For more on the implications of the presidential election for higher education, check out our new collection, Decision 2024, now available in The Chronicle store.
This election is the most important of our lifetimes. It will define the future.
Hype like that materializes every four years. For voters, it’s an intoxicating notion that we stand on the precipice of history. For political organizers, it’s a useful technique because it motivates voters to turn out.
But that line of thinking is a dead end — at least when it comes to how the results will affect higher education. While it’s always possible that this will be the one election that’s more consequential than those to come, the moments that shape history — inflection points, as President Biden has so often called them — can be identified only in retrospect. Hyperbolic assertions about the stakes obscure the actual forces that are poised to shape higher education’s future: complex interactions between candidates, their favored policies, evolving political coalitions, a changing knowledge economy, and evolving student demographics.
So take note when Sen. JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice president, calls professors “the enemy.” Watch closely as Vice President Kamala Harris seeks to tap support from the “Divine Nine” Black fraternities and sororities. But keep in mind that they are only the latest to take roles in a long-running drama in which Republicans increasingly seek to define themselves against higher education and its perceived excesses, while Democrats extol the virtues of spreading college’s benefits more broadly — sometimes in ways that frustrate the sector’s leaders.
What is most different about this election, in fact, is the diminished power over policy that the eventual president will have. Federal rulemaking used so often during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations is weaker since the U.S. Supreme Court this summer gutted a 40-year-old legal precedent known as the Chevron deference. It’s now easier to challenge regulations issued by executive agencies. Power has shifted from the presidency to the courts, and responsibility for policy rewrites has moved from the White House to Capitol Hill.
Yet Congress is all but certain to remain deeply divided along party lines, finding few chances to eke out the margins needed to pass major legislation. For all the extraordinary rhetoric surrounding the election, it will be difficult for either party to use the force of law to deviate too far from higher education’s status quo, no matter who claims the White House.
None of that means the presidential election isn’t important for higher education. It could very well have profound implications for who goes to college, how they pay, whether they will receive a good education, what academic protections faculty members will have, and what limits will be imposed on free expression.
The political environment has been supercharged by campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war, as well as a backlash against those protests. The march of artificial intelligence threatens to rewire how faculty members teach, how students learn, and what skills they’ll need once they graduate. Traditional-age college students wane in number, pushing an ever-larger share of colleges to seek new student populations, shrink, or close. The United States is involved in a “Great Powers” competition with China and Russia, placing more pressure on colleges to produce research.
Which candidates can whip up support for ideas effectively? Who can adapt their vision for the sector to align with what’s possible in Congress? Who can effectively execute the law? Those questions have become more important in this election.
Look to the last four years to see why. The Biden administration botched the execution of a congressionally mandated overhaul of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, threatening to keep students out of college and jeopardizing many institutions’ financial security. Donald Trump signed an executive order barring diversity training in federally funded programs late in his presidency, only for it to be quickly rescinded by his successor. But it tapped into a broader conservative movement and has lived on in spirit as Republicans enacted laws at the state level restricting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at colleges.
So even a presidency whose powers have been reined in will greatly influence policy. We’re left to read the candidates’ proposals and their track records to better understand what they might do. The picture that emerges is one of starkly different visions and values for higher education.
“There is a very clear divide in terms of their viewpoints on higher education and whether it serves as a benefit to greater society,” says Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education.
With Trump leading the Republican ticket, the GOP ballot line represents more volatility. The party has been pushing to break norms in higher ed, sometimes in contradictory ways. Republicans are seeking, for example, to diminish the federal government’s role in ensuring program quality through accreditors, even as the party seeks more control over campus culture.
The Republican platform, written in the same style as Trump’s social-media posts, would tear up accreditation as we know it, “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again,” and support alternatives to four-year degrees. It also nods to lowering tuition costs, though it doesn’t say how it would do that.
The platform further calls for prosecuting institutions “that discriminate,” a continuation of the conservative campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And it proposes reopening rules for how colleges investigate sexual-assault cases, a rallying cry for conservatives who want more due-process protections for students who have been accused of wrongdoing.
But the plan is anathema to activists who’ve pushed Democrats to write rules that they think protect sexual-assault survivors.
For all the extraordinary rhetoric surrounding the election, it will be difficult for either party to use the force of law to deviate too far from higher education’s status quo.
Then there is Project 2025, the plan from the conservative Heritage Foundation intended to serve as a blueprint for the early days of a Trump return to the White House. The former president has distanced himself from the 900-plus-page document, but well north of 100 of its authors spent time in his administration. It’s reasonable to expect at least some of its ideas would receive a look should the former president return to power.
Project 2025 calls for overhauling the federal student-loan system, privatizing student lending, and eliminating the PLUS programs that lend to graduate students and parents of undergraduates. It favors ending student-debt cancellation, including under the current Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
It would also eliminate the federal Department of Education and move its functions to other agencies. And it would change how higher-education data are collected and used to measure postsecondary outcomes.
Many of those ideas have circulated for a long time, particularly among conservatives who want less federal money and regulation in postsecondary education. But they now pit the small-government ethos that has historically predominated in the Republican Party against a surging populist strain that seeks to more closely police expression on campus and what’s taught in classrooms.
Which strain wins in a second Trump administration would be up to the whims of the candidate himself.
“It’s not real clear whether you would get people at the Department of Ed who want to shutter programs, who want to downsize government spending, or not,” says Frederick M. Hess, senior fellow and director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “Not only is it that Trump’s hard to read, but it’s not even clear which camp the appointees would come from.”
