What’s In and What’s Out for Colleges as Trump Takes Office

If you’re a college leader who feels micromanaged by federal regulations, a university trustee who thinks that the U.S. Department of Education has been overly intrusive in overseeing colleges’ handling of sexual-assault and discrimination cases, or a would-be education provider that is not a traditionally accredited college, you may well like some of the approaches of the coming administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress.

On the other hand, if you’re a student stuck with debt for a program from a college that deceived you, a dean whose graduate students rely heavily on federal PLUS loans, or a professor whose courses and research touch on climate science or a host of other topics that have been demonized as “politically correct,” then the next few years could be troubling.

At least that’s how some of the outlines of the new political landscape for higher education appear to be taking shape, based on recent Chronicle interviews with more than two dozen college leaders, policy advocates, and current state and federal government officials.

Besides naming Betsy DeVos as his nominee for secretary of education, Mr. Trump has said nothing publicly about his education-policy plans since the election, and the Trump transition team has been close-mouthed about its activities and intentions related to colleges.

By all reports, the only college leader to have had more than a passing conversation about higher education with Mr. Trump since the election has been Jerry L. Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, an evangelical Christian institution in Virginia. In mid-November, Mr. Falwell met with the president-elect and his daughter Ivanka Trump (“she seemed to be very involved,” he noted), Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, and Stephen K. Bannon, the incoming chief counselor, at Trump Tower in New York City.

Mr. Falwell, who brought along his wife and the university’s financial-aid director, said that the Trump team was in the “information gathering” stage but that he used the meeting to urge the team to “reduce the micromanaging of colleges and universities,” particularly around the recently issued “borrower defense to repayment” regulation, aimed at helping students who believe they had been defrauded by their college, and the stricter enforcement of Title IX rules for handling reports of sexual assaults on campuses. (Eleven days after that meeting, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights disclosed that Liberty is under investigation for an alleged Title IX offense, the nature of which was not made public.)

Donald Trump and Higher Ed

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.

• Why Did More College-Educated Young Men Vote for Trump This Year?
• A Former Trump Cabinet Official and Pro-Wrestling Magnate Is Tapped as Education Secretary
• How a Top Trump Adviser Might Influence the President-Elect’s Views on Higher Ed
• The Campus in the Second Age of Trump
• Stop Treating Students Like Babies

Mr. Falwell, who welcomed Mr. Trump to Liberty for a rally during the campaign and says that he declined an offer to be education secretary because he couldn’t commit to leaving his university for more than two years, could well emerge as a pivotal figure on education policy as the administration takes shape.

From Mr. Falwell’s account, as well as interviews with policy wonks who are positioning themselves as influencers or potential office holders in the new administration, and conversations with people who are not directly in on the discussions but who bring insight and experience to their predictions, several themes and likely priorities are beginning to emerge.

Over the next few years, for example, most observers expect nuts-and-bolts higher-education policy to be shaped much more heavily by Congress than by the executive branch. But before they can even get to meaty higher-education matters, key committees (especially in the Senate) will first be occupied with the top congressional priority for Republicans: repealing and replacing the health-care law known as Obamacare.

At the Education Department itself, people and ideas from state governments and the business-management world are more likely to hold sway, rather than those from the Washington think-tank crowd, according to William D. Hansen, a deputy secretary of education under President George W. Bush. Mr. Hansen says he has been “in touch periodically on multiple fronts” with the Trump transition team regarding the department. He is now president of USA Funds, an organization whose grants and investments promote projects that help students better connect their college education with their career. The new Education Department, he says, will “inspire creativity and innovation instead of smothering it.”

The voices of business leaders and other employers could also carry more weight in policy making. “That’s one category we will hear more from and should hear more from, frankly,” says Lindsey M. Burke, an education-policy fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which has been advising the transition team.

Broadly speaking, “there are a lot of people who think this is an open door for new approaches in higher education,” says Jeanne Allen, founder and chief executive of the Center for Education Reform, a school-choice organization. A fixture on the education scene since her days in the Reagan-era Education Department and later at the Heritage Foundation, Ms. Allen is also a vocal advocate for programs like competency-based education at colleges.

