Friends,
In a revealing interview in The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporter Rick Seltzer probes the next phase of the Heritage Foundation’s higher-education agenda following the rollout of Project 2025. What emerges is not merely a technocratic debate over accreditation but a sweeping ideological project. Heritage fellow Adam Kissel calls for severing the link between accreditors and federal student aid, effectively removing a long-standing buffer between federal funds and institutional quality review.
In its place: state-level control, market discipline, and—ultimately—the privatization of federal student aid.
The proposal frames accreditors as politicized enforcers of DEI and positions states as more trustworthy arbiters of “intellectual” and even “moral” development.
Geez, how pathetic if not deeply cynical to cloak a project of political consolidation in the language of quality, virtue, and reform. The shift would dismantle a national accountability infrastructure and replace it with a fragmented 50-state experiment, where access, standards, and protections vary dramatically by geography and political climate.
Most alarming is the open embrace of reduced college access as a policy goal. Kissel states plainly, “I want college access to drop,” arguing that expanded access in the 20th century “overachieved” and left too many students with debt and no degree. The tradeoff, he suggests, is how many lives we are willing to “ruin” in order to help those deemed deserving.
This stark calculus reframes higher education not as a public good but as a selective privilege governed by market sorting and state ideology. Combined with calls to privatize student loans, weaken federal oversight, and reshape curricula around contested visions of Western intellectual and moral formation, the agenda signals a profound reordering of higher education’s civic mission.
If enacted, these reforms would not simply adjust policy levers; they would narrow pathways to opportunity, intensify political control over knowledge, and destabilize the fragile architecture that has long mediated between public investment and institutional autonomy.
Forewarned is forearmed.
-Angela Valenzuela
By Rick Seltzer | The Chronicle of Higher Education | Feb. 13, 2026
Project 2025, the influential policy blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation, set a clear agenda for the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to reform higher education in its first year in office. What comes next?
Heritage’s “Themes for Higher Education Reform,” published in January, give an indication. One item high on its list: stripping accreditors of their role as gatekeepers of federal funding. The Trump administration has already sought to shake up accreditation by bringing new agencies into the mix, but the Heritage proposal goes much further.
I dug into that proposal with Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow for higher-education reform at the Heritage Foundation and an author of the report. We started out wonky, but I was surprised to find us veer into deeper questions of moral development and college access. Our conversation shows that higher education and its critics have come to hold far fewer shared assumptions than those on campus might think. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Why do you want to remove accreditors as gatekeepers of federal funding?
The decoupling of Federal Student Aid from accreditation would help accreditors focus on quality improvement, rather than quality assurance — meaning that quality assurance can continue to be done to some degree by the Department of Education, so long as it exists, but also by the states.
In other words, accreditors wouldn’t cease to exist.
Once they are decoupled from Federal Student Aid, there is no reason for them to be registered by the Education Department. They can continue to do whatever they like. I point to low graduation rates and low-ROI programs as evidence that institutional accreditors have dramatically failed to be reliable authorities as to the quality of institutions of higher education.
Without accreditors as gatekeepers, how would you ensure Federal Student Aid goes to institutions providing quality education?
The quality assurance will be certified by the state, either by their own assurance bodies or by third parties that they choose, which might still include accreditors, if that’s their plan.
Why are the states going to be better at this?
Returning education to the states means that we trust the state, and people of different political persuasions may trust certain states more than others, but that’s the 50-state-experiment idea that is integral to federalism.
We trust the states with billions and billions of taxpayer dollars already on a large variety of issues. It’s only Chicken Little scaremongers who would say that we can only trust these institutional accreditors who have demonstrated that they are already not good at it.
Accreditors aren’t just about quality assurance. They’re seen as insulation from politicization of higher education.
Did you read my paper from a year ago, called “The Politicization of Higher Education Accreditation”? [The paper argues that accreditors have used their gatekeeping role to impose diversity, equity, and inclusion on colleges while thwarting conservative reforms.]
I’m familiar with those criticisms. But whether accreditors are upholding the ideal of political insulation is a different question from whether we want direct state control in colleges that include private enterprises.
Heritage’s “Themes for Higher Education Reform,” published in January, give an indication. One item high on its list: stripping accreditors of their role as gatekeepers of federal funding. The Trump administration has already sought to shake up accreditation by bringing new agencies into the mix, but the Heritage proposal goes much further.
I dug into that proposal with Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow for higher-education reform at the Heritage Foundation and an author of the report. We started out wonky, but I was surprised to find us veer into deeper questions of moral development and college access. Our conversation shows that higher education and its critics have come to hold far fewer shared assumptions than those on campus might think. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Why do you want to remove accreditors as gatekeepers of federal funding?
