Higher Ed Policy Goals for a Second Trump Presidency
The specific ways people in Trumps orbit plan to remake US higher education.
Last week, admittedly in a state of panic, I tapped out a post about how the federal government could destroy the U.S. higher education sector as we know it. I stand by that analysis but also recognize the need to get a bit more specific. So, I spent part of the last week reading what I could about Trump’s plans for higher education should he be reelected. I’ve identified three (3) overall goals.
Make student loans more expensive for borrowers and more profitable for lenders.
Re-define what counts as higher education by loosening or eliminating quality standards and accountability.
Remake campus culture in ways that allow racism, transphobia, and even sexual assault.
My assessment is based primarily, but not exclusively, on the policies outlined for the Department of Education in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Project 2025 is a policy roadmap for remaking America by the most influential right-wing think-tank, the Heritage Foundation. The project is overwhelmingly staffed Trump administration alumni, presents itself as a policy mandate for Trump, and is widely reported to be the policy architecture for another Trump administration.
Project 2025 and Trump advisors would not characterize their policy goals the way that I do. My characterization is based on the clearly apparent consequences of the policies they propose. Let’s get into it.
Make student loans more expensive for borrowers and more profitable for lenders.
Here’s the plan for Trump’s student loan policy:
Privatizing federal student loans.
Eliminating all loan forgiveness plans.
Exposing lending to market rates.
Revamping income-driven repayment options.
The bottom line is that borrowing to go to college would be A LOT more expensive. An analysis by researchers at the Center for American Progress (CAP) finds that a typical borrower with a bachelor’s degree would owe more than $4,000 extra on student loan payments because of the Republican plan. It would also make balloting balances, where borrowers owe much more than they borrowed even if they have made some payments, possible.
Many voters are upset because they feel that Joe Biden hasn’t done enough to forgive student loans. Biden’s broad based student loan fogginess plan was stopped by the Supreme Court and there are legal challenges to his alternative. Meanwhile, Biden has used existing plans to forgive billions in student debt. Project 2025 wants to prevent Presidents from ever again providing student debt forgiveness.
Let’s look at what the plan says on page 322: “Protecting the federal student loan portfolio from predatory politicians. The new Administration must end the practice of acting like the federal student loan portfolio is a campaign fund to curry political support and votes. The new Administration must end abuses in the loan forgiveness programs. Borrowers should be expected to repay their loans.”
In other words, Republican’s see student loan forgiveness as naked vote-buying. This is significant in part because it says that student loan burdens are not a legitimate topic for public policy intervention.
The ideological commitment to “The federal government does not have the proper incentives to make sound lending decisions” (pg. 340). In other words, the private sector, not the government should manage the student loan program. The federal government will still guarantee the loans - basically taking all the risk away from private lenders - but the proposal implies that it’s the lenders who will be in change. Not only will the policy include higher rates to generate more money for lenders, but the program also implies that lenders should have more discretion of who to loan to and for what programs.
Project 2025 states: “Taxpayers should expect their investments in higher education to generate economic productivity. When the federal government lends money to individuals for a postsecondary education, taxpayers should expect those borrowers to repay” (p. 322). This assertion coupled with what appears to be a radical program of privatization that hods the government should not make lending decisions, would seem to open the door for private lenders to have discretion over who is credit worthy and for what program.
The analysis by CAP should be sobering because it states clearly to cost of the more concrete plans outlined for student loans in Project 2025. But higher costs of borrowing and no path to forgiveness could be coupled with even more radical changes that give lenders extraordinary influence to shape who goes to college, where they go, and what they study. Because the plan does not call for risk sharing for lenders, lenders could easily be chosen based on their propensity to steer federal loan money in ways that suits the political and ideological preferences of the administration.
Re-define what counts as higher education by loosening or eliminating quality standards and accountability.
The Republican plan for higher education includes gutting accreditation, the primary tool for institutional quality assurance in U.S. higher education. Accreditation is a form of peer-review that certifies whether an institution meets field standards for quality education. Accreditation is required for institutions to participate in federal financial aid programs. Recently, Republican politicians like Ron DeSantis have attached accreditors, claiming that it advances a “woke” agenda. Project 2025 advances the same thinking: “Rather than continuing to buttress a higher education establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats’ and a de facto monopoly enforced by the federal accreditation cartel, federal postsecondary education policy should prepare students for jobs in the dynamic economy, nurture institutional diversity, and expose schools to greater market forces” (p. 320). Proposed reforms to accreditation are about limiting accreditors power to encourage inclusive practices but are not just about that. Republicans want accreditors to lose most of their teeth to allow for the proliferation of for-profit and Christian providers that are eligible for federal financial aid.
