Meet the Would-Be Accreditors Tied to Predatory For-Profit Colleges
About a decade ago, two notorious for-profit college chains—ITT Technical Institute and Corinthian Colleges—collapsed after state and federal investigations revealed they had defrauded their students. Their closures, essentially overnight, left tens of thousands of students without their promised credentials. Many had debts they couldn’t pay back.
A lesser-known but ultimately central player in the saga was the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, or ACICS, the accreditor that signed off on both institutions.
Accreditors determine whether colleges meet quality standards. Colleges, who join accreditors as members, must get that greenlight to access federal financial aid, revenue most institutions need to survive. Colleges can select any accreditor, but only the accrediting organizations the U.S. Department of Education recognizes can unlock federal aid, known as Title IV funding.
ACICS shut down after the U.S. Department of Education found in 2022 it had failed broadly in its oversight role. The Education Department withdrew its recognition of the accreditor, ending the flow of publicly funded financial aid to ACICS schools.
ITT Tech and Corinthian Colleges weren’t the only problematic schools among ACICS’ membership. At one point, 17 of the colleges it accredited were the subject of state and federal investigations, lawsuits and legal settlements.
Now, the Trump administration has created a policy opening for some of the same executives who ran ACICS, and other predatory actors like them, to prop up new, potentially equally exploitative ventures.
The administration seems to want to fast-track new accreditors for approval, though the process typically takes years. An executive order President Donald Trump signed Wednesday in part directs the Education Department to start once again recognizing new accreditors as a way to bolster “competition.” It also tears into the old guard of accreditors, claiming they perpetuate diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements for their colleges that the administration is trying to weed out. In reality, these accreditor standards try to ensure students from all backgrounds receive the support they need to succeed.
There’s cause for concern that the accreditors laying groundwork for Education Department recognition won’t prioritize students’ interests and educational quality. Many of the aspiring accreditors are staffed with officials with a history of either working directly for low-quality, for-profit schools or for the accreditors approving them.
The potential entrance of these entities into the federal financial aid system risks more institutions like ITT Tech or Corinthians rising up and raking in taxpayer dollars. Their downfall cost the federal government billions of dollars—the Biden administration canceled $5.8 billion and $3.9 billion in loans for students who attended Corinthians and ITT Tech, respectively.
Below are some of the upstart accreditors lining up for approval and which former for-profit insiders are behind them.
National Association for Academic Excellence
The National Association for Academic Excellence, based in Kentucky, seems to be casting itself explicitly as an alternative to the current stock of accreditors the Trump administration is railing against.
NAAE, which launched last year, on its website describes itself as driving a “demonstrable, evidence-based movement toward delivering the highest level of excellence and value.”
“Institutions that adopt and operate according to these principles may find themselves misaligned with legacy accreditors,” the website reads.
A public letter from NAAE’s chief accreditation officer, Cecilia Livengood, also describes the organization’s desire to measure areas like whether “faculty in aggregate represents intellectual diversity.” This mirrors language of the Trump administration’s executive order, which calls for accreditors to prioritize faculty “intellectual diversity.”
Most concerningly, however, is the fact that a former top ACICS official is involved with NAAE, though to what extent is unclear.
Anthony Bieda, who formerly led ACICS, was cited as NAAE’s executive director at an American Enterprise Institute, or AEI, event last year, and as its co-founder in a December podcast. However, his LinkedIn merely lists him as an “executive consultant” to a new accreditation association.
Bieda was a longtime ACICS executive. He was vice president of external affairs until April 2016, when ACICS elevated him to the top job. His predecessor had resigned amid federal scrutiny on ACICS at the time.
Other figures working with the agency include Daniel Sessions, an NAAE accreditation officer who was formerly vice president of policy and administration at the for-profit American InterContinental University. The university, which remains operational, is under the umbrella of Perdoceo Education Corporation. It’s a for-profit operator previously known as Career Education Corporation that has faced numerous lawsuits for misleading students.
Career Education Corporation, for instance, paid out $30 million in 2019 to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations it had engaged in deceptive recruitment practices, including that the college used third-party recruiters who pretended to be in the military.
And one of the commissioners who would evaluate NAAE institutions, Guy Bell, was previously president of Concorde Career Colleges, another for-profit institution that has faced fraud allegations.
NAAE contacted its first potential member college in December, according to its 2024 annual report, one of the first steps to gaining Education Department recognition.
American Alliance for Accreditation of Short-Term Education Programs
Also known as A³STEP Accreditation, this new accreditor is focused on short-term college programs. The agency said it plans to work with institutions specializing in subjects including plumbing, HVAC work, welding, as well as computer programming and coding.
The accreditor’s board of trustees is composed of some former for-profit college executives.
Christopher S. Bjornstad, the organization’s board chair, was director of institutional effectiveness for a for-profit chain called the Art Institutes for nearly 14 years, according to his LinkedIn.
The Art Institutes, which opened in the 1920s, began showing signs of instability more than decade ago, when enrollment declines forced the institution to lay off hundreds of employees in 2012. Three years later, 15 Art Institutes campuses closed amid financial and legal turmoil, and reached an agreement with 40 attorneys general and the U.S. Department of Justice to end widespread investigations of its recruitment and enrollment practices.