Another yet-unanswered question is how much the Republican-led policy making will veer into hot-button values issues like the debates over the teaching of Western civilization versus multiculturalism that fueled the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s. The tone of the Trump-Pence campaign was often in direct opposition to the social and intellectual mores of much of higher education. Some observers see the potential influence of Mr. Falwell and Ms. DeVos, whose family’s philanthropy and political donations include support for organizations that oppose same-sex marriage, as a sign that policies could move in that direction.

Alexander Holt, for one, hopes it doesn’t. If the administration gets too bogged down in those “identity-politics issues,” says Mr. Holt, a policy analyst at New America who considers himself a conservative, it could distract focus from needed reforms. That, he says, would be “a missed opportunity for the things that need to be done on federal student-aid policy.”

But Charles Kolb, a top Education Department and White House official during the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, says that’s not an either-or proposition. “I think you’ll see both, just like you saw under Bennett,” he predicts, referring to the “content, character, and choice” agenda that William J. Bennett championed as secretary of education under President Reagan. That could translate into less focus on protecting gay students from discrimination and more attacks on colleges for creating so-called safe spaces, some of the same policies that Mr. Trump was so derisive of during his campaign.

What or who else could be In or Out in the next four years? Below, we outline our best guesses:

OUT

Title IX enforcement on sexual assault. It won’t go away completely, of course. But it’s hard to imagine the next administration adopting the same aggressive posture taken by the current Office for Civil Rights, considering the way many Republicans, would-be Trump insiders, and even some colleges feel about the office’s approach over the past several years. (Mr. Falwell, for one, says that the department has tried to turn colleges into “police departments, judges, juries, and executioner — a lot of things colleges are not equipped to do.”) Ditto for protecting the rights of gay and transgender people.

Free college. The idea was championed during the 2016 campaign by Sen. Bernie Sanders and then by the party’s nominee, Hillary R. Clinton, so ’nuff said about that. Meanwhile, however, groups like the Campaign for Free College Tuition continue to promote it as a policy states and communities should embrace.

Graduate PLUS Loans. Or at least the high levels of borrowing currently allowed under this program. Such loans are considered by many Republicans (and some Democrats) as the kind of easy-money source of funding that does little to encourage colleges to curtail their prices, especially when the borrowers can later roll their obligations into loan-forgiveness programs.

Loan forgiveness. Student-loan reformers had targeted such programs for curtailment even before the release last month of an attention-grabbing report from the Government Accountability Office. The report raised questions about the projected costs of the programs, which have been expanded during the Obama years. Actually, the Obama administration has proposed curtailing loan forgiveness, too. Expect the new Congress or administration to go further than the Obama proposal in limiting the amounts that could be forgiven.

Center for American Progress. Of all of the advocacy groups focused on higher education, this one was the most visibly tied to Democrats — a Hillary Clinton administration in waiting, as some saw it. It won’t be at the policy helm now, but it’s already begun to embrace its outsider status with a new “Resist” campaign that is opposing expected policies of the Trump administration, including the nomination of Betsy DeVos.

Heightened federal enforcement of for-profit colleges. The Education Department’s internal “student-aid enforcement unit” and an interagency task force were created in response to concerns about abusive recruiting practices at for-profit institutions and other poor-performing colleges. They could fall victim to changing priorities. The fate of the internal enforcement unit could be hard to track from outside the department, but the interagency task force, which involves the Education Department, the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the U.S. Departments of Defense, Labor, and the Treasury, has already made one high-profile enemy in Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who last week called for its immediate abolition after criticizing the agencies for their treatment of the University of Phoenix.

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This body, created in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, has sued several of the major for-profit-college companies over their student-loan programs. The bureau is disliked by many Republicans, who may now feel even more emboldened — and have the votes in the Senate — to dismantle or weaken it.