Pages 350 - 352 of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership book lay out a plan to defang accreditors. It argues that accreditors impose irrelevant and politically motivated standards to accessing federal financial aid programs (title IV), necessitating dramatic reform. The proposed reforms include:
Prohibit accreditors from including diversity and inclusion as one part of an overall assessment on educational quality.
Allow the states to pick their own accreditors and bar accreditors to set standards for the curriculum, governance, and academic freedom that conflict with state policy (allowing states to control the curriculum and squelch academic freedom)
Prevent accreditors from blocking religious beliefs in educational programs (i.e. allowing discrimination and teaching creationism instead of biology).
And most critically, revamp the system of accreditors to allow for the easier formation of new accreditors and allow states to act as their own accreditors.
In addition to these planed reforms to accreditation, the Project 2025 calls for limiting the ability of the federal government to collect information on student outcomes and other educational data. It also calls for an end to the gainful employment rule, which although I believe is imperfect, is a took the federal government uses to protect students from predatory institutions and programs.
Taken together, these proposed reforms would eviscerate the accreditation system and effectively redefine higher education. Long established norms on quality, governance, and academic freedom would be out the window.
Proposed accreditation reforms would have at least two outcomes. First, low-quality, for-profit providers along with ideologically driven Christin fundamentalist institutions would have much easier access to federal financial aid. Protections for students would be all but eliminated while student borrowing became more burdensome. This is a recipe to exploit students.
Second, the plan would give Republican controlled, which have sown a propensity to restrict academic freedom, a much stronger hand when crafting legislation that controls the curriculum, what faculty say, and what students learn. It is a plan to effectively end the national academic freedom standard.
Remake campus culture in ways that allow racism, transphobia, and even sexual assault.
As you can probably tell, many of the proposed reforms by Project 2025 are interlocking in that the goals of graft and profiteering, ideological control of higher education, and the decimation of civil rights protections are perused through complimentary measures. While the way Republicans wold remaking student loans and wreck accountability standards will undoubtably disproportionally impact marginalized communities, the plan also takes specific aim at those communities.
There would be no special civil rights enforcement in education. The Department of Education could be eliminated but, if not, the plan calls for getting rid of Education’s Office of Civil rights. In doing so, Project 2025 makes monitoring and enforcing students’ civil rights much more difficult. Enforcement would require the Justice Department and could only happen through litigation (see pg. 330).
Check out this partial list of their plans:
Revoke IX guidance used to protect survivors of sexual assault and relationship violence and re-establish new guidance that tilts the balance of rights towards the accused (see pp. 332 - 333).
Prohibit collecting data on non-binary genders and rely exclusively on biological sex for all federal reporting and civil rights enforcement (p. 331).
Eliminate the Gear-Up program designed to support first-generation, low-income, and racially marginalized students (p. 361).
Cap the indirect cost rate of federal research grants because “these reimbursements cross-subsidize leftist agendas and the research of billion-dollar organizations such as Google and the Ford Foundation” (pg. 355).
One odd and troubling provision of the Project 2025 plan is to renegotiate FERPA, the educational privacy law. Much of the text on FERPA is confusingly written but it seems like the plan wants to open space to re-think the age of majority (18) for college students and allow parents access to educational records for adult students. On page 335 it states, “The Secretary should make it clear that FERPA allows parents full access to their children’s educational records, so any practice of paperwork obfuscation on this front violates federal law.” This statement is in a section about title IX and gender identity so it would seem to apply to higher education. We know that LGBTQ students are not always safe at home and that some parents would suspend educational supports if they knew their adult children were gay or gender confirming. This new rule proposed by Trump could allow parents access to students’ sexuality and gender identities even when the adult students preferred to keep that information private.
Project 2025 also calls for the elimination of negotiated rulemaking. Negotiated rulemaking is the way that guidance about how the Higher Education Act provisions are enforced. Negotiated rulemaking brings student and institutional interests to the table when devising how student loan program, title IX, and other import provisions of the act work. Taking away the voice of institutions and students will allow Republicans freer reign to enact provisions that align with their ideological interests. This is another example of a wonky way that Trump could re-make the culture on campus to confirm with the Republican ideological agenda.
Concluding thoughts.
I was just talking with a reporter about my deep concerns about how Trump could remake higher education in the United States. Realizing that I was describing catastrophe I interjected that I was probably too sensitive to downside risk. Because I have information about the bad things that can happen, I probably think its more likely than it is. That’s true. But even if I am too pessimistic, there are good reasons, I think, to keep a gloomy outlook. One is that higher education as a social institution has few champions. Democrats and especially the center-left policy analysts that inform them want for more accountability and feel that colleges and universities have taken advantage of students. Without strong champions, higher education remains vulnerable.
Ok, enough.