The decoupling of Federal Student Aid from accreditation would help accreditors focus on quality improvement, rather than quality assurance — meaning that quality assurance can continue to be done to some degree by the Department of Education, so long as it exists, but also by the states.
In other words, accreditors wouldn’t cease to exist.
Once they are decoupled from Federal Student Aid, there is no reason for them to be registered by the Education Department. They can continue to do whatever they like. I point to low graduation rates and low-ROI programs as evidence that institutional accreditors have dramatically failed to be reliable authorities as to the quality of institutions of higher education.
Without accreditors as gatekeepers, how would you ensure Federal Student Aid goes to institutions providing quality education?
The quality assurance will be certified by the state, either by their own assurance bodies or by third parties that they choose, which might still include accreditors, if that’s their plan.
Why are the states going to be better at this?
Returning education to the states means that we trust the state, and people of different political persuasions may trust certain states more than others, but that’s the 50-state-experiment idea that is integral to federalism.
We trust the states with billions and billions of taxpayer dollars already on a large variety of issues. It’s only Chicken Little scaremongers who would say that we can only trust these institutional accreditors who have demonstrated that they are already not good at it.
Accreditors aren’t just about quality assurance. They’re seen as insulation from politicization of higher education.
Did you read my paper from a year ago, called “The Politicization of Higher Education Accreditation”? [The paper argues that accreditors have used their gatekeeping role to impose diversity, equity, and inclusion on colleges while thwarting conservative reforms.]
I’m familiar with those criticisms. But whether accreditors are upholding the ideal of political insulation is a different question from whether we want direct state control in colleges that include private enterprises.
Why would a state be better to dictate whether Ave Maria University or the University of Notre Dame can draw federal funding?
States already have a key role. The secretary of state, traditionally, in a state, decides which corporations are allowed to operate and the standards under which they are audited. It’s nothing new for states to decide who can operate in their state.
I’m not asking whether this is a new discussion. I’m trying to get at the inherent tradeoffs.
Ideally organizations would police themselves. They don’t, and that’s why accreditors or other outside parties are needed. And when accreditors also fail to do their jobs, different outsiders will come in, such as state and federal regulators and legislators, and then you’re kind of out of ideas, except to go to the consumer, and then the consumer votes with his or her feet, right?
So ultimately you want the market to police itself, and usually it does a pretty good job over time.
Government feels like it has an important say in the use of those dollars, at least not to discriminate against your own students or your own job applicants, and that’s what colleges do. Have the accreditors ever said “You can stop discriminating” as a matter of being allowed to operate? Has any accreditor ever told a college that its policies violate the First Amendment?
You’re referring to race-conscious admissions, DEI, and that kind of thing?
That was the first part of my comment. But to turn to the second part of the comment: Has any accreditor ever told a college that its policy violates the First Amendment and that matters for accreditation? Maybe never.
Eliminating accreditors from this role is very different than the solution Republicans have been pitching, which is to start new accreditors.
A lot of higher-education reforms have a Plan B. Plan A is politically unfeasible — to privatize student loans, return all money to the states, greatly diminish the amount of money coming from the federal government into education. All that is very challenging today, so instead, use the powers that are available for reform, and that’s Plan B.
I’m surprised we went down this road, because I expected you might talk about protecting the federal investment through accountability measures. The feds are arguably taking on more quality assurance by looking at outcomes measures, which is still a departure from the process review accreditors do. I expected you might talk about states doing the same.
Oh, I think states such as Florida, which have turned dramatically to performance-based funding, have demonstrated success in institutional improvement.
The point is not to have a federal standard for how colleges are assessed, but to have each state have its own assessment plan. I’m not against ROI for most programs, most of the time, but there are other things to do with your college time, such as develop intellectually, morally, and spiritually. Teachers, they barely even understand that there’s such a thing as intellectual development or moral development that they could focus on in college. It would be wonderful if colleges would measure intellectual and moral development, and if some states would figure out how to assess colleges by those standards.
Is it a state’s role to assess the intellectual and moral development of private actors?
Intellectual development, for sure. Moral development can be done in a viewpoint-neutral way, similar to how current accreditors focus on process rather than outcomes.
How much do you trust the state to protect whatever the minority in that state is?
Some will do better at that than others, and that’s part of the 50-state competition that you get.
The 50-state competition is certainly one of the checks that’s built into the country. Another is checks and balances between branches and levels of government. You may disagree with interpretations of the Commerce Clause, but the feds do have some role in governing interstate commerce. And if you’re talking about interstate competition and students crossing state lines, can it get muddy?
The federal government already has a role, separate from the accreditors and states, in assessing financial viability and administrative capacity.
Which it arguably has not done a particularly good job of.
No doubt we can agree on that.
What else would you like to discuss?