In 2017, the Art Institutes were sold to Dream Center Foundation, a faith-based nonprofit that struggled to maintain the colleges. It also endured legal trouble, including a 2018 class-action lawsuit alleging that it failed to disclose accreditation losses at several Art Institutes campuses. After being sold again in 2019, the Art Institutes finally shuttered completely in 2023. Bjornstad remained at the Art Institutes through 2022, according to his LinkedIn.
Bjornstad’s fellow board member is Joyce Strout, who according to her LinkedIn, was in the early 2000s president of International Academy of Design and Technology, another for-profit college owned by Perdoceo Education Corporation, then known as Career Education Corporation.
And for almost two years, Strout was vice president of national and programmatic accreditation for one of the Art Institute’s parent companies, called EDMC.
EDMC also owned schools like Argosy University, a for-profit college that lost the ability to use Pell Grants and loans in 2019, in part because Argosy used $13 million it received in federal financial aid to pay out financial obligations to staff and vendors, rather than providing it to students.
Strout has also worked for ACICS, the defunct accreditor.
In a podcast hosted by Career Education Colleges and Universities, or CECU, the primary for-profit lobbying group, Bjornstad said he sees an opening for a new accreditor with the potential passage of legislation that will make college programs as short as eight weeks eligible for the federal Pell Grant. This is the main form of financial aid for low- and moderate-income students. Short-term Pell bills have enjoyed bipartisan support in recent years, despite the fact that many abbreviated programs have historically poor student outcomes, including low graduation rates and limited job prospects.
Notably, too, its website states that it will forgo in-person campus evaluations whenever possible in favor of virtual assessments and artificial intelligence tools. In the CECU podcast, Bjornstad said the agency will create a “tool for institutions where they can upload their narrative or documents and get real-time feedback on whether they meet the standards.”
But this streamlined vision is unlikely to hold up in practice. Words on a page or virtual evaluations cannot replicate the insights gained from on-site visits, such as observing classroom interactions, assessing facilities, or having candid conversations with students and faculty. Key elements of institutional quality and culture are often intangible and context-dependent, making them difficult to assess remotely or quantify with data alone. Even an accreditor that specializes in evaluating online programs, the Distance Education Accrediting Commission, conducts on-site visits.
AI tools, meanwhile, can misinterpret or overlook these nuances entirely. For example, an algorithm might penalize a college for low graduation rates without recognizing that the institution serves high numbers of disadvantaged students. In reality, such a school may be achieving significant outcomes under challenging circumstances.
However, Bjornstad said one of his qualms about the current accreditation system is an “overemphasis on tracking retention and graduation rates, metrics I truly feel are not helpful for institutions. It is unclear what role data will play for the new agency, if at all.”
The organization said on its website it will start soliciting member colleges early this year.
American Academy for Liberal Education
AALE has actually existed since the 1990s, and was at one point an Education Department-recognized accreditor.
But in 2010, it gave up the Education Department’s seal of approval. That was the culmination of a multi-year saga, in which department staff in both the Bush and Obama administrations recommended AALE be cut off.
The Obama administration had discovered 45 instances of AALE not being in compliance with federal accreditor policies, according to a 2010 Inside Higher Ed news report. Those included maintaining inadequate student achievement standards. The pressures from the federal government had prompted AALE to abandon its bid for continued Education Department recognition, the news outlet reported at the time.
Even after losing its status with the department, AALE remained a favorite among conservatives, who appreciated its focus on traditional, Western curricula.
It’s now looking for the Education Department to restore its ability to receive Title IV money, its president, Robert Manzer, said during last year’s AEI event.
Manzer also comes from for-profit education, having been American InterContinental University’s provost and chief academic officer for nearly three years, according to his LinkedIn.
In 2023, Manzer, in an AEI report, blamed accreditors’ equity-centered policies for pushing America’s colleges toward “illiberalism.” In the essay, he urged the House of Representatives to haul accreditor leaders to Capitol Hill to “explain how their equity agendas advance the purposes of higher education and whether the policies they encourage are consistent with existing civil rights law.”
“At a minimum, competition among accreditors can create an opening for institutions to opt out of all or part of the equity agenda and its logic of illiberalism, as one or two accreditors will be incentivized to serve the mostly faith-based institutions that disagree with the agenda’s approach,” he wrote.
What’s Next?
The resurgence of accreditation agencies led by executives of some of America’s most infamous for-profit colleges signals trouble ahead.
Despite the painful lessons learned from the implosion of colleges like ITT Tech and Corinthian Colleges, the federal government seems to be prepping for a revival of exploitative accreditation models. These new accreditors, often steeped in the same networks that failed students before, now threaten to reenter the federal aid pipeline—likely with the Trump administration’s blessing.
As they market themselves to the public, their promises of “innovation” don’t suggest they’ll follow the robust accountability that accreditation demands. Without oversight, these organizations may simply become conduits to pass taxpayer dollars to predatory institutions more concerned with profit than their students’ education.