Could New DOE Accreditation Rules Open the Door to a New Generation of Online Colleges?

“An influx of new accreditors brings no guarantee that those accrediting agencies will promote innovation.”

Clare McCann, Managing Director of Policy and Operations at the American University’s PEER Center

On August 19, 2026, the U.S. Department of Education proposed a new rule that would significantly change how college accreditors are recognized and how easily institutions can move between them. The proposal would remove a current two-year track-record requirement for new accrediting agencies seeking federal recognition, streamline the process for colleges that want to change accreditors, and limit the Department’s ability to penalize an institution simply because it switches to another federally recognized agency.

The Department also wants accreditors to focus more heavily on student outcomes and remove standards it considers unnecessarily restrictive to new educational models. In announcing the proposal, DOE said the goal is to increase competition among accreditors, reduce regulatory burden, and make more room for approaches that do not necessarily follow traditional assumptions about how colleges should be organized or how instruction should be delivered.

For online universities, competency-based programs, and other digital models, the changes touch directly on who gets to evaluate them and under what standards. Accreditation is closely tied to access to federal student aid, yet many of these institutions already operate under the same recognized accreditors as traditional colleges. The question is not whether online education can enter the system, but how much more freedom institutions should have to choose who oversees them once they are in it.

The changes may give some institutions greater freedom to find an accreditor that fits their model. They may also make it easier for a college under pressure from one agency to seek oversight elsewhere.

To understand where that line falls, we spoke with Clare McCann, managing director of policy and operations at American University’s PEER Center, about what the new rules actually change, how much room the current system already gives online education, and whether greater competition among accreditors strengthens or weakens quality control.

Clare McCann is the American University Peer Center’s Policy and Operations Manager. Prior to joining the PEER Center, she was the Director of Higher Education at Arnold Ventures. McCann also worked as a senior policy advisor for the U.S. Department of Education related to issues on higher education in both the Office of the Under Secretary and the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development, and with New America’s Higher Education Program. McCann holds a degree in Political Science with a focus in Public Policy from George Washington University.

The most immediate change isn’t to online education itself, but to the accreditation structure. Under the Department’s proposal, new accrediting agencies would have an easier path to federal recognition.

Colleges would also have more freedom to leave one accreditor for another, while accreditors would face pressure to remove requirements that unnecessarily dictate how institutions organize programs, use faculty, or deliver instruction. Taken together, those changes create more room for institutions that do not fit a conventional campus model.

An online university may organize teaching around shorter terms, asynchronous coursework,, or distributed faculty. A competency-based program may let students move at different speeds and advance once they demonstrate mastery, rather than after completing a fixed number of classroom hours. Other providers may want to build programs around work experience, prior learning or new combinations of digital instruction and in-person support.

The proposal gives those models more room to find an accreditor whose standards fit how they actually operate. McCann sees some legitimate value in that flexibility.

“Proposed rules to help institutions switch accrediting agencies more easily, or to use new accrediting agencies, might help further align colleges with accreditors that make sense for them,” she explains.

That kind of alignment can matter when an institution’s mission or delivery model differs from the colleges an accreditor has traditionally overseen. A new agency might also develop expertise in a particular type of institution or approach, giving colleges another option instead of trying to fit every program into the same set of expectations.

The Department is also asking accreditors to move away from requirements that focus too heavily on institutional structure and to spend more attention on student achievement. In theory, that gives colleges more freedom over how they teach while holding them responsible for what students actually gain.

For online education, that may matter more than any single change to course design. It creates a system in which institutions may have more latitude to experiment with how programs are built, provided the accreditor is satisfied that students are still receiving a quality education.

But more flexibility does not necessarily mean a completely new market for online colleges. Many of the models the proposal seems designed to accommodate already operate within the current accreditation system. That is where the picture becomes more complicated.

Despite the attention on whether accreditation rules keep pace with newer forms of higher education, many of those models already operate comfortably within the system.

Some online and correspondence schools work with the Distance Education Accrediting Commission, which focuses specifically on those models. Others use the same regional agencies that accredit large public and private universities.

McCann points to Southern New Hampshire University, Western Governors University, the University of Wisconsin and Capella University as examples of how much variation already exists inside accreditation.

