Nicholas Kent, the Education Department official who oversees US universities, is largely staying out of the Trump administration’s showdown with Harvard and other elite schools. His approach to remaking higher education is less splashy but potentially more sweeping: Overhauling the accreditation system.
Colleges count on accreditors, the independent agencies that oversee their financial and academic standards, to approve their eligibility for federal funding. The Education Department has the power to rescind those agencies’ government recognition, a move that would effectively put them out of business.
President Donald Trump has called the accreditation system a “secret weapon” for forcing changes in academia. And Kent, having spent much of his career focused on this critical piece of higher ed infrastructure, is uniquely well-positioned to wield it.
The under secretary of education wants accreditors to enforce standards similar to commitments the White House has sought from elite schools, and pressure them to police campuses on issues like student protest crackdowns and DEI programs.
“We can no longer nibble around the edges. We need a reset of the whole system,” Kent said in an interview. “You could call it a revolution.”
By going after accreditation, the vein that connects all universities to their federal funding, Kent can make Trump’s policies course through the bloodstream of higher education.
In a hint at his priorities, Kent chose to give his first public address in the new role at a September meeting of accrediting agencies, where he declared, “Everyone should expect a dramatic overhaul of the accreditation system as it currently exists within the next year.”
Bloomberg
Kent is implementing his plans to upend what he calls the “higher education industrial complex” from his Washington office just south of the National Mall, at the end of a city-block-length hallway lined with empty cubicles. In March, the Trump administration laid off about half of the department’s 4,100-person staff, and in October they moved to fire roughly 500 more. Kent and his boss, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, are intent on dismantling the department and putting themselves out of their jobs.
But first they’re aiming to expand a campus pressure campaign that has frozen billions in federal research dollars and targeted international students. More recently, the White House invited schools to join a compact promising preferential funding in exchange for a commitment to key policy priorities.
The compact is voluntary, though, and so far, institutions from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the University of Pennsylvania have rejected it. If the Education Department can strong-arm accreditors into adopting similar terms as standards, it could have a powerful effect.
That reality is not lost on Kent, a policy wonk who has deep familiarity with the accreditation system. He began his career working for an accreditor of vocational health education programs in the 2000s before moving to a trade-school lobbying organization that pushed for quicker paths to accreditation. In 2023 he was appointed deputy education secretary of Virginia, where he continued to pursue accreditation reform.
“He understands we can’t keep doing things the way we’ve always done in higher ed,” said Virginia Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera, Kent’s former boss. “His experience in the accreditation world was tremendously helpful on that front.”
Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who’s been quietly influential in shaping Trump’s education policy, told Bloomberg in July that the administration “should turn the screws on accreditors and use them as a proxy for reform.”
The Trump administration has already begun to test the waters. In April the White House released an executive order to “reform” the accreditation system, calling agencies “gatekeepers” who had “abused their enormous authority.”
In June, as the White House battled with Columbia University over alleged campus antisemitism with $400 million in federal funds at stake, the department declared that the school had run afoul of its accreditation, a finding that could lead to having its recognition pulled. Columbia’s accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, warned the school that it was at risk of violating its standards but never went so far as to revoke its certification.
The White House repeated the tactic in July with Harvard. The school’s accreditor, the New England Commission of Higher Education, has yet to take action.
“It is the expectation of the department that the accreditors look into these issues,” Kent said. “We’re not afraid to fire accreditors
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