Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Tuesday appointed five new members to the state Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which advises on accreditation issues, including which organizations should be recognized by the federal government.
A sixth member is expected to be appointed later, according to the education ministry. The five members announced Tuesday are as follows:
—Robert Eitel is president of the Institute for Defense of Liberty, a conservative think tank. Eitel served as senior adviser to the Secretary of Education during the first Trump administration from 2017 to 2020, and as deputy general counsel of the U.S. Department of Education from 2005 to 2009. Eitel has a background in for-profit education, having worked at for-profit college operators Bridgepoint Education Inc. and Career Education Corp.
—Joshua Figueira currently serves as deputy general counsel and managing director of the Office of Compliance, Risk and Legal Affairs at Brigham Young University in Idaho. Prior to joining BYU-Idaho in 2017, he practiced First Amendment and religious issues at the Utah law firm of Kirton McConkie.
—Jay Green is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy. Green previously taught at the University of Arkansas, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Houston, and spent ten years at the Manhattan Institute. He is a school choice advocate and a frequent critic of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
— Steven Taylor is policy director and senior fellow on economic mobility at the Stand Together Trust. Taylor also serves on the Virginia State Board of Higher Education. His past positions include nearly six years at the American Council on Education. Taylor believes the current accreditation model needs an overhaul and “rewards compliance over performance, fails to track results, and saddles students with debt and low returns,” among other issues.
—Emily Reynolds is a student at Western Carolina University.
The Higher Education Act provides that the Ministry of Education appoints six of the 18 NACIQI members, while Congress appoints the other 12. The department, in a news release Tuesday, cast its latest hire as a reformer needed to help fix a broken certification system.
“Americans recognize that the accreditation process needs reform to better serve students and families, and the Trump Administration is addressing that issue in part through these reform-minded appointees,” Deputy Secretary Nicholas Kent said in a press release announcing the new members.
Kent said he believed the appointments would help the government “realign the accreditation system and get it back on track”.
“We can no longer accept a protectionist system in which a few powerful non-governmental entities control billions of dollars in federal student aid and licensing opportunities, ignore student underachievement, drive higher college costs and degree inflation, and prioritize divisive DEI standards over the skills students need to compete in the next generation of the workforce,” he said.
NACIQI’s next meeting is scheduled for December 16. The meeting was originally scheduled for July but was postponed to October and then postponed again due to the government shutdown.