“Institutions have always had the ability—and even the obligation—to select an accrediting agency that suits their mission,” she clarifies.

That includes competency-based education, prior learning assessment, and fully online delivery. None of those models depends on a separate accreditation track in order to exist.

The friction institutions describe is often more familiar: complying with standards, responding to reviews or dealing with an accreditor they believe is too rigid. McCann argues that those complaints are not the same as structural exclusion because a program is online or competency-based.

The new DOE rules may still give colleges more options and make it easier to move between accreditors, but they don’t create legitimacy for digital education from scratch. In many cases, institutions most closely associated with newer models already operate under long-established accrediting agencies. What changes is how much leverage colleges have over who evaluates them.

If new agencies enter the market and switching becomes easier, institutions gain more freedom to choose among accreditors. That may improve fit in some cases. It may also make it easier to avoid oversight when the problem isn’t the model, but the institution’s quality.

Making it easier for colleges to switch accreditors seems like a fairly simple way to give institutions more flexibility. A school whose mission no longer fits well with one agency may be able to find another that understands its model better. New accreditors might also bring different expertise into the system.

McCann’s concern is that the same rules can work very differently when a college is already under pressure.

“An influx of new accreditors brings no guarantee that those accrediting agencies will promote innovation,” she points out.

If an institution is facing questions from its current accreditor, a larger pool of agencies gives it more places to look. The proposal also includes provisions that McCann says would make it easier for colleges to keep a “back-up” accreditor and switch with much less involvement from the Department of Education.

That creates a very different incentive from simply finding a better fit.

A college may leave because another accreditor understands its programs better. It may also leave because the current one is asking questions it would rather not answer.

“New agencies could opt to set and maintain high standards,” McCann says, “but there’s little to suggest that will be the outcome.”

The concern is especially sharp because accreditation is tied to federal student aid. An agency that is too willing to overlook weak performance is not just making an internal judgment about a college. Its decision can help keep that institution connected to Pell Grants and federal student loans.

For online colleges, the stakes can grow quickly. Distance education programs are able to expand across states and enroll large numbers of students without the same physical limits as a campus-based institution. If oversight is weak, the consequences can spread just as quickly

That puts more pressure on the standards accreditors use once they have an institution in front of them. If colleges are given more freedom over who evaluates them, the quality of that evaluation becomes even more important.

As institutions grow, the debate over accreditation becomes more consequential. A weak program at a small college can still do real harm, but online education changes the scale of that risk. Distance-learning institutions can enroll students across states, expand quickly, and reach far beyond the physical limits of a campus.

For McCann, that makes oversight quality more important, not less.

“If that education is not also high-quality, providing students with meaningful opportunities to earn their degrees and succeed in the labor market after school, the risk to students is amplified,” she says.

But that is also where student outcomes become harder to treat as a secondary measure. Graduation rates, post-college earnings and whether students are actually able to complete what they started all provide a clearer picture of value than delivery format alone.

McCann says accreditors have used those measures more often in recent years, but not consistently. “Student outcomes, like graduation rates and post-college earnings, are a strong measure of value and often under-utilized by accrediting agencies,” she says.

A system that gives colleges more freedom over how they teach may therefore need to become stricter about what happens after students enroll. The question is not whether a program is online, competency-based or organized differently from a traditional degree. It is whether students finish, whether the education leads somewhere, and whether institutions that repeatedly fall short face consequences.

Accreditation occupies a particular place in that process because the Department of Education itself is limited in how directly it can regulate instruction, curriculum, or faculty. Accreditors are the bodies expected to judge the quality of the education while also helping determine access to federal aid. That role becomes even more important if the market grows.

“Accreditation is effectively the only process that evaluates the quality of the education itself,” McCann explains. “Accreditation also serves as a gatekeeping process to billions of dollars each year in Pell Grants and student loans.”

The proposed rules may give colleges more room to move and bring new agencies into a system that has changed slowly for decades. Whether that produces better online education will depend less on how many new accreditors appear than on what those agencies are willing to enforce once institutions are under their watch.

And more flexibility can make room for new models. It can also make weak ones easier to sustain. For online higher education, the real test of the new accreditation system may be whether it can tell the difference.