Florida is working with university leaders from five other Southern states to form a new higher-education accrediting body, Gov. Ron DeSantis and officials from the other states announced Thursday.
The Commission for Public Higher Education, which will need federal approval, would be an alternative to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, a longtime accrediting agency that has clashed with Florida education leaders in recent years.
“We want to focus on real, serious academic rigor. We want to focus on things that really matter, things that are enduring. We don’t want to waste someone’s education,” DeSantis said during an appearance at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.
Other participants are university systems in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas.
Accreditation plays a critical role in making schools eligible for students to receive federal financial aid. But Florida, in recent years, took steps to move away from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, which is often known as SACS, and battled in federal court with the Biden administration about accreditation.
In 2022, the Republican-controlled Legislature and DeSantis approved a bill requiring public universities and colleges to periodically change accreditors. That followed concerns raised in 2021 by SACS about then-state Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran’s candidacy to become president of Florida State University. Corcoran, who is also a former state House speaker, did not get the FSU job but is now president at New College of Florida.
Florida in 2023 filed a lawsuit against federal education officials challenging the constitutionality of the accreditation system, arguing, for example, that “Congress has ceded unchecked power to private accrediting agencies to dictate education standards to colleges and universities, and it has forbidden the U.S. Department of Education from meaningfully reviewing, approving or rejecting those standards.”
But U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra last year sided with the Biden administration and dismissed the lawsuit.
Becerra wrote that Florida could “seek to change the law in Congress, provide its own funding to students attending its schools, or compete in the marketplace without the use of federal funds, just to list a few examples. But this court is only empowered to look at the facts as they are plead, not rhetorical conclusions, and then apply the law as it exists, not as the state would like it to be. By those lights, what the state presented, at least in this complaint, cannot stand.”
The state appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the case remains pending.
DeSantis, who has tried to reshape Florida’s higher-education system to become more conservative, emphasized a need Thursday to get the new accreditation commission approved while President Donald Trump is in office. He said the Trump administration is supportive of the proposal.
“The reality is if it doesn’t get approved and stick during that time, we can have a president come in next and potentially revoke it, and they could probably do that very quickly,” DeSantis said. “If we get this done … I think almost all the states in our region are going to be favorable to this.”
DeSantis criticized what he called the “monopoly of the woke accreditation cartels,” which he said is “not what the state of Florida wants to see reflected in its universities.”
State University System Chancellor Ray Rodrigues contended the current accreditation process wastes time “checking the compliance box and managing the minutiae of bureaucracy, with very little focus on real, actual academic excellence.”
