Donald Trump has won a decisive election victory and will take office next year as the 47th president of the United States. As of this writing, his party will hold at least 52 seats in the U.S. Senate and will probably control the House of Representatives. The results should afford President-elect Trump plenty of opportunity to enact his agenda—which includes several key items related to higher education.
While not a major focus during his first term in office, higher education was a key issue for Trump on the 2024 campaign trail, where he inveighed against the “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” who run America’s colleges. The President-elect’s plans to “reclaim our educational institutions from the radical left” foreground several specific policies, including accreditation reform, a new national university, and a higher tax on wealthy colleges’ endowments.
Congressional Republicans have a broader higher-education reform agenda, which Trump may very well sign into law. But the president-elect’s embrace of these three issues may catapult them to the top of next year’s higher-education policy debates. So how might President Trump approach fulfilling those campaign promises? Let’s look at each issue in turn.
Accreditation reform
On the campaign trail, Trump devoted an unusual amount of time to accreditation reform. “The accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers, but they have failed totally,” he said in 2023. “When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors. . . . We will then accept applications for new accreditors who will impose real standards on colleges once again and once and for all.”
Trump is correct to identify accreditors as the key to higher-education reform more broadly. Colleges must have accreditation to access federal funding and, in most cases, simply to exist. This gives accreditors enormous power over how colleges operate, since their veto can be a school’s death knell. Moreover, there’s scant evidence accreditors are effectively ensuring quality at their colleges.
The first Trump administration made strides toward reducing the power of accreditors. Previously, regional accreditors had a monopoly over the accreditation of most colleges within their area of the country. Trump’s Department of Education reversed this policy, allowing colleges to seek recognition from accreditors outside their home region. While this afforded schools more choice, it did little to facilitate the entry of new accreditors who could shake up the conventional model.
A second Trump term could see continued efforts to open up the accreditation market. With control of the Education Department, the new administration could accelerate the recognition of new accreditors. Colleges could then seek recognition from these entities instead of the legacy accreditation agencies. Trump’s Education Department could also use the Experimental Sites Initiative, which allows officials to waive certain laws and regulations on a trial basis, to conduct pilots that fund new colleges or programs with nontraditional accreditation.
Greater change can come if the administration works with Congress to broaden the set of entities allowed to function as accreditors. Senator Mike Lee, a key Trump ally in Congress, has introduced legislation that would allow state governments to create alternative systems to accredit colleges. A school with recognition from one of these state entities would be able to bypass traditional accreditation and its cumbersome requirements. States could use these entities to approve nontraditional education programs as well.
A national university
In addition to expanding accreditation, Trump has also pledged to compete with incumbent colleges directly by creating a free, online national university called the “American Academy.” The new institution, Trump promised, would “compete directly with the existing and very costly four-year university system by granting students degree credentials that the U.S. government and all federal contractors will henceforth recognize,” including bachelor’s degrees.
There are many problems with having the federal government literally set up and operate a new university. My colleague Rick Hess has argued that “the idea of putting federal bureaucrats and hangers-on in charge of the ‘American Academy’ should seem like a bad joke.” We shouldn’t trust career bureaucrats at the Education Department, who lean heavily Democratic, to execute Trump’s idea competently or faithfully.
But the underlying goals of the proposal are sound: allow students to earn recognized postsecondary credentials cheaply and conveniently—especially students who already have some college credit but no degree. There’s a way to fulfill this promise that requires far less administrative legwork.
Carlo Salerno of the Burning Glass Institute has the interesting idea to have the federal government grant bachelor’s degrees without teaching any classes itself. Instead, the government would award students degrees for coursework completed at existing colleges and universities.
Salerno notes that different colleges currently offer the same course for vastly different prices: the University of Michigan, for instance, charges five times as much per credit hour than the community college down the road. In theory, students could shop around at different colleges for the best deal on every course, then assemble a degree on their own. But in practice, you need a reputable institution to issue the degree. “Shopping around” can make it very difficult to transfer every credit to that institution and earn the degree.
A version of Trump’s American Academy could fix that problem. The government could award a degree under the American Academy brand to any student who has assembled a sufficient number of credits from recognized colleges. The Academy could also award credit for work-based learning or other nontraditional forms of education. Students would be able to save money by opting for cheaper courses, while those with some college experience but no degree could start taking classes again, secure in the knowledge that the American Academy will recognize their prior credits.
It’s likely that degrees from the American Academy wouldn’t hold as much labor market value as those from long-established institutions. But if it enables students to attain degrees where they wouldn’t otherwise be able to, that would still be an improvement on the status quo. After all, many qualified workers are denied promotions or job opportunities simply for lacking a college degree; the American Academy could fix that problem.
This would effectively fulfill Trump’s promise to create a national university without all the problems of launching an entirely new college.
