President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s announcement Sunday that he won’t run for a second term leaves many of his signature higher-ed priorities hanging in the balance as Democrats rally around Kamala D. Harris, his vice president and the presumptive favorite to replace him in November’s election. The sudden move also raises questions about what a Harris presidency could mean for the sector.
Advocates have praised Biden for his work to enact widespread student-debt relief, a Title IX overhaul that enshrined legal protections for victims of sexual assault, and a set of cash infusions that propped up colleges during the Covid-19 pandemic. But in an era of policymaking via executive action, some of those achievements may be short-lived. And the botched rollout of the revamped Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which haunted students, families, and financial-aid officers throughout the winter and spring, will stand as a stain on Biden’s higher-ed record.
Several experts The Chronicle spoke to on Monday credited Biden with pushing billions of dollars to colleges during the Covid-19 pandemic via the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund and the American Rescue Plan, among them Amy Laitinen, senior director for higher education at the left-leaning think tank New America.
“You have this incoming administration that’s starting remotely,” Laitinen said of the first days of the Biden presidency, in January 2021. “The country is a mess, higher-ed institutions are bleeding money, there’s worries about them collapsing. Hitting the ground running is just an understatement” of Biden’s efforts to keep the sector afloat, she said.
Considering the significant disruption of the pandemic, Laitinen said Biden’s progress on student-debt relief, new rules on gainful employment, and what she called a “really ambitious regulatory agenda” focused on accountability and transparency have been successful. “In this administration, more than any I can remember, this Department of Education has been a higher-education department,” Laitinen said.
Liz King, the senior director of the education equity program at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, called the Biden administration’s Title IX regulation “such an important step forward.” The regulation — which rolls back several aspects of the Trump administration’s interpretation of the gender-equity law, including a live-hearing requirement in sexual-misconduct investigations — takes effect on August 1.
Because so much of Biden’s student-loan policy has gotten caught up in the courts — and because the Title IX changes are blocked by injunctions in many states — it’s difficult to gauge just what his higher-ed legacy will be, said Robert Kelchen, a professor and head of the department of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down the “Chevron deference,” which for 40 years helped protect federal regulations from legal challenges, could also see some of Biden’s executive orders overturned, Kelchen added.
Kelchen, who in 2020 wrote in The Chronicle about what to expect from the Biden administration, said much of its higher-education agenda has been predictable. The president, he said, has been “fairly aggressive through executive action and largely going around Congress when Congress was not fully in Democratic control.”
Throughout Biden’s administration, conservative legislators have taken aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion work on college campuses and proposed tenure reforms that some faculty members say would erode academic freedom. In a second term, former President Donald J. Trump would likely continue those efforts. Biden’s administration is best defined by its lack of anti-academic sentiment, said Brian Rosenberg, president emeritus of Macalester College and a visiting professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Biden, Rosenberg said in an email, “has not seen higher education as the enemy,” referencing a 2021 speech in which Trump’s vice presidential pick, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, called professors “the enemy.”
What Harris Might Do
Harris’s higher-ed policy stances are unlikely to differ much from Biden’s, experts said. The vice president has backed Biden’s efforts to expand college access and affordability, and as a senator, she co-sponsored a trio of bills — the College for All Act, the Debt-Free College Act, and the America’s College Promise Act — with the same mission. In her last presidential run, in 2019, Harris called education a “fundamental right” as part of a plea for debt-free college.
Harris is likely to continue the Biden administration’s path of forgiving student-loan debt for students who have credible claims that they were deceived by for-profit colleges. The Department of Education under Biden has also sought to recoup the cost of loan forgiveness for graduates of some for-profit institutions.
As California’s attorney general, Harris was instrumental in forcing the closure of Corinthian Colleges — a mammoth for-profit chain that included Everest University and other colleges, with campuses dotted all across the country. Corinthian was accused of using false and misleading job-placement statistics to entice students into enrolling in poor-quality degree programs that did not actually prepare them for a job.
In 2022, the Biden administration discharged all the remaining loan debt for former Corinthian students, totaling $5.8 billion. In a speech announcing the step, Harris blasted Corinthian, framing its alleged abuses in starkly moral terms.
Harris noted that, according to internal documents, Corinthian had targeted people with “low self-esteem” who were “isolated” and “stuck” in an unsatisfactory situation, but who had “few people in their lives who care about them.”
“Corinthian purposely and fraudulently went after the folks most in need, by their own definition,” Harris said. “The company believed they could get away with it because, as predators are want to do, they targeted people who they assumed wouldn’t fight back. They targeted people who they assumed no one would be there to fight for. And they were wrong.”
Robert Shireman, a former Education Department official and an outspoken critic of for-profit colleges, said it is possible that Harris would further raise the visibility of this issue, because she has “more of a core understanding than maybe even Joe Biden, given some of the work that she’s done.”
A trade organization representing for-profit colleges, Career Education Colleges and Universities, said it hoped that Harris’s position has “evolved” over time.
“Throughout her career, the vice president has made much of her reputation and persona on her role in taking on for-profit colleges in California,” said the group’s president, Jason Altmire, in a statement. “We are concerned at the way she has used these actions as a political issue, rather than taking a more fair and comprehensive look at the vital role for-profit career colleges play in America.”
During the 2020 campaign cycle, Harris advocated for more STEM funding for historically Black institutions, a priority she brought to the vice presidency; the Biden administration announced this spring that it had poured a record $16 billion into HBCU support since the 2021 fiscal year. Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at the American Council on Education, said that emphasis is likely to continue on the campaign trail. A Howard University alumna, Harris would become the first HBCU graduate in the Oval Office.
Harris is an outspoken advocate of reproductive rights, and hosted student leaders at the White House in 2022 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and led a rally for abortion access in June at the University of Maryland at College Park. Last year, her “Fight for Our Freedoms” campus tour added gun safety, climate action, and other issues to that priority list, calling them “key issues that disproportionately impact young people across the country.”
As a senator, Harris signed a 2018 letter calling for U.S. News & World Report to revamp its system for ranking the nation’s top colleges. She and five Democratic colleagues urged the organization to emphasize institutions that promote access for minority students. (Last year, U.S. News tweaked its methodology to focus more on student outcomes.)
Harris’s presence atop the ticket could mobilize college-age voters, who indicated declining support for Biden in the polls over the last few months; some progressive students have criticized the president for his staunch support of Israel in the war with Hamas. “We really believe Vice President Harris will be a motivating factor” for young voters, a representative for one political-action committee focused on that demographic told Politico.
Still, Harris’s candidacy may be best summed up by what it’s not, said Rosenberg, a frequent Chronicle contributor.
“Her greatest strength when it comes to higher education, as in so many other areas, is that she is not Donald Trump.”
