As the presidential election nears the finish line, the contest is a toss-up. If former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance win, they could use the federal government to remake higher education as we know it.
Trump’s first term did not result in profound changes for higher ed, but red states have since enacted laws to dismantle DEI efforts. This might lead you to believe such action would continue to be confined to statehouses. That’s wishful thinking.
It took the power of the federal government to achieve the current scale and scope of higher ed in America. Today, 55 percent of all undergraduates receive federal aid, and the government funds roughly 60 percent of all academic research. The federal role in student aid and science, and their associated regulations, gives the government enormous power.
And so higher ed is a likely mark for Trump’s credible plans to aggressively use executive power to punish perceived enemies, advance his cultural agenda, and feather the nest for plutocrats. Both Trump and Vance repeatedly and clearly express their view that universities are run by “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” and that “professors are the enemy.” The infamous Project 2025 set out a sweeping agenda for a Trump administration and “a shadow government in waiting” is now standing by. The judiciary, which has proven remarkably Trump-friendly, may not stop them.
Trump and his allies appear to have two broad goals for higher ed. Their first goal is to impose conservative values on campuses. From Trump down to members of local school boards, Republicans believe that education is too liberal and they are building the political will to counter what they see as “left-wing ideological capture.” This reclamation project seeks to attack DEI, roll back civil rights, and intervene in the curriculum.
Their second goal for higher ed, which they advertise less loudly, is to generate new opportunities to profit by altering federal programs and redefining what counts as higher education. Higher ed accounts for 2.5 percent of GDP — more than agriculture and mining combined. Trump University may be defunct after a $25-million settlement for defrauding students — but it could be instructive for understanding how he’ll govern the sector.
How would a second Trump administration pursue these goals? Reporting by The Boston Globe about its plans for higher ed quotes GOP House Majority Leader Steve Scalise: “There’s a lot of levers and tools” for getting the job done.
Legislation is the most powerful and lasting lever, even if it is the most difficult to pull. As anyone who watched Elise Stefanik question college leaders on antisemitism will know, Trump’s congressional allies share his contempt for higher ed. If Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress — prediction markets put the odds of a Republican sweep at around 45 percent — we should expect major changes. U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, is eager to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. Ideas for a new HEA outlined in Project 2025 include, among other things, ending the practice of negotiated rulemaking that give institutions and students a voice in regulations, changing educational-privacy laws to allow parents to monitor students and colleges, phasing out federal support for area-studies programs, and cutting federal funding for all minority-serving institutions other than historically Black and tribal colleges. Without a full HEA reauthorization, Congress could attach a second Trump administration’s higher-ed reforms to omnibus spending bills or simply let existing programs, like the access program Gear Up, sunset when legislative authorization expires.
As Scalise put it, even without congressional authorization, “We’re looking at federal money, the federal grants that go through the science committee, student loans. You have a lot of jurisdiction as president, with all of these different agencies that are involving billions of dollars, some cases a billion alone going to one school.”
A Trump-Vance administration will do nothing to support higher ed and could very well cause serious and lasting damage.
In his closing argument to voters, Trump launched a rhetorical assault on trans people. Higher-ed policy is a space in which he could convert that rhetoric into action. Project 2025 advises the government to prohibit collecting data on nonbinary genders and to rely exclusively on biological sex for all federal reporting and civil-rights enforcement. The self-described “mandate for leadership” also calls for a Trump administration to revoke Biden’s Title IX guidance, strip protections from trans students, and re-establish new guidance that tilts the balance of rights in sexual-assault cases toward the accused.
The federal financial-aid system would also be a vital tool for the Tramp-Vance goals of cultural warfare and profiteering. Project 2025 calls for student-loan privatization by arguing that the “the federal government does not have the proper incentives to make sound lending decisions.” Privatizing federally guaranteed and subsided student loans is a return to Bush-era policy — it would be a giveaway to banks and buttress their plans to eliminate public-service loan forgiveness and income-driven repayment. An analysis by the Center for American Progress shows Trump’s plans would raise borrowing costs and increase annual payments for a typical borrower with a bachelor’s degree around $4,000, effectively raising the price of tuition. This increase in costs could accelerate declining enrollments and further challenge many institutions’ viability. There is also the possibility of hard-to-predict, unprecedented shenanigans. Without providing details, Scalise hinted that Trump could withhold access to federal aid or research funding if campus politics run afoul of the administration. Trump’s longstanding rhetorical threats, combined with a willingness to take such actions, would chill campus speech and expose colleges and their leaders to unpredictable consequences.
Accreditation is another key lever Trump is prepared to pull. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was the first prominent Republican to pick a fight with college accreditors because, he said, they advance a “woke” agenda. Project 2025 says accreditors shouldn’t including DEI standards in institutional evaluations, but it also calls for a much wider variety of institutions to be accredited, including religious colleges that violate Title IX and other regulations, and, most notably, to allow states to self-accredit. These changes to accreditation would create a permission structure for sex- and race-based discrimination on campus, invite state governments to interfere in the curriculum, and make it much easier for scammer institutions and programs to access federal aid.
Eliminating the Department of Education is a longtime GOP goal that would make administering programs like federal financial aid more difficult. Even if Trump cannot eliminate the department, Project 2025 suggests moving all education-rights enforcement to the Department of Justice, which would drastically reduce the federal government’s capacity to protect students from discrimination and harassment. Further, remaking the civil service through proposed Schedule F reform would make it much easier for a Trump-Vance administration to politicize academic science by pushing partisan funding priorities and directing money to allies rather than through peer review.
In his “Agenda 47” platform, Trump calls for the creation of an anti-woke “American Academy” that would provide alternative credentials recognized as qualifications for employment in the federal government. The possibility for simultaneous graft and politicizing education are obvious: give preferred contractors the right to establish ideologically blinkered programs, make the programs eligible for federal loans and Pell Grants, and set those credentials as requirements for getting good government jobs. Such a system could dramatically reduce the value of some traditional higher-ed offerings, especially at community colleges and regional universities.
A Trump-Vance administration will do nothing to support higher ed and could very well cause serious and lasting damage. Of course, we can’t know for sure if all or any of the things mentioned above (an illustrative but not exhaustive list of possibilities) will happen if Trump is elected. But the intent to pursue such measures and their mere potentiality is terrifying.
