The frustration that comes from seeing a problem get worse year after year while the people who should be fixing it keep blaming each other gets stronger. That’s about where accreditation for American colleges and universities is now, and Senator Elizabeth Warren has had enough of waiting.
Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois is one of Warren’s co-sponsors on the Accreditation Reform and Enhanced Accountability Act of 2026, which was just introduced. Many people who follow education policy have known for years that college accreditors, which are supposed to make sure that schools meet quality standards, have not been doing a very good job of protecting students. This bill aims to change that. One time, the Wall Street Journal called them “watchdogs that rarely bite.” That description is still true, which is a shame.
From 2021 to 2024, the Department of Education found that accredited institutions had ripped off about 1.7 million borrowers. Take a moment to think about that number. These students didn’t make choices without enough information; they went to schools that the government had approved. Something important was behind the seal of approval. It seems like it didn’t, though.
Warren’s bill would require accreditors to actually rate schools based on how well their students do, such as how quickly they pay back their loans, how much money they make after graduation, and how much debt their students have compared to how much money they make. It almost seems like these should already be standard measurements. They’re not, which says a lot about how this system was made to protect institutions rather than the people who pay to go to them.
As part of the bill’s push for stronger consumer protections, accreditors will have to act faster when federal or state investigations find fraud or financial misconduct. It would get rid of conflicts of interest between accreditors and the colleges they’re supposed to be objectively evaluating. In some cases, their relationship has seemed too cozy. And the Department of Education would be able to fine or get rid of accreditors that don’t do their job well enough.
Warren is well aware that this has a political side to it. The Trump administration seems interested in using the accreditation process to punish colleges that don’t follow conservative policy ideas and reward colleges that do. Warren’s bill would stop accreditation oversight from leaving the Department of Education. This seems like a way to stop that from happening in the first place. Even though it’s still not clear how far those efforts could go, the worry is real.
Over the past year, Warren has been working on student debt in a number of different ways. She pushed Treasury nominees who couldn’t answer basic questions about the huge number of people who aren’t paying back their student loans. She has asked that it be looked into whether breaking up the Department of Education has made it less able to catch fraud. She has written letters, put out reports, and publicly asked Education Secretary Linda McMahon to explain everything from getting rid of repayment plans that are affordable to the idea of selling the federal student loan portfolio to private investors. This last point—a possible privatization of federal student debt—alarmed both people who owe money and groups that work to help them.
It’s important to remember that Warren first introduced a version of this bill to change how schools work in 2016. There were still major problems with it when it was brought back ten years later. This shows how slowly higher education policy tends to change, even when there is clear evidence of harm.
All of this moves too slowly for students going back to school this fall. Many people agree that this is the worst default and delinquency crisis ever. There are still predatory for-profit colleges open for business. Still, accreditors don’t have much power. It’s really not clear if Warren’s bill will get support in the current political climate. However, the issues it aims to solve are real and have been for a very long time.
