Answering the Call: How Southeastern Is Restoring Public Trust

Higher education is facing a historic crisis of trust. Recently, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon issued a national call to action, challenging university presidents and governing boards to restore confidence in our institutions. She posed this challenge in the form of seven targeted questions.

Now is not the time for universities to become defensive. Instead, it is time for course correction. At Southeastern University, we welcome this forthright conversation. In fact, we believe that faith-based universities are uniquely positioned to lead the way forward because these principles are already in our DNA.

This is how SEU is answering the call:

1. How will we ensure transparency and merit in admissions?

At SEU, we anchor our academics in truth and merit. Culture often tells us that merit is outdated. We reject that narrative. But we also reject the idea that merit requires exclusivity. Selective institutions manufacture prestige by rationing seats. We take a different view: our mission is to widen the door and then hold a high standard once a student walks through it.

Our admissions criteria are published in advance, objective, and applied identically to every applicant. There is no holistic black box, no undisclosed rubric, no thumb on the scale.

How, specifically

Published, pre-disclosed criteria. Our academic catalog and admissions pages publish the full requirement set before a student applies: official transcripts, a minimum cumulative GPA, a personal essay, a character reference, and agreement to abide by our published Community Covenant. Nothing is hidden and nothing is discretionary after the fact.
Test-optional by design. SEU is test-optional. SAT, ACT, and CLT scores are accepted and can strengthen an award, but they are never required. A student’s academic record, the work they actually did, governs the decision.
Merit awards on a published scale. Institutional scholarships are awarded on a published GPA scale, not by committee discretion. Incoming freshmen receive the Chancellor’s ($17,000), President’s ($15,000), Regent’s ($13,000), Southeastern ($10,000), or Founder’s ($6,000) award based on cumulative GPA alone; transfer students receive the Quest ($12,000), Journey ($9,000), or Venture ($6,000) award on the same basis. A family can calculate their award before they even apply.
Aid that actually reaches students. 99 percent of our on-campus undergraduates receive financial aid, with an average institutional award of $22,251 and more than $36.6 million distributed in a single year. Merit-based aid at SEU is not a marketing device for a handful of students; it is how nearly every student is funded.
Race and ethnicity play no role — and we would stop collecting the data. Race, sex, and ethnicity have never been factors in admission or scholarship decisions at Southeastern, because our awards are formula-driven from the transcript. We collect race and ethnicity data solely to satisfy federal IPEDS reporting requirements. If the Department eliminated that mandate, we would stop collecting it tomorrow. In our enrollment process it is not information; it is an obstruction.
Price transparency alongside admissions transparency. We publish per-credit-hour tuition, block rates, program fees, housing and meal costs, and partner-site pricing on public pages, updated annually. A family can price a Southeastern degree without speaking to anyone.

2. How will we protect free speech and open inquiry?

True education requires the free exchange of ideas. Disagreeing should never feel risky on a college campus. At the same time, an institution that will not maintain order cannot protect inquiry, because the first casualty of a disrupted campus is the student who came to learn.

Southeastern is a confessional Christian community, and we say so on the front end. We think that candor is itself a free-speech protection. Our Statement of Faith, our Community Covenant, and our standards of conduct are published before a student applies or a faculty member interviews. No one arrives at Southeastern to discover the rules have quietly changed — which is precisely the complaint students and faculty raise at institutions that claim neutrality while practicing orthodoxy.

How, specifically

Stated commitments, published in advance. Every expectation, doctrinal, behavioral, and academic, is published in advance in the catalog, the Community Covenant, and the student handbook. Students and employees consent to a known standard rather than an evolving one.
A published, enforced line between expression and disruption. Our conduct policy protects speech and assembly while treating the disruption of classes, lectures, research, worship, or university operations as a disciplinary infraction, with published levels and processes. Peaceful expression is protected. Occupation, obstruction, intimidation, and harassment are not, and the consequences are known before anyone acts.
A record, not just a policy. Southeastern has not experienced encampments, shut-down lectures, or the harassment of students for their convictions. Our classrooms are structured for wide-ranging debate conducted in charity, and our faculty are expected to model the practice of taking an opposing argument at its strongest.
Transparency as the guarantor of dissent. Because we are open about what we believe, students who disagree with us can disagree openly. The person most silenced on the modern campus is the one who suspects there is an unwritten rule. We have written ours down.

