The Public Higher Education Commission was launched last summer with the support of six state programs. Officials argued that government agencies needed a new licenser better suited to their needs. They criticized the current model as broken and suggested new entrants would offer more options at a time when insurers are facing greater scrutiny over costs and outcomes.
The six founding members of CPHE are the State University System of Florida, the University System of Georgia, the University of North Carolina system, the University of South Carolina, the Texas A&M University system and the University of Tennessee system. Aspirational accreditors now seek federal recognition, a slow process the Trump administration is working to speed up for new entrants.
Last fall CPHE tapped Mark Becker to become board chair. Becker was president of Georgia State University for nearly 13 years and spent another three as president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. Now he’s leaning on that technology to help launch CPHE, which recently announced its first manager.
Becker visited the Within Higher Ed offices in Washington, DC, to discuss his work with the emerging developer. Excerpts from the interview follow, edited for length and clarity.
Q: First, what was your interest in participating in CPHE?
A: From my time at APLU, I knew all the heads of the system except one, because they all worked at APLU. So I was asked if I would look into this. Obviously, I saw a press conference that didn’t go well when it was announced. I had to call them one by one—not all, but enough—and ask, “What’s really going on here?”
It’s probably not news that people in the media welcome, but one of the things I’ve learned in my life is when you see a news story, on a good day, it’s probably true. And it can often miss the mark, especially if you’re looking for a local machine. So I made the calls and I needed to make sure that this wasn’t a political boondoggle, that this was a genuine attempt to do something new in higher education by focusing on a specific sector: public higher education. I believed this was an opportunity to do something smart—especially with the arrival of [artificial intelligence]-as a starting point, looking at how to take what used to be a largely bureaucratic process of bean counting and turn it into a transparent and efficient results-oriented process.
Q: As you noted, CPHE was declared by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a fiery press conference where he vilified the “accrediting agency” that was “awakened” and made false statements. Does that press conference indicate the direction CPHE is going? If not, why didn’t CPHE distance itself from DeSantis?
A: CPHE focuses on being a recognized accreditor of the US Department of Education, and dealing with past media events is not our focus. Our focus is on doing what we said we would do, being who we are, whether you go to our website or press release.
Q: What is the expected timeline for government recognition as the ED wants to expedite that process?
A: Our goal is to authorize at least one institution. We have a group of 10 that we are preparing to review right now, and we are getting some self-study, which we should get before we visit the site and make decisions. But we expect to have at least one or more decisions by October, and we will submit our application to the department in November. Our understanding if we make our application in November is that we should expect a decision in late 2027, early 2028.
Q: How are current accreditors failing and what will CPHE provide that others do not?
A: We do not endorse any relevant higher education institution. We only do baccalaureate and above public institutions. These are going to be four-year institutions and those at the R-1 and R-2 level, so we don’t integrate everywhere—we don’t do community colleges, we don’t do private institutions, we don’t do for-profit—and that allows us to be very focused.
If you take, for example, that we’re setting up six systems, the systems work within the context of the state, and the states have a lot of needs—more than what the federal government needs—because the states have skin in the game. They have invested in these institutions, they are controlled by states, they are controlled by boards, and often at the system level, there are many processes. And there are many things to be done by these government institutions and programs.
They already meet a number of accreditation guidelines, because the federal government requires that—especially in the financial end, in the education system, and so on. We think we can work very well, because if we can write that this feature is already a standard feature and the center works in that context, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel and make them jump through a different set of hoops.
Q: Some states, Louisiana, for example, are pushing their public universities to seek CPHE accreditation. Are you concerned that those efforts are putting politics ahead of matching a university they don’t deserve?
A: We established six programs. That does not mean that all institutions within those six programs will go through CPHE. We are the choice. That was one of the changes that came at the end of Trump’s administration [that] The Biden administration continued: You are no longer tied to your state legislature. So now they have a choice. I don’t know what the governor of Louisiana is up to and what their desires are.
Q: You recently participated in a rulemaking session discussing accreditation. Tell me about that process and the end result.
A: First and foremost, I thought the department negotiated honestly. If you look at the document they presented and where we ended up, there was consensus. Voting for consensus didn’t mean you liked everything in it, but it was seen as an honest compromise between where they started and where they could go if they disagreed.
Q: You’ve stepped back in other areas—the responsibility to oversee intellectual research has been a struggle for you. Are you concerned about similar burdens imposed by accreditors?
A: I said in the discussions of the laws, I do not believe that this is under the Ministry of Education. As for federally funded research, that is already covered in policy by the Office of Science and Technology Policy out of the White House. All agencies adhere to that policy, and the Health and Human Services, particularly the NIH, have a well-established Office of Research Integrity. What I pushed back on was any attempt to go beyond what is now understood as the role of the federal government in overseeing, monitoring and controlling research integrity. I thought that the original language that was proposed was more than half the role of the federal government, and it was a sham. I think I said that clearly, forcefully and repeatedly, and we found a consensus.
Q: Is there anything else you want to tell our readers?
A: We need to show that we are going to be more results-oriented, more transparent, more effective, and we are able to do that by working with a particular set of institutions rather than having a set of processes that will be for everyone to come. So, when I say specific set, I mean public institutions. We have every intention—once recognized—of becoming a national authority. So we are not limited to these six systems, and we welcome applications and interest from institutions that are not in the six systems. But the way it will happen is for people to see the result. We look at what we do instead of what is said.
