As they took control of both chambers of Congress and the White House in 2025, Republicans faced a dilemma. They wanted to extend the tax cuts enacted during Donald Trump’s first term, a central priority of both the president and the party’s corporate and donor base. But because the tax extensions would blow a multi-trillion-dollar hole in the ten-year deficit projection, they risked losing the votes of fiscal hawks inside their caucus. 

So, Republicans went hunting for “pay-fors” to lessen the deficit damage. They axed tax credits for EVs and clean energy and decimated funding for Medicaid and SNAP. But in addition to these well-publicized cuts, they radically reduced federal student loan subsidies, including those for graduate students.  

Of course, they didn’t say out loud that they were reducing support for graduate education to finance tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations. Instead, they and conservative think tanks argued for the cuts on other grounds. First, invoking the so-called Bennett Hypothesis—named after the former Education Secretary, William J. Bennett, who articulated the theory—they claimed that federal student aid enables colleges to raise tuition, and that cutting federal funding will therefore force tuition prices down. Second, channeling arguments made by pronatalists at places like the Heritage Foundation, they said that young people, especially women, spend too long in graduate school, delaying marriage and childbearing, and that shrinking higher-education subsidies will boost the fertility rate. 

These arguments point in opposite directions. The first claims that cutting federal loan support will make graduate education cheaper and therefore easier to earn, the other that those cuts will make grad school harder to pursue. Regardless, both converge on the same policy outcome: less federal money for graduate education, more for tax cuts.  

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which passed in July, reduces federal higher education spending by roughly $284 billion over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, largely by tightening graduate student lending. It eliminates the Graduate PLUS program, which had allowed students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance for graduate degrees. Instead, the legislation limits future loan amounts based on the type of graduate program: $50,000 per year and $200,000 total for “professional” degrees, $20,500 per year and $100,000 total for all others.  

To avoid a political fight about which degrees count as “professional,” lawmakers added a snippet of ambiguous language from an otherwise unrelated regulation. They directed the Department of Education to clarify the final definitions based on it. In November, a committee empaneled by the department released those definitions as a first step in writing the regulations that will implement the new law. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, chiropractic, theology, law, and clinical psychology were deemed “professional” and eligible for higher federal loan limits. Nursing, teaching, social work, physical therapy, physician assistant programs, and audiology were not. 

Such regulatory notices usually fly under the public radar, but this one hit a nerve. Roughly four million nurses and more than two million social workers, including teachers and therapists, read the rule the same way: as a declaration that their work does not count as a profession. Their unions and trade associations protested. A prairie fire of anger and ridicule spread on social media. National media outlets covered the controversy. Even The Onion weighed in (“White House Reclassifies Nursing as a Hobby”). 

“None of us anticipated the offense that would be taken by the term ‘professional,’” a member of the department’s rulemaking committee told me. In retrospect, however, it’s not hard to understand the anger. Nursing and social work are overwhelmingly female professions already facing shortages, burnout, and stagnant pay. Getting a raise in these fields often requires a master’s degree, and the Trump administration was putting up roadblocks. Nurses already absorb abuse from hospital administrators and arrogant physicians while doing the unglamorous work of keeping patients alive. To then be downgraded—symbolically and financially—by the federal government was seen as disrespect. “It’s just a smack in the face,” said Susan Pratt, a nurse who is also president of a union representing nurses in Toledo, Ohio. “During the pandemic, the nurses showed up, and this is the thanks we get,” she told the AP.

Public outrage has been so intense that, in December, a bipartisan group of lawmakers asked the Education Department to restore nursing to the list of professional degrees.  

If the new federal graduate school loan regime is proving to be a disaster politically, it is not much better as policy. Robert Kelchen, a higher education policy professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville (and data editor of the Washington Monthly college rankings), notes that loan limits only make sense if they follow outcomes—either to prevent students from taking on unsustainable debt or to discourage enrollment in programs with poor repayment prospects. By those metrics, nursing stands out for the opposite reason. It has strong debt-to-earnings ratios, strict licensing requirements, sustained labor-market demand, and a clear social return. If taxpayers are going to subsidize any graduate profession, nursing is among the safest investments. 

