“Education-reform advocates on both the right and left have called for changes to the accreditation system, which serves as a gatekeeper to more than $100 billion in federal student aid annually. Colleges must be accredited by a federally recognized accreditor in order for them to receive federal student-aid money.

But critics of the Trump administration are concerned about both the order’s aims and the ways the U.S. Department of Education might try to act on them. Will Del Pilar, senior vice president of the Education Trust, an advocacy group for students of color in higher ed, said “allowing new accreditors in the name of innovation is a straw man argument; what you mean is that it stifles a standard.”

“He also criticized the order’s intention to remove a federal requirement that colleges disaggregate student-outcome data based on race and sex, which will hide the inequities hurting groups that have been historically underrepresented, he said.”

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