For several decades the Department of Education has been a popular target for Republican political candidates eager to slash the size of the federal government. Among the recent champions of doing away with the department, or at least gutting it, is Donald J. Trump.
“I may cut Department of Education,” Mr. Trump said last fall in an interview with Fox News. He was responding to a question about how he would curb government spending, and followed that comment with a criticism of the Common Core state-based educational standards.
Mr. Trump has repeated his distaste for the department on several occasions this year as he’s been pressed on how he would pay for his tax-cut plan.
And in a book Mr. Trump published last year, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, he wrote: “A lot of people believe the Department of Education should just be eliminated. Get rid of it. If we don’t eliminate it completely, we certainly need to cut its power and reach. Education has to be run locally.”
Besides those statements, Mr. Trump has been light on specifics. It’s not clear whether he would eliminate the whole department or just cut most of the programs, whether he would seek to lay off the agency’s 4,400 employees, or even whether he would make any of this a priority. His campaign did not respond to a request from The Chronicle for details.
But his proposal by no means makes him an outlier. Ted Cruz, a Republican primary opponent, said he would abolish the department and shift federal education funding to a block-grant model. Gary Johnson, the Libertarian presidential candidate, would get rid of the department “very quickly.”
In fact, ever since the department was created in 1979 politicians have had it in the cross hairs. The law establishing it barely passed the House of Representatives, said Christopher T. Cross, a former assistant secretary of education under George W. Bush, and some critics viewed it as a “payoff” from Jimmy Carter to the National Education Association in exchange for the group’s endorsement in the 1976 presidential election.
“The opposition to the department goes back 40 years,” Mr. Cross said. “It was very deep and very bitter at the time.”
Ronald Reagan promised to ax the department during his 1980 presidential campaign, though he later backed off the pledge after failing to drum up support in Congress. Despite that defeat, proposals to eliminate or streamline the agency “have become a litmus test in presidential nominating politics on the Republican side,” said Patrick J. McGuinn, an associate professor of political science at Drew University.
What’s notable about 2016, Mr. McGuinn said, is that the Obama administration’s Department of Education has been more activist than that of any previous administration when it comes to holding both schools and colleges accountable. And the Bush-era department “was the runner up,” he said. That means backlash against the agency has strengthened since 2000.
So it’s worth pondering the question: What would a higher-education world without the Department of Education look like?
An Era of Privatization
If Mr. Trump won the presidency and decided he wanted to eliminate the department, he would probably need a friendly House of Representatives and Senate ruled by Republican leaders who could be persuaded to introduce a bill that would abolish it.
Passing such legislation would only be step one. “You can’t just say, We’re going to sign a law and dismantle the department,” Mr. Cross said. “There’s so much to be sorted through.”
When candidates who favor eliminating the department have been asked to elaborate on how they would do so, they have often responded with statements like, “Of course we would keep the parts that work,” said Alexander Holt, a policy analyst at New America, a think tank.
But simply moving programs around wouldn’t save money or reduce the federal government’s size, Mr. Holt said. “It doesn’t matter if you abolish the Department of Education if you retain every single part of the Department of Education,” he said.
Let’s say Mr. Trump, or another president, really managed to abolish the entire department, including all of the programs, loans, and grants it oversees. The most significant issue would be the $1.3-trillion federal-student-loan portfolio, Mr. Holt said. About 44 million people have student loans through the federal government.
The portfolio could be privatized, Mr. Holt said. But it’s unlikely that a private actor would buy it, he said, because it’s not profitable without federal subsidies — so the government would probably have to pay a private-sector company to phase out the student-loan system. No new loans would be issued. Low-income students would stop receiving Pell Grants.
Without the department, agency-run programs like Upward Bound, which offers support and advising to disadvantaged high-school students as they prepare for college, would no longer exist.
Roxanne Schroeder-Arce, an assistant professor of theater education at the University of Texas at Austin, said she wouldn’t have made it to college without Upward Bound. “For a person like me, from a very poor family with no higher education in any of my lineage, then college wouldn’t have been a possibility,” she said. “We didn’t have the resources, the knowledge, or the networks of support to make that possible.”