Capping graduate degree loans at $20,500 annually might sound reasonable to conservative lawmakers trying to fill a self-created budget hole, but it makes less sense if you’re a working nurse or physical therapist entering an expensive, clinically intensive program in a high-cost area without family wealth. Pair that cap with the elimination of Grad PLUS and a tighter income-driven repayment regime, and the math will not work for many prospective nurses and teachers. Some will never apply. Others will turn to private loans. Many will walk away. 

Of course, there are universities charging outrageously high tuition for certain graduate degrees that don’t lead to commensurately high incomes; some of those programs were created precisely to take advantage of unlimited federal graduate student loans. As the Washington Monthly reported in 2024, the worst offenders are often elite schools. For instance, Northwestern University offers a master’s in counseling that saddles average graduates with $153,657 in debt, who go on to earn only $56,897 on average annually five years later. (By comparison, many regional public universities offer the same degree at a fraction of the cost, and their graduates earn more.) Lawmakers could have protected grad students from such predatory programs—and taxpayers from picking up the tab when those students can’t repay the loans—by directing the Education Department to limit graduate loans based on the average earnings of specific degrees or programs. Instead, they rushed through poorly worded legislation that blew up on the launchpad.  

Nor do their intellectual justifications hold up. The Bennett Hypothesis that higher federal student financial aid leads to higher tuition has been heavily studied, and evidence for it is mixed at best. Meanwhile, the pronatalist argument that reducing graduate education loan support will boost the birth rate isn’t looking so good, considering the damage likely to be done to the careers of many who deliver babies for a living.  

In one respect, however, the GOP’s gutting support for graduate education has been a success: it helped deliver the votes for nearly $5 trillion in tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy (and massive federal deficits to boot). Tens of millions of nurses, teachers, social workers, and their families are likely to remember that in the midterms. 

The post The GOP War on Nurses appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The class was called, rather plainly, “Moderns II,” and when I enrolled in it, I had no idea that it would change my life. I was a visiting student at University College London. While I had read some of the assigned authors (W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf), I had never read them in quite that way—as propositions about how to see (or not see) the world. The professor was a bit intimidating; he had a way of developing his thoughts as he spoke, his sentences moving in seemingly different directions until he landed—with a flourish—on an insight that, after the meandering that had come before, was both unexpected and somehow brilliantly inevitable. And he challenged us to think the same way. We had been reading The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell’s 1937 plea for a kind of socialism that would take the concerns of the working class seriously, and the professor must have noticed that something was bothering me.  

“Yes?” he said, suddenly appearing before me.  

“I don’t think Orwell enjoys being with poor people,” I stammered, thinking of the author’s many appalled references to the workers’ bad teeth, realizing, too, that what I had just said went against the grain of our class discussions so far, in which everyone had been warmly appreciative of Orwell’s efforts at empathy. 

“More!” the professor demanded, pointing at me. In hindsight, my critique of Orwell wasn’t particularly perceptive or even accurate, but that didn’t matter. For now, at least in my academic life, the floodgates were open: I had found a way to make the texts we were reading my own. I had discovered the pleasures of being opinionated. 

That class happened over 30 years ago, but I still think about it today. Much of the climate of American college education today seems geared to drive such opinionatedness not only out of our classrooms but the academy in general. The mind-bending assault of the Trumpists on colleges, the lethal mix of fake outrage and financial coercion that the president’s minions bring to campus, will set back American higher education by decades. It will also, as Brian Soucek in The Opinionated University acknowledges, make it unforgivably dull. What started as a laughable right-wing caricature of higher education—denouncing universities as Marxist training camps, with Stalinist professors brainwashing students into accepting the wicked gospel of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion)—has now taken hold of the minds of many university administrators. Their alternative vision has “workforce-ready” students praising capitalism while joining hands with their “thought partners,” an army of compliant AI bots. The motto of higher education, if Trump and his helpers have their way, will no longer be “Sapere aude” (dare to know) but “Skill up.” Leaving aside the fact that being able to state one’s opinions clearly and coherently is an important life-skill, too, the laudable emphasis on getting students ready for life now masks a more sinister ideological impulse: to remake our universities in the outdated, nativist image of an older, mostly white America, purged of the dissidents and immigrants we don’t want.  

