How the federal government could kill higher education.
We need to consider the risks.
Under a second Trump administration, the Federal Government could decimate higher education as we know it.
The federal government could effectively kill higher education in the United States. Maybe that sounds dramatic (it is!) but I think is realistic. We should probably start thinking about the possibility.
Speculating on imminent crisis in higher education is a frequent indulgence for people with experience and expertise in the sector (and for many without). Commentators circulate all sorts of theories on why higher education is, or will soon be, in crisis. Two of the most common theories focus on technology and demographics. One theory is that information technology will disrupt the delivery model and replace academic work. Massive technological disruption has not happened, though I suppose the jury is still out with AI. Another theory is the demographic cliff, or the idea that an anticipated rapid decline in the college-age population will lead to a massive market shock. The effects of demographic change are likely underway, if less dramatically than the direst predictions anticipate.
But if you ask me, we should focus on the possibility of murder, rather than death by natural causes. The federal government is in the best position to kill-off the sector and recent evidence suggests that if Republicans control Congress, the White House, and the Federal Judiciary, they might decide to do it. Red states are working on re-making public university governance, subjecting it to partisan control. Both Red and Blue states disinvested in public higher education. Yet, as I explain in an appearance on The World of Higher Education podcast, I think the state project is about control rather than destruction.
The federal government holds a set of murder weapons and might use them. The Federal Judiciary is a reactionary force remaking the country. The current Supreme Court was intentionally assembled to weaken the federal bureaucracy, empower former-President Trump, and grab power for itself. From affirmative action to student loans, SCOTUS has shown a willingness to wade into higher education. Trump has plans to use his increasingly likely second term to reshape the executive branch into authoritarian machinery and has floated cutting federal funding for higher education when universities don’t act in ways he likes. Republicans in Congress have demonstrated their great distain for higher education in a series of high-profile hearings.
I am going to make some assertions here. As political sectarian conflict intensifies in the country, Republicans may see higher education as a threat to their power and seek mitigate the threat by using the levels of the federal government. Higher education is a threat to Republican power because higher-educated people, especially higher-educated white people, are less likely to support the GOP than their less-educated peers. Higher education is generally supportive of liberal cultural values such as diversity and inclusion (even though the sector has a mixed track record of living up to those values). Finally, the independent authority of established knowledge – think social-level fact checking – is a threat to partisan and authoritarian control. Because higher education is primarily underwritten by the federal government, Republican control of all or most of the federal government could make an all-out national assault on higher education possible. Is it likely that Republicans will use the federal government to kill or at least reshape U.S. higher education? I don’t know. It’s not unlikely.
Why is the federal government able to decimate U.S. higher education.
Higher education is an enormous social and economic sector in the U.S. While much of the sector is independent and the constitution grants states the authority over education, the size and scope of the sector is only possible through federal coordination and federal funding. The federal government is the only entity that could form the sector as it is today, and it is the one entity that could swiftly decimate it.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in recent years, total U.S. expenditures on higher education were north of $700 billion. The Organisation for Cooperation and Economic Development (OECD) estimates that the U.S. spends about 2.5% of GDP on higher education, which is among the highest in the world. Today, there are nearly 19 million total students in the sector, down a bit from a the high-water mark of over 21 million in 2010.
The massive U.S. higher education sector is notable for its decentralization and diversity. Students enroll in a mix of public, non-profit, and proprietary institutions of varying sizes, organizational structures, and missions. The constitution grants oversight of education to the states and so all public institutions are governed at the state or local (in the case of community colleges) level, while non-profit and propriety (for-profit) institutions operate independently. As a result, there is no national “system” of higher education, and many observers argue that U.S. higher education is coordinated by the market. For sure, there are market-like aspects of U.S. higher education. For example, students can choose from a wide variety of options and campuses compete for their enrollment. But the fact of the matter is that this market exists through the federal government, which underwrites the enterprise.
The higher education act.
Federal intervention in higher education goes back to the 19th century, but let’s focus first on the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA). As part of the Great Society and Civil Rights movements during the Johnson administration, the HEA, among other things, establishes broad based federal financial aid programs, and secures the rights of woman and minoritized groups to fully access higher education in the U.S. In the years before the passage of the HEA, enrollments were growing quickly because of the post-war economic and population boom and previous federal aid programs like the GI Bill. But, without a doubt, mass participation in higher education in the U.S. is made possible by the federal aid – need based grants and federally guaranteed loans – and by the civil rights to access education ensured by the law. Below is a graph showing total enrollments from 1947 to 2023 made with data from NCES. Between 1965 and 2010 enrollments grew over 4-fold while the U.S. population less than doubled, from about 195 million to 309 million over the same period.
Today, virtually all colleges and universities – public, private, proprietary, and two-year and for-year alike – rely extensively on revenue ultimately derived from the HEA to operate. Student fees are a primary source of income for higher education in the U.S. Nearly 4 out of 10 undergraduate students receive a need-based Pell grant to fund their education, and about 4 out of 10 undergraduate students used federal student or parent loans to pay tuition. Overall, nearly three-quarters of all students relied on some sort of financial aid.
Yes, HEA programs help students afford college. But they are also central to keeping higher education solvent. Without financial interventions from the federal government in the form of student aid vouchers – portable grants and loans – and absent some other mechanism that would directly replace this income, many institutions would collapse, and most others would face severe cuts and would be forced to dramatically retrench the scale and scope of their activities.
The federal science system.
After the Second World War, the U.S. began to fund academic science through “mission agencies” including the National Institutes of Heath (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF; founded in 1950), and other departments of the federal government such as the Department of Energy, and Department of Defense. The vision for U.S. science, established by the Roosevelt Administration, was a decentralized system of academic investigation broadly steered through grant making priorities to address national defense, human health, economic innovation, and other pressing problems.
