How Trump’s win could erode Biden’s higher education agenda
Donald Trump’s sweeping election victory likely signals the undoing of much of President Joe Biden’s efforts to overhaul higher education in the U.S.
In his years at the helm of the federal government, Biden approved billions of dollars in student loan forgiveness, cracked down on colleges that rip students off and worked to codify new protections for LGBTQ+ students. Those efforts – some of which sparked controversies and brought setbacks – are among the key Democratic priorities that Trump’s win threatens.
The rhetoric of the former president on the campaign trail, and his actions while in office, offer ample evidence of his goals. He spent much of his first term dismantling higher education regulations set by former President Barack Obama, who was unusually hawkish on college oversight.
Tuesday’s election results shined a spotlight on the partisan divide between Americans with college degrees and those without them. Though it’s unclear what the president-elect will accomplish with another four years in the White House, he will likely capitalize on that mandate from non-college-educated voters to chart a far different path from Biden for America’s universities, and, by extension, for the millions of people who attend college in hopes of securing the best future for themselves and their families.
“Trepidation” was the word that came to mind for Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, the top lobbying group for colleges in Washington, D.C.
“The Trump campaign has been very critical of colleges and universities,” he said in an interview hours after the former president clinched a second term. “If you’re a college president this morning, and we’ve heard from a bunch of them, there’s a lot of uncertainty.”
What could happen to the Education Department?
Under the past few presidents, Congress has increasingly struggled to pass legislation related to higher education (or any bills at all, for that matter). In that vacuum, the U.S. Department of Education has taken up the mantle, asserting more of its regulatory authority to enact policies that fit the president’s priorities.
Republicans have campaigned to end the department since it was founded in 1979 during President Jimmy Carter’s administration as a Cabinet-level agency. It hasn’t worked; nearly half a century later, the department is still up and running.
Every day government bureaucrats at the agency carry out an array of services. One office works to curb discrimination in colleges and K-12 schools. Another handles the country’s roughly $1.7 trillion federal student loan portfolio.
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In the weeks and months leading up to Tuesday’s general election, many of the Republicans, including Trump, who emerged victorious became more emphatic in interviews and stump speeches about dismantling the Education Department altogether.
“We’re going to take the Department of Education (and) close it. I’m gonna close it,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News last month. He then turned to Fox host Steve Doocy and appeared to suggest the TV personality could be qualified to guide education policy in his administration.
“We’re going to have one person,” Trump said. “Could be you, if you retire.”
Republican congressional candidates, including Tim Sheehy, who unseated longtime Democratic incumbent Sen. Jon Tester in Montana, mirrored Trump’s tone in recent weeks. Tester’s defeat helped tip control of the Senate to the GOP, as did the victory of Bernie Moreno, an Ohio Republican who prevailed against another Democratic incumbent, Sen. Sherrod Brown.
“We’re going to get rid of some of these agencies that don’t make any sense, like the Department of Education, and just move that money to the states,” Moreno said during a radio interview in October.
There are caveats, however, that decrease the likelihood of the agency disappearing.
Trump cannot unilaterally abolish it. That would take an act of Congress, where the balance of power is still unclear. Though the GOP has retained control of the Senate, the results that determine which party controls the House of Representatives were still trickling in on Wednesday evening. Even if Republicans grasp all the levers of power in the federal government, their margins will be slim on Capitol Hill. That tricky political environment would complicate any effort to pass legislation demolishing a longstanding federal agency, which would undoubtedly be controversial.
And though Trump has said he wanted to “close” the Education Department, he also used it to his advantage during his first term. Some experts say it would be less politically beneficial for him to shutter it, especially given how he and his former education secretary, Betsy DeVos, have touted the reforms they implemented while in office.
That notion seemed to be the consensus in Washington on Wednesday morning as a panel of education experts convened by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, reacted to Trump’s win.
“Frankly, you can’t do any of the things that he wants to do without the department in play,” said Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, an education advocacy group.
Trump promises to fire ‘radical Left accreditors’
Project 2025 offers a detailed plan for dissolving the Education Department, including outsourcing existing offices to other federal agencies. That controversial blueprint for higher education is linked to former members of the Trump administration and was published by The Heritage Foundation, another conservative think tank.
But Trump has distanced himself from the group’s list of policy prescriptions in favor of his own platform. Named Agenda47, the plan rubber-stamped by the president-elect promises to “protect American students, impose real standards on higher education, and hold colleges and universities accountable.” It also includes a commitment to “fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.”
Accreditors, the independent, nongovernmental agencies that maintain oversight of colleges and universities and ensure they’re doing right by their students and employees, have become a target of many conservative politicians, including Trump. A lawsuit filed last year by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, tried to strip them of their power. A federal judge rejected the complaint about a month ago.
Eddy Conroy, an accreditation expert at the left-leaning think tank New America, said that though the accreditation system could use reform, it’s still the “best mechanism” to hold colleges accountable for serving students.
“Suggesting that you will eliminate that – without a plan for what comes next, to ensure that students receive a high-quality education when they go to college – is not governing,” he said.
Student loan relief, Title IX, oversight rules in jeopardy
The changes likely won’t stop there.
During his time in office, Biden enacted billions of dollars in student debt relief. Trump has called those efforts a “disaster.” Biden also pushed to enshrine protections for LGBTQ+ students and staff in schools, while Trump has vowed to “keep men out of women’s sports.” And Biden revived Obama-era college oversight regulations, which Trump scrapped during his first term.
The regulatory whiplash that will likely ensue over the next few years will be tough for colleges to process, said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities.
“There’s an extraordinary amount of moral distress,” she said.
Recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have curtailed the power of federal agencies, including the Education Department, will heighten that uncertainty about what colleges can expect from Washington. Some of those rulings, which were made possible with the help of conservative justices Trump appointed, could even stymie regulations the president-elect may try to enact, said Robert Kelchen, a higher education professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
“Most of the policy movement for the last 15 years has been through executive actions,” he said. “It’s likely to be more difficult to do that.”
Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at [email protected]. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele.
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