UNC System ‘exploring’ creating its own accrediting agency, president says
The University of North Carolina System is “exploring the idea” of partnering with other “major” public university systems around the country to create a new accrediting agency, according to UNC System President Peter Hans.
Hans announced the proposal Wednesday in a committee meeting of the system Board of Governors, which oversees and sets policy for the state’s public universities. He offered few details of the plan and did not identify the other state university systems that might join the UNC System in the effort.
The move, if it comes to fruition, would appear to be the first of its kind in the United States, and potentially would see the UNC System oversee the process of forming the agency that would accredit its own schools.
“We’ve been having a number of discussions with several other major public — public — university systems, where we’re exploring the idea of creating an accreditor that would offer sound oversight,” Hans said in his brief remarks on the subject. “And I’ll have much more detail on this within the next few months.”
Hans offered some context for why the system might pursue the proposal, noting significant changes to accreditation rules at the state and federal levels in recent years.
Accreditation is meant to “ensure that institutions of higher education meet acceptable levels of quality,” per the U.S. Department of Education, which approves the agencies that are authorized to accredit schools around the country. Accreditation is crucial to several facets of university operations, including federal student aid; in order for a student to receive such aid, they must attend an accredited school.
“That’s the origin of accreditation,” Hans said.
But he noted there has been “a lot of discussion in recent years, on the national level, about reforming the accreditation system for higher education.”
“There are frustrations with the cumbersome, expensive, time-consuming burden the current approach places on our campuses, especially smaller institutions that must dedicate significant resources to the process,” Hans said.
On Thursday, Hans deferred a question from The News & Observer about the states that could be included in the plan, only offering that “a number” of university systems share similar concerns and “frustrations” about the current accreditation landscape.
Hans said he hopes to provide more information about the plan at the Board of Governors’ July meeting.
Recent changes to accreditation
Historically thought of as a highly administrative endeavor without much public attention, accreditation has been subject to increasing political scrutiny in recent years.
During the first administration of President Donald Trump, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos oversaw significant deregulation and changes to the federal accreditation rules. That included adding new rules that allowed universities to use accreditors outside of the regional agencies they had historically been required to use.
Schools in the UNC System, for instance, are accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, or SACSCOC. But under the 2019 changes, accreditors were permitted to cross the long-established regional lines that dictated the schools they oversaw.
The North Carolina General Assembly furthered those changes in 2023, approving a law that requires the state’s universities and community colleges to switch accreditation agencies for each 10-year accreditation period. The law was nearly identical to a similar measure passed by Florida’s legislature in 2022.
More recently, Trump last month signed a sweeping executive order further targeting the accreditation process and the agencies that oversee it. Among other provisions, the order directed the Department of Education to make it easier for schools to change accreditors and to “resume recognizing new accreditors to increase competition and accountability in promoting high-quality, high-value academic programs focused on student outcomes.”
“The accreditors’ job is to determine which institutions provide a quality education — and therefore merit accreditation,” the order read. “Unfortunately, accreditors have not only failed in this responsibility to students, families, and American taxpayers, but they have also abused their enormous authority.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon supported the order, saying in a statement that “America’s higher education accreditation system is broken.”
Hans previously endorsed McMahon, a New Bern native, for her appointment as education secretary in a letter to U.S. senators.
The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a North Carolina-based conservative education think tank, last fall promoted the idea of states forming their own accrediting agencies by arguing that such groups “would refrain from interfering with legitimate oversight and governance issues, as they would be designed to complement rather than replace existing accountability measures.”
Accreditation controversies
Much of the debate over the accreditation process has centered around what critics — generally political conservatives — believe to be standards in which accreditors require schools to promote frameworks like diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.
“The existing accreditation monopoly raises costs, contributes to the ever-increasing tuition and fees faced by American families, favors legacy four-year institutions, blocks new accreditors from the market, interferes with states’ governing board decisions, and pushes universities in ideological directions when they should be focused on core subjects,” McMahon said in her statement regarding Trump’s recent order. “The result is more bureaucracy, less innovation, sprawling DEI administrative complexes, and burdensome oversight by unaccountable accreditors rather than state education leaders and duly appointed governing board members.”
SACSCOC, in particular, has come under fire amid the increased political focus on accreditors. But the agency, unlike some other accreditors, does not have a DEI standard that its schools must meet, Inside Higher Ed reported.
SACSCOC and UNC-Chapel Hill, the UNC System’s flagship campus, have been entangled in recent years, after the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees in 2023 approved a controversial plan to establish the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the university. Faculty leaders said they were not meaningfully consulted on the plan for the school ahead of the trustees approving a resolution on the matter, which ran contrary to the generally accepted idea that faculty oversee the university’s curriculum.
Weeks after the trustees approved that proposal, the president of SACSCOC, Belle Wheelan, criticized the board and raised questions about whether the university might be in violation of the agency’s accreditation standards because of their actions, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.
In its October article on state-based accrediting agencies, the Martin Center cited “model legislative text” from the National Association of Scholars, a politically conservative education organization, for states to form their own agencies.
“The most effective means for states to solve the problem of unaccountable higher education accrediting organizations imposing social justice requirements on their public university systems is to found their own accrediting organization,” an introduction to the model text reads.
Hans, in his remarks Wednesday, focused heavily on the resource implications that the current accreditation process has for universities — and how, he says, a new agency would address those issues.
“The goal here is to save time, save money and ensure quality,” Hans said, “and I believe we can do so in partnership with other major public university systems.”
This story was originally published May 15, 2025 at 11:07 AM with the headline "UNC System ‘exploring’ creating its own accrediting agency, president says."