The Opinionated University is, as it ought to be, an unabashedly opinionated book. Soucek is a professor of constitutional law at the University of California-Davis who was trained as a philosopher. It shows: At its core, his book is a logically compelling dismantling of what has become the mantra of American educational leaders—institutional neutrality, a doctrine that essentially means that, when in doubt, a university should voice no opinion at all. As Soucek explains, that was the central recommendation of the so-called Kalven Report, issued in 1967 in response to student protests against the Vietnam War, by a University of Chicago committee chaired by the law scholar Harry Kalven Jr. In December 2023, when three flustered presidents of elite universities couldn’t tell a congressional committee whether they would penalize students on their campuses for alleged antisemitic hate speech (a “context-dependent decision,” they said), the popularity of the Kalven guidelines soared. If only those presidents had practiced institutional neutrality!  

The intent of the Kalven report was, of course, to preserve free speech against rash decisions made by university leaders. Yet, as Soucek now tells us, institutional neutrality creates more problems than it solves. He has fun labeling the adherents of institutional neutrality “Kalvenists,” a pun that hints at some deeper commonalities. The 16th-century Calvinists believed in predestination—that, in other words, God had, without letting you know, already decided whether to send you to Heaven or Hell, and that there was nothing you could do to change that. But Calvinists relaxed their grim doctrine by also allowing that there might be some signs even in your earthly life where you were headed—if your business succeeded, for example. Soucek shows that modern-day academic “Kalvenists” likewise get themselves entangled in exemptions. Even as they advise university leaders to stay out of politics, they also concede that there are situations where saying nothing is not wise—when, for example, a university’s core mission is under threat. And here’s the rub: Since there are, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 2,600 four-year colleges in the United States, many with their own slightly different missions, the list of exceptions is potentially endless.  

Soucek’s antidote to the moral porousness of Kalvenism follows from that insight—an embrace of pedagogical pluralism. His book envisions, in cleverly nuanced detail, an admittedly idealistic landscape of higher education in which each institution would, after internal discussion and without interference from above, speak up whenever its mission demands it. For a university with a large medical school, for example, it would make sense to weigh in on discussions about reproductive rights, while another school with strong international ties might champion protections for its international students. 

The archenemy of Soucek’s “opinionated university” is conformity. When I decided to become a professor, I didn’t realize how much paperwork would attach itself to my career, the way barnacles latch on to an aging boat: faculty reports, compliance certificates, lists of learning outcomes, conflict-of-interest disclosures, and effort allocations. (Making such documents digital has only increased their number.) In his first chapter, Soucek turns to one such document that gets conservatives’ blood boiling—the notorious diversity statement, an essay outlining a faculty member’s commitment to creating an inclusive environment, which used to be a staple of the academic application process before DEI became the acronym from hell. Soucek admits that such required assertions of pedagogical bona fides may become insincere—who wouldn’t want to teach a class that lifts all students, regardless of their background? But what if we decided to reimagine diversity statements as opportunities to express not abstract beliefs but as concrete plans for meaningful action? As Soucek points out, critics of such declarations don’t object to statements of a candidate’s teaching philosophy. Why not ask an applicant, then, how their work as a whole (including their research) would enrich, in its own unique and non-conformist way, the overall vision of the university they are hoping to join? 

Ironically, the most effective tools for enforcing educational conformity, also known as teaching evaluations, generally get a free pass. Treated as reliable data by university administrators, they are often skewed. As Soucek makes clear, evaluations tend to reward those who pander and grade-inflate. And they routinely yield lower ratings for women of color. Where “non-experts”—to wit, our students—sit in judgment on our teaching, charismatic slickness often wins out over disciplinary aptitude. (Soucek doesn’t mention the frequently abysmally low participation rate in an exercise many students view as a waste of time.) Anecdotally, this critique seems right to me. While I belong to a demographic that statistically fares well in evaluations, I am always surprised by how many of my students’ responses pertain to things other than class content: “Instructor looks rumpled,” one student commented on what I would describe as the result of having little time between classes. “Instructor is ok,” observed another student, before criticizing my high-energy classroom delivery: “But he should lay off the coffee.” 

If instructors, to improve their ratings, are tempted to ingratiate themselves with their students, some universities cozy up to the fine folks at U.S. News & World Report for better rankings as well. Soucek favors those colleges that don’t forget their mission and are not afraid to say “No! in thunder” (to use Herman Melville’s feisty phrase) when silence would harm their faculty and students. My colleagues at Indiana University were hoping for such support when an assistant professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology, Dr. Caitlin Bernard, was castigated by Indiana’s own attorney general after performing an abortion on a very young rape victim. Instead, Indiana University’s president only volunteered that Bernard was a “well-respected doctor.” 

