Accreditation has emerged as the most widely adopted approach to ensuring higher education quality around the world. While this approach allows variations, it provides a common language shared by different systems and academic traditions. While cooperation across agencies will continue to intensify, the future presents the risk of undue governmental intervention.

Over the past three decades, nearly every country and jurisdiction around the world has adopted some form of accreditation. The practice of accreditation is almost five times as old as that, having first been formally established in the United States in 1885. However, the near-universal introduction started in the mid-1990s, coinciding with regional and economic integration across countries, especially in Europe. Accreditation is far from monolithic: It can focus on programs, academic units (schools or faculties), entire institutions, and even multicampus systems. Accreditation approaches vary and, importantly, there is not a standard duration for a program or institution to remain accredited before its next review. Policy effects of accreditation also vary. At the same time, accreditation encapsulates a sense of assumptions. It is a voluntary but consequential process conducted by relevant peers. Governments oversee, and often fund, accrediting agencies, but these agencies or accreditors remain independent in their decisions, often acting by delegation from the government. Accreditation processes involve a self-study, which is a rigorous and evidence-based exercise of demonstrating how an institution performs against a set of long-term standards and its own stated mission. While accreditation outcomes are summative—accreditation is granted or not—the focus is on improving what the institution or program already does well. These principles make the concept of accreditation strong and provide a common language for quality assurance across otherwise very distinct systems.

Accreditation Trends and Challenges

In addition to the widespread adoption of general accreditation processes, a significant minority of programs and institutions now seek recognition by an agency outside of their own country. Accreditation or recognition of professional programs, such as in medicine or engineering, is also increasingly adopting global standards. Accreditors often work with each other to refine their practices and to develop solutions to address issues of shared interest, such as the pervasive issue of identifying and confronting diploma mills and predatory providers.

Looking ahead, the international agenda for accreditation presents significant challenges. Like credential recognition, mutual recognition of accreditation across countries has proven an enduring problem, despite accreditation providing a shared understanding of principles and practices. Accreditation has been particularly challenging for transnational education. Who should accredit a branch campus or cooperative cross-national universities, or online programs made available across jurisdictions? The rise of microcredentials, most of them powered by blockchain technologies and offered by organizations outside higher education, opens another question: Will accreditors engage with providers that issue microcredentials but that are not higher education institutions in the traditional sense? Another challenge is the proliferation of the types of indirect stakeholders now deemed relevant for higher education, and therefore, for accreditation, such as professional and scientific associations, labor unions, industry guilds, or the K-12 school system. Also expanding are the notions of the public good for which higher education is held responsible, which may impact accreditation, too.

However, there is a more significant threat emerging that puts the very core of accreditation at risk: undue government intervention.

Accreditation’s legitimacy stems from the fact that it constitutes a peer-review process. While accrediting agencies are sometimes funded or overseen by national governments, their independence, closely connected to university autonomy, is paramount. This reality is changing. The United States is perhaps the paramount case, where a hostile takeover of foreign aid and a dismantling of the Department of Education are unfolding. President Trump campaigned with the promise to “fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics,” while Project 2025 called for “attacking the accreditation cartel.” Among such rhetoric, the higher education community needs to stand together to preserve one of the best approaches available to ensuring the quality of programs and institutions, while remaining open to change to accommodate society’s shifting expectations.

Gerardo Blanco is associate professor and academic director of the Center for International Higher Education, Boston College, United States. E-mail: [email protected].

Andrés Bernasconi is professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and president of Chile’s National Commission on Accreditation. E-mail: [email protected].