Inside Higher Ed: How Accreditation Changes Could Impact Professional Licensure

In late August, Department of Education staff suggested ending federal recognition of the American Bar Association’s accreditation authority. But how would losing federal recognition actually affect law schools, law students, and the bar admissions process?

From Inside Higher Ed, the answer is classic law school: it depends. On the state, on the institution, on the nature of federal recognition, and on how all of these actors respond to any Department of Education action. More below the fold.

Jessica Blake, How Accreditation Changes Could Impact Professional Licensure, Inside Higher Ed (Aug. 31, 2026):

Higher education is governed by two kinds of accreditors, programmatic—those that assess the quality of a particular type of program, department or school—and institutional, which evaluate entire institutions. Both types can choose to apply for federal recognition, which would allow them to decide whether an institution can access federal student grants and loans, but they don’t have to. And the Education Department, which decides whether an accreditor is federally recognized, has no control over the licensure of degree earners. That’s determined at the state level . . . .

When it comes to legal licenses, the ABA’s accreditation council says that only one state requires federal recognition—Florida.

But even in that case, the effect of the ABA’s potential loss of federal recognition appears to be minimal. . . .

Nationally, five stand-alone law schools rely solely on the ABA for accreditation, and at this point their graduates will not qualify for Florida licensure if ABA’s recognition is denied. But 183 of the law schools affiliated with the ABA are part of a larger university, so they have a second and broader institutional accreditor; what remains unclear is whether those institutional accreditors will be approved by the Florida Supreme Court . . . .

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