Jimmy Carter, who as the 39th president of the United States created the Department of Education, died Sunday. He was 100.
As president, he tackled discrimination in intercollegiate athletics, segregation in the nation’s public colleges, and fraud in student-aid programs. He sought to reduce student-loan defaults, and he oversaw a sharp increase in spending on student aid.
Carter also left a lasting imprint on education policy by expanding federal aid to middle-income students. But his actions also sparked fierce debate over the federal role in education and over who should benefit from federal aid — fights that persist today.
In a statement mourning the death of the former president, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona wrote: “Everything we do here at the Department to raise the bar for America’s students is part of President Jimmy Carter’s lasting legacy.”
Carter attended Georgia Southwestern College and the Georgia Institute of Technology before receiving his B.A. from the U.S. Naval Academy, in 1946. While serving in the Navy, he took courses in reactor technology and nuclear physics at Union College, in New York.
It took Carter almost three years as president to achieve the goal of a free-standing Education Department, partly because he faced pushback from some members of his cabinet and Congress, who didn’t want to give up jurisdiction over education programs then under their purview. (At the time, education was buried in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, with programs scattered across several other agencies.)
Colleges, meanwhile, were divided on the plan, with some hoping the increased visibility would translate into additional money for education, and others worrying that it would increase government intrusion into academe.
When the House finally passed legislation creating the department, in 1979, it was a major victory for the president. At a signing ceremony he said his “best move for the quality of life in America may well be the establishment of this department.” He also sought to reassure those who worried about federal interference, saying that while “the federal government is there, eager to help,” the primary responsibility for education would remain with state and local agencies.
More than 40 years later, it appears that both the supporters and skeptics of the department were right. Spending on education programs has increased sharply since the 1970s, as has the federal role in higher education. In 1980 the department’s budget was $14 billion; in 2021 it was $95.5 billion.
The department now plays a major role in the life of colleges, for better or worse. Regulations have multiplied, and federal oversight has increased. While the department has withstood repeated Republican attempts to abolish it, some colleges have begun to question the wisdom of its creator.
“His legacy looms large over American higher education, but it is mixed,” said the president of the American Council on Education, Molly Corbett Broad, in an interview for this article in 2015. “There is, to this day, a continued concern about whether a Department of Education with such a heavy hand in regulation is good and healthy for American higher education.” Broad died in January 2023.
Reshaping Student Aid
The Carter administration also simplified the process of applying for student aid, working with states, institutions, and the College Board to develop a common form for collecting students’ financial information and a common formula for determining need. Today we know them as the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and the federal methodology. That “one form, one methodology” approach lasted into the 1980s, when “Congress started messing around with formulas and we reinvented things,” like state and institutional forms, said Tom Butts, who was an adviser and, later, deputy assistant secretary for student financial assistance in the Carter administration.
More enduring were Carter’s changes in the formula for awarding campus-based aid and in the process for collecting student-loan payments.
In the mid-1970s the default rate in the National Direct Student Loan Program (now known as Perkins Loans) stood at 20 percent. The government kept information about borrowers on index cards, sent out bills, and hoped for the best, said Leo Kornfeld, who served as deputy assistant secretary before Butts and died in 2020. Guarantors in the bank-based loan program weren’t doing their jobs, either. Some defaulters hadn’t been billed in five years, according to Chronicle coverage at the time.
The administration established a debt-collection service, created a computerized billing system, and persuaded the IRS to supply borrowers’ addresses. The response was immediate and “overwhelming,” Kornfeld recalled.
“The mail came in truckloads, so much that we had to hire temps to open the envelopes,” he said. “Some kid addressed his check ‘Pay to Jimmy Carter’ — we had to figure out how to deposit that one.”
Meanwhile, the administration began to crack down on fraud in the Pell Grant program (then called the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant), verifying students’ financial data for the first time.
The White House also took steps to bring credibility to the campus-based aid programs, replacing an allocation formula that was subject to gamesmanship with one based on prior-year guarantees and a “fair share” formula. While Congress never phased out the “base guarantees,” as Carter intended, his changes probably saved the campus-based programs, Butts said.
“There was a great deal of mistrust and scandal around the allocation process,” he recalled, “and people in Congress were beginning to say, ‘Maybe we don’t need these programs.’”
But the biggest student-aid legacy of the Carter era, by far, is the Middle Income Student Assistance Act. The bill, which the president pushed as an alternative to a tuition tax credit, made middle-income students eligible for Pell Grants and opened up the subsidized-loan program to all students, regardless of need. At the signing ceremony, Carter called the measure “similar to the GI Bill as a landmark in the federal commitment to aid families with college students.”
The plan worked — a little too well. With interest rates soaring nationally, the 9-percent rate offered by the federal government was very attractive, and the student-loan program exploded. In 1980, Better Homes & Gardens ran an article encouraging families looking for money to remodel their homes to take out a student loan, recalled Terry W. Hartle, who retired in 2022 as senior vice president for government relations and public affairs at the American Council on Education.
The expansion was short-lived; when Ronald Reagan took office, in 1981, he reversed course, reintroduced need into the equation, and added an origination fee on student loans. But the Middle Income Student Assistance Act lives on, in the still-unresolved debate over who should qualify for student aid.
“It teed up a policy issue that has bedeviled policymakers ever since,” Hartle said, “and that is the extent to which student aid is to be aimed at low-income students, and the extent to which it is to be directed to middle-income students.”
Civil Rights and Gender Equity
When he took office in January 1977, Carter inherited fights over the desegregation of public-college systems and gender equity in athletics. Civil-rights activists and women’s groups had sued prior administrations for failing to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the cases were still wending their way through the courts.
In 1977 a court ordered the department’s Office for Civil Rights to establish new criteria for the statewide desegregation of colleges and schools. The Carter administration responded by directing states to define their missions “on a nonracial basis,” specify steps they would take to strengthen historically Black colleges, and eliminate program duplication between HBCUs and majority-white colleges. It also called for expanding nonminority enrollment at HBCUs.
But the administration’s attempts to carry out the court order strained its relations with some Black-college leaders, who feared that desegregation would mean the demise of the public Black college.
“Black leaders were divided over whether HBCUs should be integrated,” said R. Shep Melnick, a historian at Boston College. Some said, “We don’t need white students, we need more money.” In response, Carter twice ordered his agency heads to provide more federal grants and contracts to HBCUs.
At the same time, the administration faced competing pressures from women’s groups and colleges to beef up — or water down — Title IX, the federal gender-equity law. Colleges, which had been given three years to comply with the 1972 law, claimed they still didn’t know what was expected of them when it came to athletics. Women’s groups were calling for a crackdown on colleges.
“There was a lot of big money involved in this, and you have the booster clubs of alumni that made major contributions to men’s sports teams,” said Cynthia Brown, deputy director of the Office for Civil Rights at the time. “These were powerful forces.”
In 1978 the office issued a “policy interpretation,” stating that colleges had to provide “proportionately equal” scholarships for their men’s and women’s athletic programs, and to offer “equivalent” benefits and opportunities in other aspects of college sports.
That statement became “the bedrock set of principles” for gauging compliance with Title IX, said Marcia D. Greenberger, founder and co-president emerita of the National Women’s Law Center. “It has withstood the test of time.”
