Accreditation Overhaul: New Bill Links College Program Costs to Graduate Earnings

The Accreditation Choice and Innovation Act is a major shake-up of how colleges and universities get—and keep—their federal accreditation. Essentially, it changes the rules for the gatekeepers of higher education quality. The bill introduces new paths for agencies to gain recognition, including through state designation, and mandates that accreditation standards must now focus heavily on hard student outcome data, like comparing the total price of a program to the “value-added earnings” of its graduates. This means the return on investment for your degree is now a required part of the quality check.

The New Bottom Line: What’s Your Degree Actually Worth?

This legislation forces accreditors to get serious about student success metrics, and it’s where the bill gets interesting for anyone paying tuition or student loans. Currently, accreditation can sometimes feel abstract. This bill makes it concrete by requiring agencies to use standards that measure student achievement outcomes, including retention, completion, loan repayment rates, and a comparison of the median total price charged to a student cohort versus that cohort’s value-added earnings (Sec. 2).

Think of “value-added earnings” as the graduate's income compared to a baseline poverty level, adjusted for geography. For a student considering a specific program—say, a specialized master’s degree—this means the accreditor must now look at whether the typical graduate makes enough money to justify the cost. If the numbers don’t add up, the institution could face scrutiny from its accreditor. This is a direct attempt to curb high-cost, low-value programs that leave students with debt and limited job prospects.

Opening the Gates: New Accreditors and State Power

One of the biggest structural changes is the introduction of a new path for accrediting agencies to gain federal recognition: state designation (Sec. 2). A state can now determine that an entity is a reliable authority on education quality and formally designate it as an accrediting agency. If the state’s plan meets federal requirements, the Secretary of Education must approve it for a five-year period. This decentralizes some authority, giving states a much larger role in the accreditation landscape. While this could foster innovation, it also raises a flag: if a state decides to designate a less rigorous agency, it could lead to a “race to the bottom,” allowing lower-quality institutions to gain access to federal student aid dollars.

Furthermore, the bill tightens up the rules for existing accreditors, requiring their governing boards to be fully independent of any related trade association, with separate budgets and strict conflict of interest guidelines (Sec. 2). This is aimed at ensuring that the agencies doing the policing aren't overly influenced by the institutions they are supposed to be regulating.

The Religious Mission Safety Net

The bill carves out significant new protections for religious institutions. It requires accrediting agencies to respect an institution's religious mission and prohibits them from using mission-based policies as a negative factor in accreditation decisions (Sec. 2). More critically, if a religious institution faces an adverse accreditation action (like being placed on probation) and believes it's because the agency failed to respect its religious mission, the institution can file a complaint with the Secretary of Education.

During this complaint process, the institution’s accreditation status is treated as if the adverse action never happened. The burden of proof then falls squarely on the accrediting agency to prove the action was not due to the religious mission. This shifts substantial procedural power, potentially making it much harder for an agency to enforce standards against a religious school if that school claims the standards conflict with its tenets.

What Else Changes for the Student and the School?

For online learning, the bill requires accreditors to ensure institutions have processes to verify student identity in a “minimally burdensome way.” While the goal is to prevent cheating, the vagueness of “minimally burdensome” could be exploited to implement weak verification systems, which is a concern for the integrity of online degrees.

Finally, the bill limits the Secretary of Education’s ability to set accreditation criteria beyond what is explicitly required by law, reducing the Department’s flexibility to address emerging quality issues. It also streamlines the process for institutions to switch accreditors, allowing them to do so quickly provided they aren't facing a pending loss of state authorization or accreditation (Sec. 2). This gives institutions more leverage, but also means they can more easily shop around for an accreditor whose standards they prefer.