In the last installment of In the Room, I discussed the work on a Credit Transfer Consortium: why the issue matters, what the draft framework looks like, and where our members opposed it. This time, I want to take you into a room that is doing something more fundamental: rewriting the Principles of Accreditation themselves. The Consortium is just one new initiative sitting on top of our existing standards. This is the foundation those standards rest upon, and right now, we are in the process of rebuilding it from the ground up. Let’s start with why.
The Issue
When I speak with registrars, accreditation liaisons, provosts, or presidents and ask what frustrates them most about the current Principles, I tend to hear three main complaints:
1. The standards leave little room for an institution to find its own path to good outcomes.
2. They fail to meaningfully distinguish between a two-year technical college and a research university awarding doctorates.
3. They create a large amount of documentation that measures whether an institution can prove compliance rather than whether it is doing good work.
None of this is a criticism of the creators of the current Principles; they were designed for a different regulatory era, and like any long-standing document, they have accumulated requirements that were added over time but rarely removed. I would add that I do not necessarily agree with these complaints, but they exist because perception is reality. Higher education has evolved faster than the standards have. This gap highlights the need for a complete, ground-up revision rather than just more marginal edits.
The Discussion
We built the rewrite around three core values: enable innovation, honor institutional mission diversity, and reduce administrative burden. Every draft standard is tested against four guiding questions: does it genuinely promote student achievement, does it advance quality and continuous improvement while maintaining transparency, does it improve transparency and accountability while reducing unnecessary burden, and does it keep the focus on outcomes and results rather than process for its own sake. In practice that means standards are being worded to leave more room for institutions to make their own internal decisions, on the premise that the best outcomes usually come from institutions that have the freedom to find their own path to excellence, and standards are being approached from a more contextual, almost storytelling, posture rather than a checklist posture. In other words, we are committing to outcomes that reflect the missions of our institutions and recognizing that genuine differentiation must be considered during the writing of standards and not after.
The writing process itself was deliberately unconventional. The committee did not start with the current Principles or the current Resource Manual open on the table. It started by asking what actually matters for quality, moved to a review of what federal requirements demand regardless of what we might prefer, and only then circled back to ask what we had overlooked.
We put the draft in front of our members and the public this spring, and the response told us the rewrite is on the right track but not finished. We received 473 total responses, 385 of them fully completed and 88 partial, split between 182 responses to an institutional version of the survey and 291 to a public version. We deliberately did not flag which provisions were federally required and which were our own choices, because we wanted honest reaction to the standards as written, not reaction filtered through what people assumed they had to accept. The overall tone trended positive, but two tensions showed up consistently: a trade-off between the number of standards and how they are structured, and a trade-off between how clearly an expectation reads and how much flexibility institutions have in interpreting and applying it. The most specific feedback clustered around five areas: how the standards differentiate by institutional mission, where the line falls between a standard and its implementation, the role of faculty, the role of libraries, and academic freedom. The committee is now working through revisions that respond to that feedback, informed (and trying to anticipate) as well by the new Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) regulatory language I have been tracking with you.
As we move into the next draft, let me give you a little advice. First, verbs matter, because the difference between an institution ‘shall’ do something and an institution ‘should’ do something is the difference between a mandate and a value. As with assessment language, verbs carry meaning showing depth. Verbs like “list” or “count” are what I would consider compliance verbs. In assessment language, they are low level verbs. Verbs like “demonstrate” are higher level verbs indicating a more active outcome.
Second, beware of crosswalks, because mapping every new standard back to an old one is how you accidentally rebuild the thing you were trying to replace. It is also based primarily in looking for terms or content rather than changes in intent or philosophy. It gives people and institutions permission to do what they have always done rather than looking at new and more effective means to show a commitment to quality and improvement.
Finally, keep asking whether a given requirement is about compliance or about improvement, because those are not the same question and they do not belong in the same sentence.
Progress Update
That work has produced a set of concrete proposals since the draft went out. The committee has recommended discontinuing the CR standards designation, discontinuing differentiated reaffirmations for institutions that previously responded to a smaller subset of standards, introducing attestations for a number of standards in place of extensive documentation, and discontinuing the QEP. It has also proposed shortening the number of years between reaffirmations, eliminating the fifth-year review, and bringing back non-binding on-site committee suggestions alongside formal compliance recommendations. I am particularly excited about the last recommendation. The Commission, and our institutions, should have a focus on holding compliance of course, but we can also identify areas where institutions are excelling. We should acknowledge where quality exists as well as areas of improvement.
On timing, the current discussion phases institutions in by reaffirmation class (date approved by The Commission’s Board of Trustees): the Class of 2027 stays on the current Principles, the Class of 2028 gets a choice with a Fall 2027 reaffirmation visit, and the Class of 2029 moves fully to the new standards. I realize this creates tons of questions, but we do not have all the answers as yet. We are working through the dynamics of these changes, so more to come on that. We anticipate a full package of both the standards and process changes by the Board meeting with the Resource Manual followed closely.
We walked through all of this with attendees at the Summer Institute in July, and the reminder I gave the room there is worth repeating here: this is still a draft, and there is more work to do. Writing the standards turns out to be the easier half of this project. Implementation is the real work ahead of us: a full revision of the Resource Manual, a reconfiguration of the review cycle and its processes, and retraining every evaluator so that on-site teams apply the new standards, and the new philosophy behind them, consistently across the membership. So, we are not simply looking at a change of standards but a change of approach.
The Pruitt Perspective
Before I get into my perspective on this work so far, I want to give a heartfelt thank you to the incredible individuals who have worked so hard on this first draft. The group made up of peers from across our membership comprising of presidents, provosts, and liaisons have worked very hard to meet some pretty tough deadlines. Thank you for your work so far and the work yet to come.
Underneath the guiding questions and the feedback tallies, this rewrite comes down to one trade: we are asking institutions to accept less prescriptive language in exchange for more responsibility for demonstrating quality in their own words based on their own missions. That is a harder ask than it sounds. A detailed standard tells an institution exactly what to produce. A contextual standard asks an institution to make an argument, and arguments can be second-guessed in ways checklists cannot. I think that trade is worth making anyway, because a system built entirely around proving compliance eventually optimizes for compliance rather than for the outcomes compliance was supposed to protect. That is the same argument I have made about negotiated rulemaking and about the Credit Transfer Consortium: accreditation works best as a peer-driven process grounded in professional judgment and institutional mission, not as a federal or bureaucratic checklist exercise. The AIM rulemaking is going to put a floor under some of what we do regardless of how this rewrite turns out. What we control is whether the rest of the Principles reads like a document written by peers who trust institutions to tell their own story, or a document written to survive an audit. It is the difference in being Quality Seekers versus auditors. I know which one we are trying to build.
Standards should measure whether students are being well served, not whether an institution can produce the right binder. That is the whole point of this rewrite, and it is why I would rather take the time to get it right than rush it to get it done.