Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education Executive Order #14279
POLICY UPDATE Background On April 23, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to remove DEI standards from the higher education accreditation process at federally funded institutions and establish new race- and gender-blind criteria. The order specifically cites the American Bar Association (ABA)’s Council and the Liaison Committee on Medical Education as violating the Civil Rights Act for including DEI in their accreditation processes. However, the percentages of Black students at ABA-accredited law schools and medical schools are lower than the general Black population. For example, less than 10% of students at ABA-accredited law schools identified as Black in 2022, and only 5% of practicing attorneys identified as Black in 2024. Medical schools are similarly unrepresentative, with 10% of first-year medical students identifying as Black in the 2023–2024 academic year, and only 5.7% of physicians identifying as Black in 2023. This executive order will exacerbate these disparities by removing structural support for professional students of color. This order continues a wave of anti-DEI policies in higher education. In 2023, the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action and race-based admissions policies in the decisions for Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard University and SFFA v. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Institutions of higher education created affirmative action policies to diversify and integrate university enrollment following the civil rights movement by factoring race into admissions decisions. However, in these cases, the Court ruled that affirmative action violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by using racial identity, a protected class, to evaluate candidates. Since the Supreme Court rulings, Harvard and UNC have seen a 20% reduction in Black freshmen, which poses a serious threat to the future of Black enrollment at those institutions.
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