rule, competitive institutions will seek accreditation from a commission with a reputation for discerning quality,” Gaston said. “To do otherwise would forfeit a competitive advantage.”

Doyle, the new accreditation leader at Marymount University, said he worries that accreditation could become “too narrowly reduced to a small number of outcome measures”.

“Outcomes are essential to measure, and higher education has existed too long without doing a better job of this. Institutions should be accountable for demonstrating student learning, persistence, graduation, employment, debt and value,” Doyle said. “But higher education serves many purposes, and students are not all starting from the same place.

“If accountability systems are not inclusive of the amazing variety of outcomes that our graduates embody, they can unintentionally harm institutions that serve students with greater needs or missions that are more complex.”

Doyle has mixed feelings about the pace at which the world of accreditation is changing as he enters the field.

“Institutions can adapt to clear expectations, even demanding ones,” Doyle said. “What is harder to adapt to is a rapidly shifting environment where federal regulations, accreditor standards, state policy and public expectations are all moving at once. That makes it especially important for institutions to have strong internal systems for planning, evidence, and decision-making.”

But Doyle also sees upshots in the changes.

“Ultimately, the speed and expansiveness of changes can be a positive in that they keep me constantly learning, they remind me of the difference I get to make, and they give me some job security,” Doyle said half-jokingly. “And they will, in the long run, make our universities more capable of demonstrating our benefit to society and real improvement in students’ lives.”