Higher Ed Changes Loom Under a Second Trump Administration

Despite having a limited formal role in higher education, the federal government has a lot of influence on colleges and universities. Its loans and grants help the vast majority of college students pay tuition. Its laws and regulations set the terms for participation in federally funded education programs. And its politics can alter the trajectory of academia. Congressional hearings on campus antisemitism last year led to a wave of policy changes related to student protests and forced some of the country’s most powerful university administrators to resign, all without a single law or regulation being passed.

With Donald Trump scheduled to begin a second presidential term in January, higher ed officials are preparing for both predictable and unpredictable changes. A shift in party control of the White House reliably causes a pendulum swing in federal regulations on issues like Title IX enforcement, which is meant to prevent sex discrimination. Regulations promulgated by the Biden administration, to extend protections for transgender students and change how sexual misconduct investigations are handled, are just now taking effect in some states. Those regulations were partly an undoing of Trump’s first-term policies; most observers expect him to undo the Biden administration’s regulations again.

“It’s been a burden because the people who are working on the college campuses implementing these policies on the ground are having to learn all new policies,” says Rebecca Natow, an education professor at Hofstra University in New York.

Trump has also signaled other looming changes for higher education, in both vague and specific terms. Most explicitly, he has said he wants to eliminate the Department of Education, which administers financial aid to college students. How that would affect higher ed operations isn’t exactly clear. Universities rely on tuition payments that are backed by federal grants and loans. Significant changes to those programs, such as moving them under the administration of another federal department, could cause massive disruptions for students and universities. They could affect states as well, which already directly fund many higher ed institutions.

“If there are gaps in need-based financial aid for students, some states will want to fill that gap or at least partially fill that gap,” Natow says.

It’s not clear whether Trump will try to follow through on that plan. Eliminating the Department of Education would require congressional action. Republicans have said they want to get rid of the department since it was created in 1979, but have never actually tried to do so, even when they’ve had full control of the executive and legislative branches.

“I don’t think [Trump’s education secretary nominee] Linda McMahon would like to write herself out of a job,” says Katharine Meyer, a fellow with the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings. “There are a lot of ways that having the Department of Education is useful for any executive leader. So it seems politically ill-advised.”

Colleges and universities could also feel the impact of some of Trump’s non-education policy agenda. Efforts to deport immigrants or create new obstacles for international students could be disruptive for many university programs, for example.

Other indications of Trump’s plans can be found in Project 2025, the conservative policy agenda created by the Heritage Foundation. (Trump has publicly distanced himself from Project 2025, but not from its broader ideological agenda, and is planning to hire several of its authors in his next administration.) The plan calls for stopping federal student loan forgiveness, a signature effort of the Biden administration that has been opposed by GOP lawmakers and has faced stumbling blocks in the courts. Trump has called Biden’s debt-forgiveness plans “very unfair” to students who didn’t take loans. It also calls for the privatization of student loan programs. That could cause problems especially for students with the greatest financial need, who are less likely to be able to secure funding from private lenders.

If those plans were to come to pass, there may be a new round of student debt forgiveness programs administered by states, Meyer says. Those could be targeted to serve various specific state goals, like a program started in Connecticut this year that provides debt relief for health-care workers.

There are some areas within higher education where Republicans and Democrats seem to be aligned, like support for workforce development programs outside of traditional colleges and universities. The 2024 Republican Party platform calls for “additional, drastically more affordable alternatives to a traditional four-year College degree.” The parties have worked together to propose expanding Pell Grants, which support low-income college students, to other types of training and certificate programs.

But the second Trump administration and GOP Congress are likely to continue efforts to shut down diversity, equity and inclusion programs in higher ed institutions. Project 2025 refers to “a higher education establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats.’” Trump has vowed to go after accreditation organizations with the goal of “protecting free speech and removing all of the wasteful Marxist DEI bureaucrats who are driving up tuition costs and destroying our students and their minds.” Many states have already passed laws rolling back DEI programs. Some colleges and universities have begun anticipating policy changes and eliminating diversity programming on their own. Others are cutting scholarships that are geared toward specific populations in the wake of a Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action policies. The Trump administration could accelerate those changes if it uses the Department of Education or the Department of Justice to investigate university diversity practices — as Trump has vowed to do for primary schools.

Republicans have argued that American universities are increasingly elite institutions that aren’t a good fit for many young people looking for careers. Some have argued that federal support for student loans has contributed to rising tuition rates. Vice President-elect JD Vance has described universities as “the enemy” and said academic research “gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country.”

Many education policy experts see the anti-DEI efforts as part of a broader trend toward clamping down on liberal education in general, with school boards banning certain books and conservative state legislatures targeting specific curricula and issues like critical race theory.

“My larger concern is the general attack on people learning,” says Mary Churchill, an education consultant and professor at Boston University. “I do think we’re going to continue to see the devaluing of education.”