Accreditation Without Accountability

On May 13, 2026 Do No Harm, a healthcare education advocacy group, sent an open letter to the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), the national accrediting agency for social work education programs, demanding the removal of all DEI requirements from its accreditation standards. The letter, which cited specific DEI mandates imposed by CSWE, argued these requirements are ideologically divisive, and pointed to President Trump’s April 2025 executive order on accreditation reform, along with federal anti-discrimination law, as grounds for compliance.

CSWE refused. 

Dr. Halaevalu Vakalahi, the CSWE’s president and CEO, argued the executive order does not apply to her organization because they are a programmatic accreditor, not an institutional one, meaning they fall outside the order’s federal oversight structure entirely. She added that CSWE will instead continue to work with individual programs to ensure they can meet the accreditor’s required educational standards.

In short, CSWE is using its programmatic status to justify noncompliance with federal standards—and likely also with federal law. 

But, what is a programmatic accreditor? 

American higher education runs on two accreditation tracks. When it was introduced in the late 19th century, accreditation was a voluntary, private-sector process intended to ensure and improve the quality, integrity, and effectiveness of educational institutions and professional programs. Institutional accreditation evaluates a university as a whole, while programmatic accreditation evaluates individual degree programs oriented towards licensed professions: physical therapy, veterinary medicine, social work, and dozens of others. In many of these professions, a single private organization holds accreditation authority nationwide, thereby granting an unelected body a monopoly over training, staffing, and graduation requirements for an entire field. 

States compound the problem by writing these “sole programmatic accreditors,” or SPAs, directly into licensing law: aspiring professionals must graduate from an SPA-approved program, or they cannot gain licensure. Texas alone has more than a dozen SPAs embedded in licensure statutes/regulations, most of which maintain standards that appear to directly conflict with the state’s own DEI restrictions. The result is a private monopoly with the power to disregard state law.

What do these apparent conflicts look like?

CSWE evaluates social work programs on their ability to instill nine qualities, which it refers to as competencies. Competency 3 requires students to understand “the pervasive impact of White supremacy and privilege” and to demonstrate “anti-racist” practice throughout the curriculum. This appears to run directly contrary to Texas SB 17′s ban on mandatory DEI training at public institutions. Reports from Texas social work programs suggest CSWE is aware of their apparent conflict with state law, but are choosing to disregard it. Faculty have described DEI work continuing under new terminology, changing in name but not in substance. Although facing pressure from all sides, CSWE is not backing down from their commitment to acting as they please. 

Current state licensure statutes are why federal reform, however bold, cannot entirely solve the problem. 

Although the Department of Education Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) committee’s recent proposed rulemaking is a key step in the right direction, SPAs do not need federal recognition to keep their gatekeeping power. Their power flows from state statute and board rulemaking. For example, CSWE does not even hold Department of Education federal recognition, but is still able to accredit and control 900 social work programs across the United States. SPAs operate in a gray area between federal and state control, using power granted by the state to exert influence over how students are trained. From inflating degree requirements to mandating ideological indoctrination in the classroom, private entities are creating the standards for occupational licensing. 

Who can close the accountability gap? Individual states.  

In January 2026, the Texas Supreme Court broke the American Bar Association’s (ABA) monopoly over licensing for Texas lawyers. The ruling asserted the state’s authority to set “simple, objective, and ideologically neutral criteria” instead of the ABA’s privately interested criteria. This example sets a positive precedent for programmatic accreditor accountability, as a private monopolistic entity is no longer able to control licensure for a profession in Texas. Most programmatic accreditation standards are established by statute or board rule, however, demanding legislative and executive, rather than judicial, action. Legislators do not need to review every single programmatic accreditation standard; they need to eliminate the structural power granted to SPAs by removing their names from state statute and building enforcement mechanisms that hold all accreditors to state law. 

The contention between Do No Harm and CSWE is pulling back the curtain of a larger system that allows monopolistic programmatic accreditors to act without oversight. As long as states hand licensure gatekeeping to private monopolies with no meaningful oversight, SPAs will continue to feel and act empowered. Today, there is public discord over social work training. Tomorrow, the spotlight could be on veterinary medicine, physical therapy, or other accreditors that decide that their own standards outrank the law of the state that empowers them. 

To create meaningful oversight, credible enforcement mechanisms, increased competition, and an accreditation system that can no longer govern without being governed, reforms can no longer wait. At the end of it all, governments that choose to license certain occupations should assume the responsibility to ensure that the standards for those occupations reflect the public interest, not the protectionist interests of private associations.  

Isabella Romboldi is a Research Associate at the Cicero Institute.