NewU University is a 501(c)(3) private nonprofit degree-granting post-secondary educational institution, licensed to operate and issue Bachelor of Arts (BA) degrees by the Washington DC Higher Education Licensure Commission (HELC).

The Commission strives to be a national leader in licensing, compliance monitoring, and enforcement and outreach that ensures students are protected and approved postsecondary institutions provide quality education and training programs. For a list of FAQs, visit the HELC website here. A complete list of approved institutions is available here.

HELC Contact Information:
1050 First St. NE
Washington, DC 20002
202.727.6436

NewU University is a brand new school, and we are opening our doors to our first class of students in Fall 2022. We are bringing much needed reform and innovation to Higher Education for the benefit of students and parents. 

Licensure in our nation’s capital by the DC HELC is mandatory, and serves as a transparent and rigid quality control and oversight mechanism. Many people tend to look to accreditation status as an indicator of quality, yet numerous accredited schools continue to close or merge as they fail to innovate the way NewU University does. A list of accredited schools that merged or closed in recent years is available here. We agree accreditation status can serve as an assurance to most of us, but it is not the only signal of quality and it actually does not apply to new institutions. Most people are surprised to learn that regional accreditors do not have a process for evaluating colleges before they have actively enrolled students, and even when that process commences it may take at least 2 years for it to be completed because of accreditor procedural timelines. Because of these dynamics, it is unrealistic to expect brand new universities to be accredited from the start. NewU University is confident we would meet and exceed any and all regional accreditation standards, so we plan to commence and successfully complete the accreditation process with The Middle States Commission on Higher Education or a similarly situated accreditor in due time. We plan to launch our accreditation process in Fall 2022 when we have actively enrolled students, so that a regional accreditor is in a position to engage with us. If we find an accreditor who would work with us sooner, we are committed to starting the process asap. 

Because of where we are in our evolution – recruiting our first ever class of students – and because accreditors do not have a process for evaluating new schools before they have actively enrolled students, we strongly encourage our prospective students, parents, counselors, and teachers to look to NewU University’s licensure status and the unanimous vote of approval by DC HELC, which demonstrates that NewU provides quality education on par or better than any other university operating in our nation’s capital including but not limited to Arizona State University (ASU), Bard College, Cornell University, Drexel University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University (NYU), Northwestern University, Stanford University, Texas A&M University, The College of William & Mary, and University of California Berkeley, among others.