Harris, Trump, and Higher Ed

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You may not have heard much about higher education in the presidential campaign, but it’s definitely on the ballot.

Related Reading:

• Rhetoric and Records Shape the Presidential Race
• College for All? Not Anymore.
• Obama’s Legacy: An Unlikely Hawk on Higher Education

Guest: Rick Seltzer, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle.

Rick Seltzer There are a lot of problems that these campuses really could stand to hash out at the federal level and there’s not a lot of consistent discussion about it.

Jack Stripling As the presidential election fast approaches, we’re hearing a lot about a few things: the economy, immigration, the war in Israel and Gaza. These might not sound like issues that have much to do with how colleges and universities do business or the lives of faculty and students on their campuses. But in fact, the biggest issues of this campaign are deeply connected to higher education. Today on the show, we’ll talk with my colleague Rick Seltzer about what this presidential election might mean for colleges and universities and why that matters to more Americans than you might think. Rick is a senior writer at The Chronicle and author of the Daily Briefing newsletter, an essential higher ed rundown that I read every weekday morning with my coffee. Rick, thanks for coming on the show.

Rick Seltzer Jack, It’s a real pleasure to be here. You read the briefing with your coffee. I listen to this podcast while I do the dishes or take a walk or mow the lawn. So that’s prime territory for me.

Jack Stripling That’s great. I actually read the Daily Briefing in bed this morning. True confession. So I just want to set an attitude of candor out of the gate.

Rick Seltzer It’s wonderful. I like to have a close relationship with my readers, so I’m game for that.

Jack Stripling Fair enough. So I want to talk to you about how the two candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, might approach higher education. But before we do that, let me ask you, is the future of higher education a major issue in this election from your perspective?

Rick Seltzer I don’t think either candidate has placed it front and center. You saw the Trump campaign using it to fire up the base a little bit earlier in the election cycle. But since then, it has been something that’s referenced in passing but hasn’t been one of the featured issues.

Jack Stripling So how might some of the larger issues that they’re talking about in this campaign intersect with higher education, even if it’s not front and center of what they’re talking about?

Rick Seltzer Right. So if we start with the Trump campaign, the motivating factor there is immigration and clamping down on immigration. The former president has promised to hold one of the largest mass deportations in American history. It is hard to see that not affecting higher ed, which draws talent from around the world and also enrolls a lot of students that could potentially be subject to deportation. And he’s also hammering on the economy, which is something the Harris campaign is also trying to focus on. And so you have this question of opportunity and what the right way to have an economic opportunity for everyone in the country is. And I think higher education has long been held up as a source of entry into the middle class, a way to move up and get more economic opportunity. And as we talk about what the economy is going to look like for the next presidential term and forward, there’s this real question of how much higher ed actually factors into that. Now, I will say that, generally speaking, we know voters today are very concerned about the cost. The cost of everything. And the cost of college is no exception. It’s included in the cost of everything. Both campaigns have touched in different ways on college affordability as a theme. And that’s probably a reflection of two things: There are questions about who has the money to pay for college, and there are questions about whether colleges are really preparing graduates adequately for a radically changing workforce in a radically changing world. On top of that, colleges are tied deeply to their local economies and to the global economy because they perform a massive amount of research.

Jack Stripling Right. So there are pocketbook issues here. How do I spend my money? There are workforce preparation issues. And then you also mentioned research where, you know, major research universities are at the forefront of that in the United States in terms of creating that global knowledge economy. So, again, these are ways that we might not necessarily think these candidates are talking about higher education. But in fact, when they’re talking about the economy, they really are.

Rick Seltzer Exactly. It’s... I don’t want call it a proxy issue. It’s kind of the what supports the way that our world works today in many ways are colleges and universities.

Jack Stripling What about global affairs? Talk about the higher ed connections there.

Rick Seltzer Well, we talked a little bit about immigration. But the other major one this election cycle has been protests in Israel and Gaza and Hamas. And what you’re seeing unfolding on college campuses; a mass protest movement that is trying to force colleges to divest from either Israel or weapons manufacturers or other world linked companies, the GOP has really hammered colleges for not cracking down harder on protesters, specifically pro-Palestinian protesters who have been accused of antisemitism. And a lot of Democrats are in a tough spot. They’re trying to signal support for Israel and Jewish students, and they’re also defending the rights of peaceful protesters who are passionate about Palestinian self-determination, which makes the campus protests a fairly powerful wedge issue for the right. It divides the Democratic coalition.