Over time, federal investment in academic science has grown. The chart below shows NSF data on federal funding for academic science from 1953 to 2022 in nominal millions of dollars. Today, the federal government funds about $55 billion in academic research per year, which covers a majority (55%) of all academic research expenditures. The second largest and fastest growing source of income for academic research comes from the institutions themselves, which very likely derive some of those funds from federally underwritten tuition fees.
Beyond funding most of the academic research directly, and indirectly supporting an even larger share, the federal government has important convening and steering functions. The scientist-lead mission agencies guide research priorities, establish norms for monitoring and evaluating ethical and other standards that govern science, and link universities with government research labs and with industry.
As with massive enrollments, the large-scale academic research enterprise in the U.S. could not operate without intervention from the federal government.
Ways the federal government could destroy U.S. higher education.
Because massive enrollments and the academic research enterprise both rely on the federal government for vital resources and to stimulate and structure other actors, the federal government also has the capability to collapse the system. Given the enormously disruptive set of recent SCOTUS rulings, and the apparent increased likelihood that Trump will win the Presidential election, I have started thinking about ways the federal government could destroy the U.S. higher education sector. Decimating higher education is a familiar play for authoritarian governments and the risk that the U.S. will have an authoritarian government appears much higher today than it did even two weeks ago. So, let’s consider how each of the branches of government could do this under authoritarian GOP control.
The Supreme Court
I am not a constitutional scholar with a deep understanding of the nation’s foundational law. Nor, it seems, are most Supreme Court justices who appear to make decisions based on made up stuff that suits them at the time. Given the doctrine of how it benefits Trump and other Republicans, it’s easy to see a path for the SCOUTS to damn the U.S. higher education sector. It basically boils down to SCOTUS ruling that federal intervention in higher education is unconstitutional because regulating education is in the power of the states.
Following this line of reasoning, the court could do relatively disruptive things like invalidate title IX and other civil rights provisions of the higher education act that make it safer for woman and marginalized students to attend college. They could also invalidate in whole or in part previsions of the Civil Rights act, or overturn court prescient like Brown v. The Board of Education. Doing things like this seem completely plausible and would open the door to more discrimination and would create a situation akin to reproductive rights. The right to access a higher education would be dependent on your state of residence. Overall access to education would decline.
The Department of Education, which administers the HEA has long been a target of conservative attacks. I could easily see the court finding the Department of Education unconstitutional and throwing the HEA into regulatory limbo. Because the HEA has not been re-authorized since before the Obama administration, and much of its workings depend on administrative rulemaking, the court’s new doctrine of its only legal if we like it could easily defang much of the act.
Even more dramatically, the court could find that all federal student aid is unconstitutional because educational financing belongs to the states. This sort of logic would also decimate K-12 education but that is for another blogger to address. The sudden revocation of student aid would be an existential shock. Most private institutions would close nearly instantly. States would have to establish state-funded alternative programs or many public institutions – and nearly all community colleges – would also go under in short order. Institutions that survived would have make deep, deep cuts and operate as a shadow of their former selves. The entire sector would enter a death spiral. Tens, and more likely, hundreds of thousands of people would lose their jobs. Higher education as we know it today would be gone.
Congress.
In short, Congress could dramatically scale back federal financial aid, federal research funding, or both. Trimming student loan programs at the margin or not allowing the Pell grants to grow with inflation, effectively shrinking it them, would hurt and accelerate lower rates of enrollment and decline in the sector. So would doing more targeted measures such as eliminating or scaling back funding for minority serving institutions, putting strict accountability standards like return on investment, or ideological tests, like having “balance” in faculty ideology to access to federal aid. These sorts of measures that would substantially reshape, perhaps shrink, but not obliterates the higher education sector seem plausible with a GOP Congress and Republican president.
Congress, with consent from the President, could zero out federal aid and or federal research funding. This is somewhat less likely than cutting or using targeting to reshape the sector. But it could be done, and it would mean, as I describe above, near instant death for the sector as we know it now. Gutting the federal student loan system seems more possible than a total wipeout of all aid. States and private loan markets would have to fill the gap and that would be messy and hurt both students and institutions.
The President.
Given recent court rulings, it seems like imagination is the only limit on what a President Trump could do. He could direct the Department of Education or science mission agencies to suspend aid and funding for specific institutions, or to entire states that he doesn’t like. He could simply direct the Department of Education to stop administering aid. Same with science funding. He could say, “no more research on climate change,” and it would be so. He could suspend all visas for international students – although he has recently said that he wants to give international students Green Cards, so who knows! Basically, Trump could direct the executive branch to do whatever it wanted with higher education or anything else and it would be up to the court to validate or prohibit his orders. In other words, Trump could make higher education his plaything and that would damage if not destroy the sector.
Final thoughts.
Am I engaging in catastrophic hypotheticals? Sure. Does it all seem possible? It does to me. I am eager to hear where you think I might be wrong. Sure, this stuff might not happen, or maybe only some of it will, and yes, I agree that its unlikely to unfold exactly as I have laid it out here. But my point is that the federal government built the current higher education sector in the U.S., it has the power to destroy it, and the means and perhaps motivation to do so. Lots of higher education thinking focuses on demographics, technology, and student outcomes. These things are clearly important. But we need to give our urgent attention to what a malicious federal government could do. Those of us who study higher education, and who work in the sector – especially institutional leaders and think tanker and lobbyists, ought to be thinking about this stuff. Everything is on the table. Ok enough.