What To Know If Your Nursing School Loses Accreditation

Losing accreditation is rare, but when it happens it can put your financial aid, your transfer credits, and your ability to sit for the NCLEX at risk. A program can lose its own accreditation, or the Department of Education can withdraw recognition from an accrediting body, which takes down every program that body accredits. Either way, the Department of Education has safeguards that let you keep the credits you earned or discharge your federal direct loans. Here is how it works.

What It Means When a School Loses Accreditation

Accrediting bodies measure nursing programs against state and national standards. Schools rarely lose accreditation, but when they do, your earned credits and financial aid can be in jeopardy.

One of the standards a program must meet is its NCLEX pass rate, which schools publish for their graduating class. Historically, pass rates of 80% or lower have been enough to put a school on probation. The accrediting body usually gives a program at least two years to fix the problem before pulling accreditation. Graduate from an unaccredited program and you lose the ability to transfer credits or enter a graduate program, and you cannot sit for the NCLEX or become a registered nurse.

The two main nursing accreditors in the U.S. are the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing and the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education.

Most often a single program loses accreditation because its standards slipped. But when an accreditor itself loses standing with the Department of Education, every school it accredits is affected. That is what happened to the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), which the Department of Education stripped of recognition in 2022. Schools accredited by an ousted body do not have to close, but they get a limited window, up to 18 months, to secure accreditation from another recognized body.

This was not the first time for ACICS. In 2016 the Department of Education moved to pull its recognition and denied the agency's appeal. ACICS sued to overturn the decision and won. In the years that followed, many institutions it accredited sought accreditation elsewhere, which left roughly two dozen programs without it.

What Happens to Your Credits

A school that loses accreditation must offer a teach-out plan to protect the credits you already earned. The plan is an agreement with another institution that lets you transfer all your credits and pick up where you left off. You can accept the teach-out plan or decline it and enroll anywhere you choose.

Declining has a cost. Other schools typically accept only some credits from a prior program, so you may have to repeat coursework. You could also be denied admission outright and need remedial coursework before a new school will take you.

What Happens to Your Federal Aid

If your school loses accreditation, it affects your federal student loans too. The borrower defense to repayment regulation offers relief to students who were defrauded by their school and cannot finish their program. A 2022 report found that roughly 16,000 borrowers received $415 million in discharges after claims against DeVry University, Westwood College, and the nursing program at ITT Technical Institute, among others. Eligible claims can rest on substantial omission of fact, breach of contract, aggressive or deceptive recruitment, or substantial misrepresentation.

When a school loses accreditation, you may qualify to have your federal student loan discharged. The Federal Student Aid site has the details and the application. It takes about 30 minutes and applies only to direct loans, not private loans or loans administered by other state or federal agencies.

Once you submit, the Department of Education notifies you about eligibility. In some cases you may even get a refund on payments you already made. If your application is denied, you are responsible for the loan plus accrued interest, though you can mail a request to reconsider along with evidence supporting your case.

One important limit: you cannot get both a teach-out plan and a loan discharge. If you accept the teach-out and attend another school, you keep the loan. If you apply for and receive a discharge, your credits cannot transfer.

How You Will Know

Schools must notify students when they lose accreditation or land on probation. In the ACICS case, the body oversaw only about two dozen colleges and roughly 5,000 students by the time it lost recognition, down from more than 230 programs and 360,000 students six years earlier. Stratford University, the largest nursing program affected, shut down all classes, online and in person, the same week the loss of approval was announced.

The Department of Education generally tries to avoid closing colleges, but in recent years it has taken a firmer stance against accreditors that do not hold schools to national standards. Schools accredited by an ousted body are barred from offering federal-aid programs or enrolling new students until they are fully reaccredited. If you watch the accreditation status of your program, you will see the warning signs early and know how a loss would play out.