“State authorization” rules for distance education and “borrower defense” rules governing when students are entitled to have their loans discharged. Welcomed by many student groups and consumer advocates, both have been criticized by college leaders as examples of regulatory overreach. Both regulations were issued within the past few months, which could make them particularly easy to repeal under the Congressional Review Act. Ditto for newly issued rules on teacher education.

The “gainful employment” rule. One of the signature policies of the Obama administration, the regulation has been a key tool for cracking down on career-focused programs that saddle students with unmanageable debt relative to their earnings. Some colleges have cited the rule as a reason for their closure. It won’t be easy to repeal the regulation in full, but portions of it will be prime targets for Congress, if not the new Education Department, to eliminate.

IN

Income-share agreements. These financing tools, in which investors help finance students’ educations in return for a percentage of their earnings, are a trendy idea among the innovation crowd. They are especially popular in conservative circles.

Risk sharing. The idea that colleges should bear some of the cost when their students default on federal loans has been gaining fans in Congress. Many policy makers even see it as better than looking at default rates to determine eligibility for federal student aid. As the debates over this approach proceed, expect to see many lawmakers and others draw from eight new papers on risk sharing, published on Monday, that outline various issues and options.

Private lending. Not a return to the bank-based student-loan system that was fully phased out under President Obama (the subsidies paid to banks and other parties would add too much of a hit to the federal budget) — even student-loan experts like Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the free-market Manhattan Institute, says that was a “a terrible way to bring in market forces” to student lending. But with so many conservatives arguing for a greater role for “private capital” in student loans, some form of new federally sanctioned option could be on the table, perhaps even to fill the gap if PLUS Loans for graduate students are curtailed.

Competency-based education. Of all the ideas promoted by the “disruptive innovation” crowd, this is the one that seems to have the most bipartisan support. But a cloud now hangs over such programs because the Education Department’s Office of Inspector General, an independent arm of the agency, has questioned whether such programs run afoul of rules requiring substantial interaction between faculty members and students for programs to receive federal student aid. Critics of the Obama administration say they hope the incoming administration will do more to remove that cloud, perhaps, as one such critic, Diane Auer Jones, has proposed, by offering some legal and financial indemnifications to colleges that choose to go ahead with such programs. Ms. Jones, who has lobbied for both Princeton University and the for-profit Career Education Corporation, and served a short stint at the Education Department during the George W. Bush administration, has said she “would definitely go back” to the department for the right position there, if asked.

The Republican congressional staff. The aides who work for committees and individual members do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to forging federal laws, and with the policy locus expected to shift to Capitol Hill, the aides will be the ones in the best position to sweat — and decide — the details. (Higher-education issues aren’t always partisan, so look for some aides on the Democratic side to be key players too.)

American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute. Policy wonks at each of those right-leaning groups have already begun talking with the transition team, and their ideas are likely to be even more welcome with Republicans in charge of policy.

Federal student aid for education providers that bypass traditional accreditation. The Obama administration took steps in that direction with a program known as Equip, but many policy advocates and political leaders around the country are keen to see a lot more of the approach.

Skills training. Employer groups continue to decry the five to six million jobs going unfilled in the country because of the so-called skills gap. That alone should kick up the demand for programs that can help young people and adults get more skills. The incoming Trump administration is also likely to propose a major public-private investment in infrastructure, and as John Engler, president of the Business Roundtable, puts it, that would only deepen the “demand for skilled labor that cannot be met” right now. Lots of this training may not happen at colleges, but already some community colleges — like those in the coalition Rebuilding America’s Middle Class — are beginning to position themselves for this. For-profit colleges, too, could see opportunity here.

Jeb Bush. Sure, Mr. Trump famously mocked the former Florida governor during the campaign as “low energy” before defeating him in the primaries. But as Michael B. Horn, a writer, consultant, and education-company investor notes, Mr. Bush also has close connections to Ms. DeVos through the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which he founded and on whose board she has served. “I wonder,’ says Mr. Horn, “if there’s going to be some sort of back-channel there.”

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.