3. How will we encourage intellectual pluralism and academic vitality?

A mind filled with knowledge but empty of truth will never be ready to lead. We should be candid about where Southeastern stands here, because faith-based institutions do not approach this question the way secular institutions do, and pretending otherwise would be the very evasion the Secretary is asking universities to stop.

For us, education is a tool of discipleship and Christian formation. We are graduating students who are not only highly skilled, but equipped to live out and defend the convictions that built this country. We do not offer our students a posture of neutrality among all claims. We offer them something we believe is more honest and more rigorous: a stated position, a serious encounter with the strongest opposing arguments, and the intellectual tools to reason their way through both.

The failure in American higher education has not been that institutions hold convictions. It is that many hold them while denying they have any. Intellectual pluralism is best served by institutions that declare their commitments and then argue for them in the open. That is a market of ideas. A sector in which every institution says the same thing while claiming to say nothing is not pluralism at all.

How, specifically

A core curriculum that requires students to argue. Every undergraduate completes a 33-hour Foundational Core built on Worldview Foundations plus four Habits of Mind, discursive inquiry, natural-scientific and socio-historical inquiry, quantitative inquiry, and creative-aesthetic inquiry. Courses including Divine Design and Missional Vocation, Worldview and Complex Problems, Scripture, and Lived Theology require students to engage primary sources across competing traditions and then articulate and defend, in writing, a reasoned account of their own convictions. A student cannot pass by absorbing a position; they have to be able to state it, source it, and defend it.
Faculty hiring and course design that are open about their premises. We hire faculty who are mission-aligned, and we publish that expectation rather than conceal it. Our institutional formation framework and course design standards ensure that integration of faith and learning is intentional and reviewed at the course level, not left to chance or to individual improvisation.
Annual faculty evaluation, no tenure. Southeastern does not operate a tenure system. Every faculty member is reviewed at least annually on teaching quality and student outcomes. Instructional excellence is a live expectation throughout a career, not a hurdle cleared once.
Vitality measured by demand. Enrollment reached 13,636 in fall 2025, a 16 percent increase in one year, across more than 120 degree programs. The Chronicle of Higher Education ranked SEU the second fastest-growing private doctoral university in the nation from 2013 to 2023. Families are choosing this model, and they are choosing it knowing exactly what it is.
One request in return. Our ability to answer this question the way we have depends on continued strong protection for religious mission in federal regulation, accreditation, and civil rights enforcement. Secretary McMahon has been a consistent defender of that principle. Institutions like ours can contribute genuine diversity to the national conversation only so long as we remain free to be what we are.

4. How will we address affordability, value, and student outcomes?

A college degree should never become a lifelong financial burden. We have not addressed affordability with a discount campaign; we have addressed it by building delivery models that cost less to operate and passing the difference to students.