Jack Stripling Yeah, so what has Kamala Harris specifically said about the campus protests?

Rick Seltzer I think she’s trying to walk a line very similar to what the Biden administration has, which is signaling support for Israel while doing much more to acknowledge the death toll in Gaza, but not going beyond trying to keep the outcry from escalating at home. You’re seeing them deploy the federal government to investigate whether campus protests have created a hostile environment for Jewish students in particular, and also for Muslim students.

Jack Stripling Well, you know, I mean, as I look at this, I think that it’s probably fair to say that college campuses have been the epicenter of the public debate about this particular issue.

Rick Seltzer Absolutely. College campuses are one of the few places in this country that we actually have public debates that are hard anymore, where different competing ideas really do come out into the open and confront each other, on the quad in some cases.

Jack Stripling That’s funny because I feel like a lot of times the conservative criticism is you can’t say anything on a college campus.

Rick Seltzer I think that there are certainly college campuses where there is more of a chilled effect than others. There are also college campuses that uphold freedom of speech very well. There’s probably some truth to that idea that college campuses lean one way politically. But it is a gross oversimplification.

Jack Stripling Well, I’m not the first to say this, but we’re in a particularly interesting position this campaign. because we’re dealing with somebody who’s part of the current administration and somebody who’s already been president. So we kind of have some sense of their philosophical approaches, or at least we think we do. And I wonder if you can break down for me just from your perspective, you know, what are the, I guess, larger competing ideas of the Trump and Harris campaigns when it comes to higher education?

Rick Seltzer Yeah, I think it’s safe to say that Harris would likely be a continuation of the last two Democratic presidencies. So Barack Obama and Joe Biden both deployed regulations to try to make colleges more accountable to those they serve and also protect various student groups on campus who are underrepresented or at particular risk of being harmed by various things. So LGBTQ students, sexual assault survivors, folks like those, they have pushed regulations that will try to protect. As far as the accountability agenda that I mentioned earlier, it started with the Obama administration, and the Biden administration is working on it now. There’s a push for what’s called gainful employment regulations. Don’t fall asleep on me. This is... it matters if you are enrolled in a career program, because basically if the Biden regulations hold and they’ll probably only hold if Kamala Harris wins the presidency, you could see a bunch of career training programs lose access to federal financial aid in 2026 because they’re not judged to be serving their students well enough.

Jack Stripling Yeah. Cracking down on programs that sell students a bill of goods and say we’re going to help you get a job, but in fact, this degree program is kind of worthless.

Rick Seltzer Correct. Or that are graduating students, in some cases into fields where they’re not able to earn enough. You know, it doesn’t necessarily even have to be that nefarious, although in some cases it could be. Some of these places may just not be getting it done economically for their students.

Jack Stripling Right. Well, and you mentioned the Obama administration. I think it’s worth pausing there for a minute because I remember doing some of my own reporting on this and, you know, one of the things that I found interesting at the end of the Obama administration was that this was a person who, I think, higher ed, you know, fully embraced or a lot of higher education did. There seemed to be like some intellectual simpatico there. He has a professorial background. This is one of our friends. And then he comes in and he’s kind of a hawk on higher education. He ends up instituting a lot of accountability measures. He pushes this gainful employment thing like you’re talking about. We have the creation of the College Scorecard. There’s lots of talk about rating colleges and seeing how well they do their jobs. And we can talk about whether that ended up watered down in the end, but how do you see Kamala Harris as somebody who does or doesn’t carry out that same type of ethos or agenda if she becomes president?

Rick Seltzer I think the clearest thing we can say is that she’s likely to continue the crackdown on for-profit colleges. That’s something that she’s talked about as a through line throughout her career, at least since she was attorney general of California. In this campaign, she’s hammered that a lot. As far as the accountability agenda, it’s a bit of tea leave reading, to be honest with you. It’s who is she likely to be staffing her administration with? It’s what are the issues that higher ed faces? Is it possible she comes in on day one and tears up gainful employment? Yes. Do I think that’s likely? Not at all.

Jack Stripling But isn’t part of the picture that she’s putting together of herself about, I was an attorney general. I prosecuted people. I prosecuted, you know, for profit universities. Kind of like a cop on the beat is the impression I get. And I wonder if that might carry over into higher ed?

Rick Seltzer It’s possible. Certainly on the for profit side, I think that it will. The bigger question is what kind of accountability, if at all, do they want to try to pursue for nonprofit colleges? The current gainful employment regulations they pushed would put more information before consumers. That has kind of been the Democratic answer to concerns about college quality is more information, let consumers make informed choices. I would expect that to continue.