Accreditation would lose whatever teeth it has, as it’s tied to financial aid, Mr. Cross said. So would enforcement of Title IX, the gender-equity law — and the Office for Civil Rights, which enforces that law, would no longer exist anyway. Also gone would be the National Center for Education Statistics, which collects troves of data on demographics and outcomes. Abolishing the center would make it harder to find reliable information on colleges’ performance.
With all federal financial aid cut off, Mr. Holt said, most private and for-profit colleges would very likely close. That would in turn cause thousands of people to lose their jobs and devastate the economies in which the colleges reside, he said.
Who’d Pick Up the Slack?
That’s a doomsday scenario. But let’s take a step back. The programs run by the department were created through acts of Congress. Eliminating them would also require Congress to act — either to repeal them or to not fund them through the federal budget. It’s hard to imagine lawmakers shutting down something as popular as the Pell Grant program.
So a President Trump might decide to get rid of the Department of Education but continue some of its activities, such as distributing financial aid. The remaining programs would have to be overseen by a different agency.
Read more about Donald Trump’s candidacy, his election, and how he relates to academe in this collection of Chronicle articles and essays, including news and commentary about the Trump administration.
The student-loan system could be moved to the Department of the Treasury, Mr. Holt said. But that department doesn’t have any experience handling student aid, he said, so there would be a huge learning curve. Given the workload, that shift might also require a staffing increase.
As long as federal financial aid continues to exist, there’s a need for accreditation, Mr. Cross said. Accrediting agencies must be approved by the federal government, he said, so there would have to be a small staff in another department to manage that work.
Enforcement of Title IX would probably fall to the Department of Justice, Mr. Cross said. Still, he said, “I don’t know how you’d have the oversight and enforcement activities that you have now.”
Though resistance to the department has grown during the Bush and Obama years, political pressures would complicate even introducing a bill to eliminate the department, experts say.
Federal education spending touches all 435 congressional districts and 50 states, and most members of Congress would be reluctant to support laws that would affect that flow of money. Democrats have become adept at arguing that, if you’re against the Department of Education, you’re against education itself, Mr. McGuinn said.
The department is often held up as an example of bureaucratic bloat, Mr. McGuinn said, but it’s actually one of the most efficient parts of the government, in terms of its ratio of employees to how much money it distributes through its programs. “If anything,” he said, “it’s understaffed.”
‘An Idea With Some Legitimacy’
Richard K. Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, has a different take. He sees the department’s footprint on many problems that negatively affect colleges. Eliminating the department, he said, “isn’t one of those off-the-cuff Trump remarks meant to shock people. It’s an idea with some legitimacy.”
For instance, Mr. Vedder believes colleges have been able to push up tuition and fees more quickly because the department gives out so much in financial aid. The higher sticker prices may have driven some low-income students away, he said. And the department’s recently ramped-up enforcement of Title IX has imposed what Mr. Vedder considers a legally dubious standard on colleges’ investigations of sexual misconduct.
“I would like to see it put out of existence,” Mr. Vedder said of the department, “but I accept that that’s less likely to happen.”
He’d at least like to see a downsizing of the federal role in student aid and more experimentation with “alternative ways of financing,” such as income-share agreements. Pell Grants could become more of a voucher program and be distributed directly to low-income students, he said.
Mr. Trump has painted eliminating the department as a way to ease regulation and cut red tape for schools and colleges, Ms. Schroeder-Arce said. But he’s also expressed a desire to make colleges answer for student outcomes. “How do we hold colleges accountable without federal programs?” she asked. “What he’s saying is inconsistent — it doesn’t add up.”
Even without a department, the federal government wouldn’t cut all ties with higher education, as many colleges would still receive millions of dollars in research funding.
And eliminating the department altogether is a long shot. Still, a President Trump could reduce the agency’s authority substantially by lobbying for cuts to its budget and staff, Mr. McGuinn said. That worries him, in part because states, when left to their own devices, haven’t provided much oversight of higher education.
“Many concerns about higher education are universal,” such as access, affordability, and outcomes, he said. “How do you address those in the absence of federal policy and a federal department?”
