First Step: State Approval
Universities in the United States are overseen by three agencies known as the Regulatory Triad. namely, state-run accreditation agencies; private, non-profit, membership-based organizations called certifiers; and the U.S. Department of Education.
State approval is the first point of entry for a new institution wishing to become a university. Even if a school is not interested in Department of Education accreditation or federal funding, it must obtain state approval to recruit or enroll students. In general, a business cannot call itself a university unless it receives state approval. The University of Austin used the name “UATX” before the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), the state accreditor, approved the school in October 2023.
States typically have one or two agencies that oversee “traditional” institutions of higher education, that is, non-profit schools that grant degrees (rather than certificates). A study by the American Enterprise Institute looks at the extensive documentation that state accreditors require of college aspirants. Most states require schools to submit faculty resumes, blueprints and floor plans of campus buildings, and lists of classroom equipment. Sometimes explicit requirements are attached to this document. For example, in Mississippi, each classroom must have at least 600 square feet of floor space. However, whether a school passes its plan is often at its discretion. Individual approver. Many accreditors, including THECB, require schools to have “reasonable” or “sufficient” faculty-to-student ratios, but these terms are typically left undefined.
In practice, this means that state accreditors typically evaluate how similar an aspiring school is to an established university. However, new entrants to the market often want to innovate and sometimes deviate from standard models to reduce costs or increase efficiency. New schools may view the requirement that faculty have a terminal degree as outdated or counterproductive. But such policies may face greater scrutiny from state authorizers.
In fact, state accrediting agencies not only look similar to traditional colleges and universities, but they often tend to accredit institutions as well. is Existing university. This is true not only in Texas but across the country. According to federal data, many of the “new” colleges formed in Texas over the past 25 years are new campuses of existing systems, such as the University of Texas or Texas A&M University, and a few specialized institutions, such as seminaries.
But there is arguably no recent precedent, at least in Texas, for a large, independent, degree-granting nonprofit institution like the University of Austin. Michael Shires, UATX's chief of staff and vice president of strategic initiatives, says it's been 60 to 70 years since the Lone Star State approved a new agency in the same category as UATX. (THECB, formed 59 years ago, could neither confirm nor deny that timeline.)
Shires said many state governments have “added a lot of new rules and regulations on top of the law” since the last time they established new nonprofit colleges. “One of the challenges we had was interpreting the code, finding a path and adding all the new layers on top of it so we could start a new organ.” The chapter of Texas law governing state recognition is 80,000 words long.
The initial application to THECB at the University of Austin was 1,200 pages long, with an additional 700 to 800 pages of supporting documentation. After the school submitted the application, THECB's first response was “a request to break the application into smaller pieces because their computers could not open this massive 1,200-page document with all the graphics and tables,” he says. shire. “We had to split the file into six pieces so we could actually open it.”
As UATX discovered firsthand, state approval timelines can be frustratingly long. The school officially launched in November 2021, submitted an application for accreditation in December 2022, and received approval in October 2023. It takes more than a year of preparation and a 10-month official approval process. The initial approval timeline may vary across the country, but typically takes 10 months.
Additionally, many states have limits on the number of institutions or programs they approve annually. For example, UATX was only allowed to launch as a single degree program.
Shires emphasizes that the state of Texas has been a “partner” throughout the approval process. But it was still off, and “time is money,” he says. “That’s one of the really big lessons of starting a new university. “This is a very expensive process.”
Texas was at least open to the idea of a new university. Many other states are at best indifferent to new colleges and universities, and state accreditation systems are an afterthought. According to researcher Molly Hall-Martin, some states have only one full-time employee dedicated to approving new colleges. In the median state, funding for state grantors represents only 0.04% of total state support for higher education. Many agencies quietly complain that they receive little help from the state in navigating the accreditation process and that accreditors are unresponsive to their questions.
In some cases, once a new college receives approval from the state, the college may stop there. However, in most cases, colleges must take an additional step called accreditation. Receiving federal funding requires recognition by an accrediting agency, and graduate schools generally only accept students who have graduated from accredited colleges and universities. To be competitive, new schools need both federal funding and guarantees that graduates will be eligible to attend graduate school. Moreover, most state accreditors require schools to be accredited or on the path to accreditation as a condition of initial approval. So in practical terms, state approval is only the first hurdle that ambitious universities must clear.