Jack Stripling So we’re having to read some tea leaves, as you say. But under a Harris administration, we might see some continuations of what’s happened under Joe Biden, specifically things around like working on student debt relief, that type of thing. We might see a resurgence of some of the accountability stuff that came out of the Obama administration or a ratcheting up of that. What about Trump?

Rick Seltzer With Trump, we will... I think that the cone of uncertainty for what Donald Trump does is much wider as wide as it may be on Harris. But with Trump, you do see this idea of either a war on institutions or wanting to take back institutions to a more, either right leaning or Trump-leaning or Trump-sympathetic area. This is a movement that is built on skepticism toward institutions, and that includes colleges. So I think it’s likely that we’ll see them roll back some of the regulations that are viewed as burdensome toward GOP-leaning constituencies. I wouldn’t expect to see as many protections for LGBTQ students, for example. I think it’s likely that you’ll see some work to achieve a long held conservative change to accreditation, which is this system of self-policing that higher ed has it for itself or self quality assurance. The right has long charged that that prevents innovation among colleges.

Jack Stripling Yea, explain a little bit for listeners what accreditation is, how it works.

Rick Seltzer Sure. So basically, if you want to draw federal financial aid, you know, millions of dollars to most colleges that really help them run as they run at the scale they run. This is loans, this is Pell Grants, some other support. You need to be accredited by a federally recognized accreditor, which are more or less membership organizations that check things like: Are we providing a quality education? Do we have the resources to provide a quality education? And there’s a whole batch of rules that they are supposed to follow and the GOP has long said that accreditors kind of constrict innovation in education. It’s very hard to make changes to the way you deliver it. And so you’ll see some voices on the right pretty consistently over time, trying to break down kind of the barriers that accreditation imposes or the accreditors that currently exist that they see as having a stranglehold on the system. They’ll try to change that.

Jack Stripling Yeah, and you mentioned this before, I think. But, you know, accreditation is a system of self-policing. So one of these regional accreditors will send a team to look at your college and evaluate it. And the people on that team are also people who work in higher education. And so if you are infinitely skeptical of whether higher education has a strong liberal bias or whether it has its act together, you may not be like on board with the idea of it policing itself. Is that part of what you think is at play here?

Rick Seltzer Absolutely, I think that’s at play. I think accreditors have also really struggled to communicate what they do to the public, including to the GOP. Their argument for themselves or one of their arguments for themselves, to be fair, is that we’re not just police. We’re the folks who move colleges from trouble to being successful.

Jack Stripling Well, let’s talk a little bit about policy. You know, we’ve been sort of talking about philosophy and policy together. But when you look at a potential Harris administration, do you have a sense from a policy standpoint what we might expect? Has she put anything specific out there that’s worth talking about?

Rick Seltzer What we’ve seen that’s probably most resonant or has broken through the most is actually this idea that you don’t need a college degree to succeed. I’m answering your question about what higher education policy she’s put forward that’s most important, and it’s actually a policy that’s not specifically about higher education. I think that tells you a lot about how this campaign’s gone. But there’s a real focus on things like alternative degrees, ways to break into the workforce and be trained and end up with a good career and good career prospects, even if you don’t go to college. And that’s kind of raising eyebrows within the higher ed sector and outside of it. If you look at the Harris website, for example, you’ll see some information about making college affordable and you’ll see mention of apprenticeships. But those aren’t issues where she goes into particular depth. There are also still nods towards loan forgiveness, student debt forgiveness. That, however, is an issue that is likely to be tied up in the courts for a long time.

Jack Stripling I know this is a long, complicated story, but just take a moment and tell us about the debt forgiveness debate. What is it? How has it played out? What might Harris do about it?

Rick Seltzer So go back a few years and the idea was growing on the left that student loan debt — the money students borrowed to be able to go to college — has grown too large and that it is a millstone around the necks of too many people who have either graduated or really importantly, actually, those folks who went to college for a few years didn’t graduate, and so therefore they don’t have the earnings benefits that a degree brings, but they still have some college debt. And so this concern was growing and growing, and it prompted Joe Biden, the candidate, to lean into the idea of eliminating some student debt, forgiving some student debt. That was a promise that they made on the campaign trail. And the Biden administration has more or less spent the bulk of the last four years trying to put some form of debt forgiveness into place. They shored up some existing programs for students who were wronged by colleges and some other small groups of students. But you still have this large corpus of folks who are out there who still owe money and in most cases have been paying their loans on time or have not been paying their loans on time in some cases that Democrats would like to clear a portion of that debt. They’ve tried a bunch of different legal avenues to try to do it. They’re still trying to do it. I’m not going to put you to sleep by explaining all those unless you ask me to. But all of them have been stopped so far.

