Accreditation Without Accountability

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | October 15, 2026 | Isabella Romboldi

[karpov]

On May 13, 2026 Do No Harm, a healthcare education advocacy group, sent an open letter to the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), the national accrediting agency for social work education programs, demanding the removal of all DEI requirements from its accreditation standards. The letter, which cited specific DEI mandates imposed by CSWE, argued these requirements are ideologically divisive, and pointed to President Trump’s April 2025 executive order on accreditation reform, along with federal anti-discrimination law, as grounds for compliance.

CSWE refused.

Dr. Halaevalu Vakalahi, the CSWE’s president and CEO, argued the executive order does not apply to her organization because they are a programmatic accreditor, not an institutional one, meaning they fall outside the order’s federal oversight structure entirely. She added that CSWE will instead continue to work with individual programs to ensure they can meet the accreditor’s required educational standards.

In short, CSWE is using its programmatic status to justify noncompliance with federal standards—and likely also with federal law.

But, what is a programmatic accreditor?

American higher education runs on two accreditation tracks. When it was introduced in the late 19th century, accreditation was a voluntary, private-sector process intended to ensure and improve the quality, integrity, and effectiveness of educational institutions and professional programs. Institutional accreditation evaluates a university as a whole, while programmatic accreditation evaluates individual degree programs oriented towards licensed professions: physical therapy, veterinary medicine, social work, and dozens of others. In many of these professions, a single private organization holds accreditation authority nationwide, thereby granting an unelected body a monopoly over training, staffing, and graduation requirements for an entire field.

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TOPICS: Education
KEYWORDS: college

[BobL]

Probably too complex of a topic to get much response, so I’ll summarize the problem, at least for education:

Leftists created the Department of Education and thus only had to get control of that institution to be able to destroy public schools...so that was made easy simply be dangling cash, lots of cash. That’s why parents are IDIOTS to think that public schools represent their interests...they don’t.

But private schools (K-12) were a different beast as there was no way to centrally organize them...so the Left got clever and took over their accreditation and told the schools that if they wanted to be accredited, then they MUST comply with the Leftist mandates. If one wonders why private schools would submit to that, it’s because colleges (already controlled by Leftists) DEMAND it.

Probably something similar here - grab the jugular, and you get compliance with very little effort and expense.