The Democratic candidates were slower to put policy proposals on paper as Biden dropped his bid for re-election and handed the campaign off to Harris. But the track record suggests she would probably continue the political left’s approach to higher education.
As attorney general of California a decade ago, Harris cracked down on the Corinthian Colleges, fitting into a long liberal campaign against the for-profit sector. She’s backed debt forgiveness and efforts to make public college free for many students. A graduate of Howard University, Harris has stumped for the country’s historically Black colleges and universities, proposing during her 2019 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination new investments in HBCU science, technology, engineering, and mathematics programs.
Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, fits a similar mold. As governor, he signed into law the country’s first restrictions on online-program managers, which are companies that help colleges run remote classes but have drawn criticism as skirting oversight and depriving colleges of revenue. He also signed a bill making the state’s two- and four-year colleges free for students in families that make less than $80,000 per year.
Since Harris is now vice president, the Biden administration’s track record also offers insight into how she might govern. That record is a mix of support for the sector and regulatory pills that have been harder for some campuses to swallow. The administration poured emergency funding into higher education during the pandemic, helping to keep students enrolled, shoring up institutional finances, and probably rescuing some colleges from closure.
The Biden administration tried to extend Title IX’s antidiscrimination protections to include LGBTQ students, only for Republican attorneys general to challenge the rules and tie them up in court. The courts similarly blocked wide-ranging efforts to cancel student-loan debt. Seeking to hold colleges accountable for how they treat students, the administration tightened regulations on for-profit institutions and certificate programs, and proposed strict requirements intended to ensure students are interacting with instructors in online courses.
“If the Democrats are elected, we would see a continued focus on accountability, access to higher education, and trying to get a better understanding of what is access to quality education,” says Dominique J. Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware.
As important as policy may be, study also the candidates’ rhetoric. Substance often follows style in politics as campaigns shape attitudes, including about a higher-ed sector struggling to connect with a public that’s divided about colleges’ costs and value.
Harris’s comments about colleges are typical for a Democrat. In recent months she’s called herself “a proud graduate of Howard University” who knows “firsthand that our HBCUs are centers of academic excellence.” She’s touted her record in taking on Corinthian, “one of our country’s largest for-profit colleges that scammed students.”
The Republican ticket has been oppositional. Trump last year threatened to “fire” accrediting agencies and reclaim “our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.” And of course Vance has portrayed professors as dangerous.
Faculty members have responded to Vance in kind. The American Association of University Professors denounced him in a statement, describing him as a fascist taking part in an effort to turn colleges into indoctrination centers of the far right.
Substance often follows style in politics as campaigns shape attitudes, including about a higher-ed sector struggling to connect with a public that’s divided about colleges’ costs and value.
“It’s true that we’re coming out swinging with respect to the statements we’ve heard particularly JD Vance make,” says Todd Wolfson, the AAUP’s president and an associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. “We are not the enemy. We are the backbone of this country.”
The AAUP needed to stand up for its members who are afraid, Wolfson says. The association is pursuing an ideal for higher education that includes more funding for public institutions, job security for college employees, an end to student debt, a more diverse work force, and leaders who fight for academic freedom and freedom of speech.
Even if those sound like old ideas, repackaged, they show that someone feels the need to push an affirmative vision for higher education in the face of its sharpest critics. Many, if not all, of those priorities threaten to put higher ed further at odds with conservative politicians. That could very well escalate the war of words.
If it does, remember how words can trickle out of gridlocked Washington, D.C., to influence state policy. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida reshaped his state’s public higher-education system as he tried to outflank Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. DeSantis banned DEI, attempted to prohibit instruction in topics that prompt guilt or anguish based on race, color, national origin, or sex, weakened tenure protections, prompted colleges to change accreditors every five years, and revamped the state’s public honors college, New College of Florida, in the image of a “classical liberal-arts education.”
Remember also that policy doesn’t trickle down only on the right. “Promise” programs making public-college tuition free predated Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign. The idea wasn’t always popular with college leaders, who worried that they wouldn’t receive enough additional public funding to compensate for an influx of students. But the Vermont senator pushed the idea into the limelight. Democratic governors went on to sign free-college programs into law, from Walz in Minnesota to Andrew Cuomo in New York, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, and Maura Healey in Massachusetts.
The right’s outward hostility toward higher education can also obscure the fact that liberals also have deep-seated concerns about business as usual. The two sides ask some of the same fundamental questions: Is higher education affordable? Is it teaching the right things? Is it serving the right students and providing them with adequate support? Can federal funding stoke research at more types of institutions, like HBCUs, tribal colleges, and community colleges? What criteria should federal agencies use to award science funding?
“Both sides have a lot of criticisms of higher education,” says Fansmith, of ACE. “What you hear from Republicans is we are not sure there is value in the higher-education enterprise. For Democrats, it’s we believe there is value, we just don’t think it’s working well for enough people.”
No matter who wins the presidential election, the sector will change in the coming years, as political pressures combine with enrollment declines, evolving student demographics, broad financial challenges, and cultural clashes. This election is a choice between candidates who will deeply shape that change, if not with the policy pen, then with the bully pulpit.
Will the president be an oppositional leader of a coalition that believes higher ed must undergo a fundamental overhaul? Or will the president see colleges as home to core constituencies, even if they’re flawed entities that should be incrementally reformed?