Jack Stripling And we expect that a Harris administration would continue to be in that fight in one way or another?

Rick Seltzer The problem is the student loan portfolio isn’t going to get any smaller. And this is a very loud, vocal constituency. It’s hard to see why after coming this close and being turned back many times, they would stop agitating for some sort of student loan forgiveness.

Jack Stripling Would you say that debt forgiveness was the signature higher ed policy proposal of the Biden administration?

Rick Seltzer They also tried to do free community college for everyone. A big access push at the federal level. That fizzled out. Now, it actually has made big gains at the state level. So I think there are some trickle down effects there that have been really important. But debt forgiveness is the one with the biggest potential effect. It’s the biggest fight that they’ve had.

Jack Stripling Well, that allows us to create a portrait in contrast. So where might Donald Trump be on this? Do we have a sense?

Rick Seltzer Republicans are very against debt forgiveness. The prevailing idea I get is these are folks who knew what they were doing when they borrowed. It’s important that they live up to their promises.

Jack Stripling It’s a personal responsibility play. It’s a moral hazard idea, maybe.

Rick Seltzer Yeah. The moral hazard idea circulated on the right a lot when the Biden administration came out with various debt forgiveness plans. And that’s this idea that if you don’t pay back what you borrow now, why wouldn’t you just borrow more in the future, assuming, well, I’ll not have to pay it back then, they’ll do forgiveness down the road and that gets very expensive, very fast. One really interesting thing on the right, though, is if you kind of read between the lines, there are various ideas out there, not from the Trump campaign, but from others about making it a little easier to pay for college or different types of college. So there are some student loan repayment plans that are not nearly as generous as the Biden plans, but that would be a little more generous to some students and a little simpler to navigate than the morass that we have now, where there are a bunch of different plans that no one can seem to get through. So I think there’s actually a little bit of area that there could be agreement between the right and the left on some fixes here. It’s just such a bitterly contested big issue right now that it’s hard to see how they could actually get in the same room and hammer it out.

Jack Stripling: So we have heard a lot about Project 2025. And I know there’s a big debate around whether that’s something that Donald Trump wants to implement. He has tried to distance himself from it. But I wonder if you can talk a little bit about it and what it might mean for higher education.

Rick Seltzer Sure. So Project 2025 is this 922 page book that was put together by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. A lot of folks from Trump’s first administration helped write it. It’s contradictory at points. It contradicts itself, but it’s essentially supposed to function as a road map or a menu from which a Trump 2.0 administration could start picking ideas so it can hit the ground running. This is where you get really big ideas that Democrats are trying to hang around Trump’s neck as terrifying, massive, radical changes. And in many cases, they would be massive changes. This is where you get talk of privatizing all federal student loans, so the federal government would support them, make it possible to... make it financially feasible to make them, but they would be privately owned and serviced.

Jack Stripling How would that differ from the system we have now?

Rick Seltzer So currently the federal government technically owns the loans. If the loan portfolio makes money, the feds make money on it. If the loan portfolio loses money, the feds lose money on it.

Jack Stripling If I’m a student, should I care about this?

Rick Seltzer Yes. What it means is a little harder to parse. But the question is, do you trust the federal government to protect your interests as a borrower, if it also stands to make money off of you? Do you trust the federal government more than you would a private lender? A bank, essentially? Do you think that it would be less confusing if you weren’t working through a private company that services the loan while the feds own it?

Jack Stripling We hear off and on talk of doing away with the federal Education Department. What should we expect from a Trump administration about this?

Rick Seltzer Great question. It has been a longstanding goal of some conservatives to eliminate the Education Department, return many of its functions to the states, spread out its other functions to other arms of the federal government. I think the Trump administration has also had some talk about a government efficiency commission or something to that effect, right? Shrinking the size of the federal government, making it work with fewer people. Breaking up the Education Department could potentially be something there. It’s a big lift. The Education Department does a lot of things, and splitting it apart and moving it around would take a concerted effort and we’ll see if they’re actually game to do that if they win.

Jack Stripling So this idea of eliminating the Education Department, it dates back at least to Ronald Reagan. How might that work? And would it matter to everyday Americans?

