In a recent interview, Nicholas Kent, the Trump administration’s chief higher education official, signaled a desire to short-circuit the American system of college accreditation.

Since the 20th century, accreditors deputized by the federal government have determined whether colleges are financially and academically sound enough to access federal student aid. They effectively act as arbiters of quality and sentries of the billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded grants and loans that animate the country’s higher education ecosystem.

They’ve also failed in many regards, Kent insinuated in his interview with Bloomberg, declaring the administration would not “nibble around the edges” when revising the contemporary accreditation model. “You could call it a revolution,” Kent, the under secretary of education, told the news outlet.

What has not been made public is how long that revolution has been underway.

A cadre of officials from potential new accreditors, those likely to align with Trump administration ethos, have been in contact regarding accreditation reform with Kent and another new Education Department appointee, David Barker, since at least fall 2024, according to emails that the newspaper The Atlanta Journal-Constitution obtained in records requests.

Having access to high-ranking decisionmakers like Kent and Barker is not illegal or improper, but there’s good reason to suspect some of those aspirant accreditors may end up being laissez-faire overseers. One of the people corresponding with Barker and Kent, for instance, was Anthony Bieda, the former head of a now-defunct accreditor of many predatory for-profit colleges, the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, or ACICS.

ACICS signed off on the likes of ITT Technical Institute and Corinthian Colleges, for-profit chains that flatlined about a decade ago after state and federal investigations found they defrauded students. When accusations of deception roiled ITT Tech and Corinthian, ACICS often doubled down and defended how they review colleges in their purview. Years later, in the saga’s wake, the Education Department took the rare step of cutting off ACICS from the federal aid system, and it later shut down.

Bieda’s proposed new accreditor, the National Association for Academic Excellence, or NAAE, is stacked with former personnel of for-profit colleges who have a history of lawsuits and fraud allegations. One of them, Guy Bell, was formerly president of Concorde Career Colleges, a for-profit institution that has faced accusations of fraud and misconduct.

Bieda, who lists himself as an “executive consultant” to NAAE on his LinkedIn, has himself met with Kent and Barker at least a couple of times, the emails suggest, including when Kent and Barker still held their positions as a deputy education secretary in Virginia and member of the Iowa Board of Regents, respectively. Kent became under secretary in August, and Barker became assistant secretary for postsecondary education in November.

Kent has long been a fixture in the college landscape, having also previously worked for a for-profit lobbying group. Barker almost exclusively comes from a real estate background, with his first foray into higher education being his appointment to the Iowa regents.

In November 2024, Bieda organized a Zoom meeting on “accreditation reform” and invited Kent and Barker when they were in their previous roles, the emails show.

Bieda also copied Barker on a May 2025 email in which Bieda lauded the Trump administration’s accreditation guidance published that month. The policy loosened rules for colleges shopping for accreditors, inviting institutions under scrutiny to evade oversight. For his part, Bieda celebrated the guidance as lowering “the barriers to seeking new, alternative sources of accreditation.”

In effect, Bieda has acted as the point person marshalling a new field of potential accreditors, the emails indicate. Bieda’s “accreditation reform” meeting that brought in Kent and Barker also included higher education officials from various red states who are trying to build an accreditor exclusively for public colleges.

Considered in isolation, a public college-accreditor doesn’t seem problematic. But the effort, the Commission for Public Higher Education, is driven by some conservatives who are hostile to the accreditation system and have publicly delighted in the idea of its destruction.

“Florida has set an example for the country in reclaiming higher education—and we’re working to make that success permanent,” the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, said in a statement announcing the new agency. “That means breaking the activist-controlled accreditation monopoly.”

Right-wing voices, including from within the Trump administration, have cast legacy accreditors as powerful enforcers, menacing colleges into kowtowing to a needlessly byzantine set of benchmarks. They have taken special exception to diversity-related standards some accreditors maintain, though those have largely been suspended or abandoned altogether amid the administration’s DEI crackdown.

Trump 2.0 has sought to compel high-profile colleges to conform to its anti-diversity crusade in an authoritarian, wrecking-ball fashion, notably withholding from institutions billions of federal research dollars. Some colleges capitulated to these tactics.

Rewiring the accreditation system, however, could give the Education Department a compliant accreditor roster through which to impose its policies—like NAAE, or the public college accreditor, known as CPHE.

Bieda seems to want CPHE and other new accreditors, including his own, to be in lockstep, but perhaps not so publicly. In a July email, he invited CPHE-connected officials to a Zoom meeting where they could land on “discrete projects” where CPHE could learn from NAAE.

CPHE officials were also invited to a September “conference” also attended by Bieda and representatives from a couple of other up-and-coming accreditors, emails show. One of those who offered to present at the event was Christopher S. Bjornstad, board chair of an accreditor hopeful, the American Alliance for Accreditation of Short-Term Education Programs.

Bjornstad was director of institutional effectiveness for a for-profit operation called the Art Institutes for about 14 years, according to his LinkedIn. Over the past decade or so, the Art Institutes spiraled through enrollment declines, mass layoffs, campus closures, legal scrutiny, and two troubled ownership transfers before finally collapsing in 2023. Bjornstad left the Art Institutes in 2022.

Taken together, the correspondence reveals a long-running, highly coordinated effort to remold the accreditation landscape to resemble the Trump administration’s vision. What emerges from this network of backchannel meetings will determine which colleges get access to billions in taxpayer dollars.

As Kent framed it, the administration wants a revolution. It plans to rewrite the rules. The foot soldiers selected for that mission, new accreditors with checkered oversight records or overt political aims, will be unlikely to guard the nation’s financial aid with vigor. Students (and taxpayers) will bear the costs if they fail.