Making it much easier for a new accreditor to take its place among existing accreditors has been a priority in the current administration.
Why won’t that become a race to the bottom — to accreditors that offer rubber stamps?
As we get more and more transparency in ROI and syllabi and other areas, it will become more and more valuable for a college to show that it is accredited by an accreditor with standing in terms of high-quality outcomes for graduates. So why wouldn’t it be a race to the top?
Would any reform really change the dynamics that make it difficult to ensure quality instruction?
It wasn’t until a huge amount of money was in the federal system that we had to start working on this problem, and then put Band-Aids on it. The tough love is to rip all the Band-Aids off, privatize student loans and the federal-aid system, and then we wouldn’t have to worry as much about accreditation and accountability for the federal dollars, because there wouldn’t be any.
And then, arguably, college access drops.
I want college access to drop. Why do I want college access to drop? Do you want there to be colleges with a 12-percent graduation rate, 15 percent, after six years? You want federal dollars to go to that school?
We overachieved in terms of access in the 20th century. We took kids who would have had a great career as an electrician or in the military or as an entrepreneur, and we said, “No, go to college.”
They took six years not to graduate. Now they’re in debt, no good degree. They’ve been moved away from their home community for six years. Their life has been ruined because we told them they should go to college and we gave them enough money to do it.
That may apply to some students, but I might hesitate to say it to those who were able to earn a degree of value only because of federal financial aid.
Yep, totally agree with that critique. The tradeoff is how many students’ lives you want to ruin in exchange for helping students who deserve to be helped.
If a state wants to make its public universities merit-based in such a way that the kids who are smart but poor get a full ride, the states could easily do that. A number of state-scholarship programs probably do that.
Then you get into questions about which tier of institution those students should be able to access, which can be a problem in public-heavy states like California.
If you look at the Ivy League core curriculum and then you look at what a student can choose to take to graduate outside of STEM, these are not top-tier institutions. You take Beyoncé, you take Bad Bunny, as your course. I would rather have my niece stay at Florida State than go to Columbia.
Without having taken the classes, I can’t say for sure, but there may be some value to cultural critique.
I don’t think they’re doing cultural critique so much as cultural appreciation. I would rather have them reading the Iliad than listening to a Bad Bunny song.
An interesting thing to me is the idea that there is no space for both.
My critique is about the core curriculum. What are the things that you should expose an 18-year-old to, so by the time they’re 22 they can take their place among educated men and women of America in the West? They already know the Bad Bunny. They don’t need that in college.
A wonderful product of the market, right?
If you’re spending $80,000 a year and you’re saying, “I want to be educated. You all are pretty smart over there. You faculty, can you articulate what I should know and be able to do intellectually and morally?” And they say, “Here’s 400 courses, just choose any of them,” that’s not a very good use of my $80,000.
A shorter version of this interview appeared in Friday’s Daily Briefing newsletter.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Rick Seltzer
Rick is a senior writer at The Chronicle and author of the Daily Briefing newsletter. He has been an editor at Higher Ed Dive and a reporter and projects editor at Inside Higher Ed. Before focusing on higher-education journalism, he covered business beats for local and regional publications.
Subscribe here to receive the Daily Briefing newsletter in your inbox each day.
States already have a key role. The secretary of state, traditionally, in a state, decides which corporations are allowed to operate and the standards under which they are audited. It’s nothing new for states to decide who can operate in their state.
I’m not asking whether this is a new discussion. I’m trying to get at the inherent tradeoffs.
Ideally organizations would police themselves. They don’t, and that’s why accreditors or other outside parties are needed. And when accreditors also fail to do their jobs, different outsiders will come in, such as state and federal regulators and legislators, and then you’re kind of out of ideas, except to go to the consumer, and then the consumer votes with his or her feet, right?
So ultimately you want the market to police itself, and usually it does a pretty good job over time.
Government feels like it has an important say in the use of those dollars, at least not to discriminate against your own students or your own job applicants, and that’s what colleges do. Have the accreditors ever said “You can stop discriminating” as a matter of being allowed to operate? Has any accreditor ever told a college that its policies violate the First Amendment?
You’re referring to race-conscious admissions, DEI, and that kind of thing?
That was the first part of my comment. But to turn to the second part of the comment: Has any accreditor ever told a college that its policy violates the First Amendment and that matters for accreditation? Maybe never.
Eliminating accreditors from this role is very different than the solution Republicans have been pitching, which is to start new accreditors.
A lot of higher-education reforms have a Plan B. Plan A is politically unfeasible — to privatize student loans, return all money to the states, greatly diminish the amount of money coming from the federal government into education. All that is very challenging today, so instead, use the powers that are available for reform, and that’s Plan B.