Rick Seltzer The Education Department plays a big role in how people pay for college, which means it plays a big role in who can access college. It provides tens of billions of dollars in student loans each year. And its Office for Civil Rights is charged with enforcing laws that prohibit discrimination at colleges. So it does some vital things. Trump has said he wants to do away with the department and move everything back to the states. But how that works in practice isn’t exactly clear. And eliminating the department would require Congress to act, which is always a dicey prospect these days. So we’ll have to wait and see there.

Jack Stripling Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute.

[BREAK]

Jack Stripling So Rick, we’ve been talking about how higher education connects with some of the biggest themes of this election. Immigration and the economy are a couple of big ones. But some of the biggest political fights in higher education right now are culture war issues. We’re seeing fierce debates over what’s taught in college classrooms and whether colleges are indoctrinating students with liberal ideas. How might this larger debate play out differently, depending on whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris become president?

Rick Seltzer I think you have on the right, and especially with Trump, a real push to reclaim institutions that are seen as having gone astray or having been captured by the left. Higher education is a big one of those institutions. You see this push on the right to kind of return to the glory old days of a classical education, something much more focused on Greek and Roman civilization and foundational ideals of what they would describe as Western civilization. There’s this strong sense that colleges lost their way. Maybe they’re focusing on what’s a supposedly woke agenda and that the federal government interferes too much in religious institutions and how they run. On the left, on the other hand, you see far less focus on what’s actually happening inside classrooms. The energy tends to be around protecting students from discrimination and other harms. There are various flavors of that. So you see a consumer protection angle, making sure students can afford college and earn degrees that have high value in the marketplace and won’t have to be saddled with student loans for years and years and years. And then there is also civil rights protection, which is where we see the energy around defending LGBTQ rights or making minority students feel welcome with diversity, equity and inclusion programs. But the left isn’t talking about upending business as usual in the same way that the right is. And I think the left retains a lot more faith in nonprofit colleges to craft their own curriculum and take care of their own business. So I think depending on who is elected, that means we’d see some very stark differences in what’s emphasized. You see the right leaning into culture war issues in the classroom and on campus a lot more. I would even extend that to the athletic field. One of the things that they’re hammering related to colleges right now is a question of whether trans athletes should be able to compete in women’s sports. You know, this is an issue the Biden administration largely punted to the next administration. They ran out of time to issue regulations that they said they were going to issue. And it has ended up being this kind of culture war, red meat that the right is using to motivate voters.

Jack Stripling So what are other ways that culture war issues have been part of this campaign?

Rick Seltzer Oh you see in the states a big push to stop diversity, equity, and inclusion programing, this idea that you shouldn’t provide education that makes students feel guilty because of who they are, which depending who you ask, can be code word for don’t make white students feel guilty about slavery. Or could be much broader; divisive issues in K-12 classrooms was a big discussion. But you even see some of this kind of nibble at the edges of higher education.

Jack Stripling And the previous Trump administration was, did some very overt things around diversity, equity and inclusion programing, right?

Rick Seltzer I believe toward the end of the administration, there was an executive order that would not have allowed federal funding to go for programing, which would have covered colleges as well.

Jack Stripling You know, another issue that I think has inflamed tensions across the country and also created, you know, a big divide does have to do with these campus protests and I wrote down a quote from Donald Trump for the purposes of this part of the discussion that I want to read to you and hear your response to it. He said, “One thing I do is any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” What do you make of that in a political context?

Rick Seltzer It’s a wedge issue. It’s a motivating issue for a block of the voters who do not like disorder, who do not like nontraditional ideas, and who back Israel very strongly. And then it also is a rhetorical play into Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric as well: This idea that there are people who belong in the country and people who don’t, and people who should benefit in this country and people who should leave. It’s pretty consistent with his broader reason for running. It’s very inconsistent or at odds with higher education’s perception of itself as a place for integrating global cultures and different ideas around the world.

Jack Stripling And it pretty effectively marries two things, right? It marries the immigration issue, which is a huge one for him, with this campus protest issue, which is a divisive one for Democrats.

Rick Seltzer Divisive one for Democrats, and also, we should point out, campus protests have a history of motivating the right. The right wasn’t particularly thrilled with Vietnam, anti-Vietnam protests on campus, right? This is decades and decades and decades long. I don’t want to call it merely a meme, right? It’s this idea that is bigger than this particular set of motivating factors or this particular news situation. This is something that’s much more deep seeded and has become a recurring theme in American life.