How, specifically

We froze tuition for every student. In January 2026, Southeastern announced that tuition would remain flat for all students, on campus, online, graduate, and partner sites, for the 2026–27 academic year. We did that voluntarily, ahead of any federal request, and we were able to do it because stronger retention and student success let us hold the line without cutting quality.
The network campus model: about a quarter of the cost, inside a local faith community. More than 200 SEU partner sites operate in 42 states and five countries, hosted by local churches and ministries. Tuition is $339 per credit hour, roughly one quarter of our main-campus rate of $1,350, or about $10,170 for a full year, further reduced by a practicum scholarship of approximately $2,034. That rate has not increased in years. Just as important, students remain in their home community, in their home church, working and serving locally, mentored face to face. Room, board, and relocation costs do not have to be financed because they are never incurred.
Online and trades pricing. SEU Online undergraduate tuition is $399 per credit hour. SEU Trades and the online RN-to-BSN are $250 per credit hour. These are not introductory rates; they are the published price.
Competency-based education and subscription tuition. Our Master of Arts in Ministerial Leadership, launched in fall 2025, is offered on a $399 per month subscription covering all coursework, fees, learning resources, and faculty support. Students advance by demonstrating mastery rather than by logging seat time, so a motivated student can finish the full 36-hour degree in about 12 months for roughly $4,799, compared with $19,620 in the traditional format. That is a reduction of roughly 75 percent. Because the subscription is self-pay, these students borrow nothing at all.
Credit for what students already know. Students may earn up to 45 credit hours through prior learning assessment, examination, portfolio, professional certification, military training, and dual enrollment, so working adults are not charged again for what they have already mastered.
Debt and accountability. Median federal debt for our completers is approximately $21,500, and our fastest-growing programs are structured to reduce that further. We support the accountability principle in current federal law: a degree financed with taxpayer dollars should leave graduates better off than they would have been without it. We ask only that earnings be measured at year five or year ten rather than year four, so that graduates entering ministry, teaching, social work, and other service vocations are not penalized for answering a call the country needs answered.

5. How will we maintain academic standards and rigor in the age of AI?

We must hold the line on academic rigor, and we refuse to let grade inflation or intellectual laziness hollow out the value of a degree. But we are not going to meet this moment by trying to build a wall against artificial intelligence.

AI is changing how businesses run, how the economy works, and what marketable skills a young professional needs. We want our graduates to be successful, and that means teaching them to use these tools responsibly, ethically, and well, not teaching them to fear a technology their employers adopted two years ago.

The honest way to protect rigor is to change how we assess learning. If an assignment can be completed by a machine, the assignment was already measuring the wrong thing.

How, specifically

Assessment a machine cannot sit for. Our competency-based and mentorship programs assess mastery through direct, one-to-one evaluation between a student and a faculty mentor. Competency is demonstrated in live conversation and applied performance. An oral defense of one’s own work cannot be outsourced to a chatbot.
Practicum assessment in real settings. Network campus students are evaluated in part by an on-site ministry mentor who observes their actual work in a real community over a full semester. Performance in front of people who know you is the oldest anti-cheating technology there is.
Institutional AI guidance, theologically grounded. Southeastern publishes Generative AI Community Guidance built on four principles: missional alignment, responsible use, data privacy and security, and flexible citation. It’s grounded in the conviction that human creativity and moral responsibility flow from being made in the image of God. Technology is never value-neutral, and we teach students to evaluate it accordingly.
Externally validated credentials. SEU Tech programs in cybersecurity, data science, and software development embed third-party industry credentials from Google, IBM, and Meta directly into the curriculum. Our students’ competence is validated by employers’ own standards, not only by our grade book.
And a request. A candid word to the Department: one reason AI has destabilized assessment across the sector is that federal regulation still anchors learning to seat time and the credit hour, and accreditation has been slow to accommodate direct assessment and competency-based education. Institutions that measure time cannot easily prove learning. We know how to educate well and drive costs down, provided regulators clear the path. We strongly support the Department’s accreditation modernization effort and urge a simpler, faster Title IV pathway for direct assessment and competency-based programs.

6. How will we safeguard research integrity from malign foreign influence?

Southeastern understands that leadership is ultimately about stewardship. On this question, our answer is partly structural and partly a matter of policy.

The pattern that ought to concern the country is well documented: foreign nationals recruited into research programs at large institutions, trained at American expense, who then carry intellectual property home to strategic competitors. That risk lives where the research money and the visas are concentrated. Southeastern is not a research-intensive institution, we are not a significant sponsor of foreign work visas, and we have no classified or federally funded research portfolio to compromise.