I’m surprised we went down this road, because I expected you might talk about protecting the federal investment through accountability measures. The feds are arguably taking on more quality assurance by looking at outcomes measures, which is still a departure from the process review accreditors do. I expected you might talk about states doing the same.
Oh, I think states such as Florida, which have turned dramatically to performance-based funding, have demonstrated success in institutional improvement.
The point is not to have a federal standard for how colleges are assessed, but to have each state have its own assessment plan. I’m not against ROI for most programs, most of the time, but there are other things to do with your college time, such as develop intellectually, morally, and spiritually. Teachers, they barely even understand that there’s such a thing as intellectual development or moral development that they could focus on in college. It would be wonderful if colleges would measure intellectual and moral development, and if some states would figure out how to assess colleges by those standards.
Is it a state’s role to assess the intellectual and moral development of private actors?
Intellectual development, for sure. Moral development can be done in a viewpoint-neutral way, similar to how current accreditors focus on process rather than outcomes.
How much do you trust the state to protect whatever the minority in that state is?
Some will do better at that than others, and that’s part of the 50-state competition that you get.
The 50-state competition is certainly one of the checks that’s built into the country. Another is checks and balances between branches and levels of government. You may disagree with interpretations of the Commerce Clause, but the feds do have some role in governing interstate commerce. And if you’re talking about interstate competition and students crossing state lines, can it get muddy?
The federal government already has a role, separate from the accreditors and states, in assessing financial viability and administrative capacity.
Which it arguably has not done a particularly good job of.
No doubt we can agree on that.
What else would you like to discuss?
Making it much easier for a new accreditor to take its place among existing accreditors has been a priority in the current administration.
Why won’t that become a race to the bottom — to accreditors that offer rubber stamps?
As we get more and more transparency in ROI and syllabi and other areas, it will become more and more valuable for a college to show that it is accredited by an accreditor with standing in terms of high-quality outcomes for graduates. So why wouldn’t it be a race to the top?
Would any reform really change the dynamics that make it difficult to ensure quality instruction?
It wasn’t until a huge amount of money was in the federal system that we had to start working on this problem, and then put Band-Aids on it. The tough love is to rip all the Band-Aids off, privatize student loans and the federal-aid system, and then we wouldn’t have to worry as much about accreditation and accountability for the federal dollars, because there wouldn’t be any.
And then, arguably, college access drops.
I want college access to drop. Why do I want college access to drop? Do you want there to be colleges with a 12-percent graduation rate, 15 percent, after six years? You want federal dollars to go to that school?
We overachieved in terms of access in the 20th century. We took kids who would have had a great career as an electrician or in the military or as an entrepreneur, and we said, “No, go to college.”
They took six years not to graduate. Now they’re in debt, no good degree. They’ve been moved away from their home community for six years. Their life has been ruined because we told them they should go to college and we gave them enough money to do it.
That may apply to some students, but I might hesitate to say it to those who were able to earn a degree of value only because of federal financial aid.
Yep, totally agree with that critique. The tradeoff is how many students’ lives you want to ruin in exchange for helping students who deserve to be helped.
If a state wants to make its public universities merit-based in such a way that the kids who are smart but poor get a full ride, the states could easily do that. A number of state-scholarship programs probably do that.
Then you get into questions about which tier of institution those students should be able to access, which can be a problem in public-heavy states like California.
If you look at the Ivy League core curriculum and then you look at what a student can choose to take to graduate outside of STEM, these are not top-tier institutions. You take Beyoncé, you take Bad Bunny, as your course. I would rather have my niece stay at Florida State than go to Columbia.
Without having taken the classes, I can’t say for sure, but there may be some value to cultural critique.
I don’t think they’re doing cultural critique so much as cultural appreciation. I would rather have them reading the Iliad than listening to a Bad Bunny song.
An interesting thing to me is the idea that there is no space for both.
My critique is about the core curriculum. What are the things that you should expose an 18-year-old to, so by the time they’re 22 they can take their place among educated men and women of America in the West? They already know the Bad Bunny. They don’t need that in college.
A wonderful product of the market, right?
If you’re spending $80,000 a year and you’re saying, “I want to be educated. You all are pretty smart over there. You faculty, can you articulate what I should know and be able to do intellectually and morally?” And they say, “Here’s 400 courses, just choose any of them,” that’s not a very good use of my $80,000.
A shorter version of this interview appeared in Friday’s Daily Briefing newsletter.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Rick Seltzer
Rick is a senior writer at The Chronicle and author of the Daily Briefing newsletter. He has been an editor at Higher Ed Dive and a reporter and projects editor at Inside Higher Ed. Before focusing on higher-education journalism, he covered business beats for local and regional publications.
Subscribe here to receive the Daily Briefing newsletter in your inbox each day.