Jack Stripling We’ve got a sense of the philosophies that are at play here. We’ve got some sense of what the policies might be that we could expect from either administration. But we have so much gridlock in Washington. What are the chances that either administration will accomplish much when it comes to higher ed?

Rick Seltzer It’s going to be hard for any president to get things done the way that the last two administrations have. So, the Obama administration and Trump administration relied on a lot of rule writing, executive orders, letters, you know, not putting things through Congress. The Supreme Court just made it very, very hard to do that or much harder to do that because the Supreme Court lowered the bar for challenging regulations in court. So you’re going to see the system get mired in a lot more lawsuits, whether that’s debt forgiveness, protections for sexual assault survivors, whatever the regulations are, if there is a strong interest group that can challenge them, count on it.

Jack Stripling Lots of legal challenge in addition to whatever mucks up the works in terms of executive orders or Congress or what have you.

Rick Seltzer Correct. The question to me is, can they motivate Congress to do something? And that’s why I think the policy light campaign is a real tragedy for the sector. Higher ed is facing a lot of problems in the next few years. Depending on who you listen to, lawmakers are going to have to make some tough choices about whether to keep funding the Pell Grant or cut back eligibility because of the way that the federal budget is going. Pell Grants are the federal government’s primary financial aid for low and middle income students in some cases. So if you can’t pay for college and you want money that you don’t have to pay back, it’s a Pell Grant from the federal government.

Jack Stripling So a huge issue for low income students and their ability to access college.

Rick Seltzer For low income students as well as colleges. A lot of colleges that are on financially shaky ground are pretty reliant on Pell students. They enroll a large number of them. And if you start nibbling around the edges of who qualifies for Pell, you could really hurt their budgets. The sector’s already losing 10 to 20 colleges a year. In some cases, these are in over served areas; cities, suburbs. In some cases they’re rural institutions that may be the only place for a student to go to college if they don’t want to travel dozens or hundreds of miles. I don’t think the sector is in a particularly strong place right now and, remember, this is a sector that in the past has been pitched as the primary way that you get economic opportunity in this country. And so I think it’s a real shame that the candidates haven’t started laying the groundwork for shoring up or supporting or figuring out what’s next for colleges and higher education.

Jack Stripling So, Rick, I want to be honest about this. I’m obsessed with higher education. So are you. We’ve reported on it a long time. But there are people who would look at this election and say there’s a good reason it hasn’t been a front burner issue. We have, you know, in some ways the fate of democracy at stake. We have the economy at stake. We have, you know, huge issues with our immigration policy that people are very spirited about. Why should the average person care about what might happen to higher education under either of these presidents when we have so many other things to think about?

Rick Seltzer Higher education touches all of those issues. And it has, in many ways, contributed to the world we live in now. And so, if you are someone who is very concerned about the economy and what it takes to earn a good wage and be able to have the skill set that you need to have a good, stable job, you’re someone who should be concerned about being able to pay for college or if colleges are taking the bulk of the money that’s allotted for education, when you would rather see it go to more apprenticeship programs, workforce training, something else. Everything is a set of tradeoffs in politics. And if you’re not talking about the explicit goals that you have for big parts of the economy, really important chunks of American life, I’m just not sure what you as a candidate are actually talking about. It’s just this clash of ideas that isn’t actually interested in improving life for anybody. It’s something else.

Jack Stripling Yeah. And I also wonder, I mean, you have mentioned that we are setting ourselves up for a situation in which anything that either administration tries to do could just be mired in legal challenges for a long time. So there is a perspective you might have, a cynical one that is, “doesn’t really matter because none of this stuff is going to happen anyway.” What do you make of that?

Rick Seltzer Well, neither president is going to be able to get much done on their own. But what they talk about and what ideas they put out there will feed what eventually gets done when Congress either acts on its own or is forced to act by a crisis. Ideas really do matter, even if it doesn’t happen this year or next year or even in four years, because today’s ideas that get thrown on the scrap heap get recirculated. The other part is states have been putting in place a lot of changes and a lot of the changes that states put in place are drawn from either other states or from the federal discussion. So, just because it doesn’t get done in Washington tomorrow doesn’t mean it won’t get done somewhere in this country soon.

Jack Stripling And as you say, higher education, the staging ground for some of our biggest debates about ideas, so if nothing else, it’s the setting in which this conversation will continue to happen. Rick, you’ve given me a lot to think about. I really appreciate your broad knowledge on these issues and your perspective, and thanks for coming on the show.

Rick Seltzer Hey, thank you for having me. It was a real pleasure.

Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, Laura Krantz, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.