How, specifically

A minimal research attack surface. Southeastern’s separately budgeted research expenditures fall below the threshold for the National Science Foundation’s HERD survey. We operate no foreign-funded laboratories, no classified research, and no research centers with foreign institutional partners.
Negligible visa footprint. Federal records show approximately five H-1B approvals for Southeastern across 2017 through 2025, and no permanent labor certifications. We are not a conduit for foreign nationals to acquire American research capacity.
Gift acceptance with a hard floor. We do not accept gifts, grants, or partnerships carrying conditions that would compromise our academic control, our institutional integrity, or our Christ-centered mission. Any gift with strings attached to curriculum, personnel, or governance is declined.
Full Section 117 compliance, and support for going further. We comply fully with Section 117 foreign gift and contract reporting and support the Department’s expanded reporting portal and enforcement posture. We would support lowering the reporting threshold as well. Institutions with nothing to hide should welcome the disclosure.
International sites we control. Our international locations, in Cambodia, Spain, Moldova, South Africa, and Uganda, are mission partnerships delivering SEU curriculum under SEU academic oversight. They are not foreign-funded ventures and they do not involve foreign government support.

7. How will we prioritize American interests and workforce needs?

Universities exist to serve their students and, by extension, the prosperity and security of the nation. Our goal is straightforward: to graduate skilled, principled, productive citizens who strengthen their communities and love their country.
We build programs by looking at where the country is short of people, and we build them to fit the lives of the adults who would fill those jobs.

How, specifically

Aviation. Facing a national pilot shortage, SEU launched aviation degrees in 2019, a BS in Aviation Management with a Professional Pilot track and an AAS in Professional Pilot, in partnership with KingSky Flight Academy at Lakeland Linder International Airport, with an FAA-approved Boeing 737 simulator on campus. Since 2019 we have hosted the U.S. Air Force JROTC Flight Academy, one of roughly nineteen universities nationwide entrusted with the program, training more than fifty cadets to a private pilot certificate. We are actively exploring an aviation maintenance program to address the parallel shortage of certified technicians.
Nursing, built around a working adult’s schedule. Our Associate Degree in Nursing, launched in fall 2023, was designed specifically for working adults and career changers: foundational coursework online, nursing courses on evenings and weekends, clinical rotations with partners including Lakeland Regional Health and BayCare. We also offer the BSN, an online RN-to-BSN at $250 per credit hour, and the MSN. To date, our 2026 NCLEX first time pass rate for our BSN program is 95.24% and combined 89% first time pass rate across all nursing programs.
SEU Trades. Also launched in fall 2023, SEU Trades offers associate and bachelor’s credentials in electrical, HVAC, and plumbing technician services, construction technology, and project management, online coursework paired with paid, mentored, on-the-job apprenticeship, at $250 per credit hour. We believe the skilled trades are honorable work essential to thriving communities, and we are willing to say so with a degree program rather than a press release.
Technology and cybersecurity. SEU Tech delivers cybersecurity, data science, and software development credentials in eight-week online courses with no prerequisites, embedding Google, IBM, and Meta industry certificates, so a working adult can re-skill without leaving a job. This fall, SEU is launching a 90-credit abridged bachelor’s in Computer Science, all delivered in a Competency-Based Education model, getting students equipped and into industry even faster.
Teachers. Our educator preparation programs are approved by the Florida Department of Education, placing certified teachers into the classrooms where the state’s shortage is most acute.
Regional workforce alignment. In July 2026 we opened a campus in downtown Winter Haven with a plan to focus on healthcare, logistics, and business, the sectors Central Florida employers identify as their pipeline needs, developed in coordination with regional economic development leadership.
Citizenship. Our students contribute an estimated 50,000 hours of community service annually. We are forming citizens, not only employees.

The Path Forward

We cannot simply complain about the changing landscape of higher education. We must lead through it. The Secretary’s call to action has been issued, but our true mandate comes from our calling as stewards of the next generation.

Southeastern welcomes accountability, and we are prepared to be measured. We would ask, in return, for two things: that federal regulation stop anchoring learning to seat time so institutions like ours can keep driving cost down while proving what students actually know, and that the religious mission of faith-based universities continue to receive strong protection, so that the sector retains the genuine diversity of thought this call to action seeks.

If we want our young men and women to lead with wisdom, resilience, and moral clarity tomorrow, we must be uncompromising in our standards today. It is time to stop drifting and start leading for a lasting legacy.