As university leaders like to remind us, academic freedom has its limits. My own university’s administration became obsessed with the phrase “expressive activity,” a term that strikes me as both unintentionally humorous and somewhat demeaning, as if stating one’s opinion were something akin to coloring pictures or going for a morning run. That Indiana University’s administrators didn’t view their faculty’s expressive activities as all that harmless became clear when they banished them from campus grounds between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. (a restriction later blocked by the courts). But even Soucek believes that some frameworks should exist. Academic departments, for example, should issue public statements only about subjects in which they can claim some disciplinary expertise. And when a colleague’s research takes a turn that conflicts with a university’s stated mission, said university should leave the reprimands to that colleague’s academic peers.  

In a chapter on “institutional counterspeech,” occasions where a university feels compelled to criticize its own actions, Soucek grants that colleges often face hard choices. In a moving aside, he recalls how excluded he felt back in 2018 when UC Davis held a campuswide blood drive, complete with prizes, in which he, as a gay man, could not participate. (The FDA has since amended its guidelines.) Recognizing the importance of blood drives, Soucek appreciated a statement from his chancellor, who expressed his profound regret over the unnecessary and discriminatory federal restrictions. In a similar vein, a university leader might choose to condemn the views of an invited campus speaker as hurtful to some members of the campus community, while still allowing the event to proceed for the sake of academic freedom. In 2017, Lauren Robel, the provost of Indiana University Bloomington, declined to disinvite Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, a widely debunked 1994 book that attempted to correlate race and intelligence. “Our academic community,” Robel insisted, “depends, distinctively, on more than mere tolerance. It depends on engagement with ideas, perhaps especially with ideas we believe are wrong or flawed.” At the same time, as you debate ideas you dislike, you should always feel protected, as Soucek makes clear in his final chapter on “Regulating Campus Speech.” 

But that last example also makes me wonder how much of The Opinionated University rests on an assumption that we can no longer take for granted—that American universities, and specifically their leaders, always have the best interests of their students and faculty in mind. One of the most noxious effects of the ongoing MAGA makeover of American universities has been the extent to which politicians have deputized college administrators, inciting them, for example, to prosecute and punish those whose teaching falls short of the required “viewpoint diversity”—in translation: whose classes make conservative students uncomfortable. To which I would respond: No one, whether you are right or left or middle-of-the-road or nothing at all, whether you are faculty or a student, should ever feel overly comfortable in college. Or, as Soucek puts it: “The point of education, and of rational argument more generally, is to change what people think.” (Note that the mind that is being changed here could also be the professor’s … Has happened to me plenty of times!) Here’s hoping that generations hence will still be able to feel the rush of excitement I experienced decades ago when my professor stood before me, sensing I had an idea different from everyone else’s: “Yes?”  

The post The Kalven Trap appeared first on Washington Monthly.

This summer and fall, Donald Trump’s administration launched a multi-pronged attack on diversity in higher education, deploying lawsuits and cutting funding for minority-serving institutions, particularly those with high populations of Hispanic students.  

In June, a group of conservative plaintiffs took aim at the federal program that offers funding and support to Hispanic-serving institutions, or HSIs. The Department of Justice is declining to defend the program in court, a move that breaks with tradition and increases the lawsuit’s chances of success. 

In September, the Department of Education redirected $350 million in federal funding for HSIs to other priorities, like charter schools and American history education. As in the lawsuit, the Trump administration argued that sending this money to schools that primarily serve Hispanics would be racial discrimination. 

The latest campaign in Trump’s war against “DEI” has the potential to devastate universities that define themselves through their service to underprivileged minorities. It also could pose a threat to the financial survival of the university system as a whole. 

As the Washington Monthly noted this fall, Hispanic students are the main growth population in a time of enrollment slump. With the overall student population declining, the federal government could be encouraging colleges to better serve an underprivileged group while preserving their own bottom line. Instead, it’s punishing them for doing so, reasoning that to target any particular ethnic or racial group—for any reason—is illegal discrimination. 

Beyond that, what would happen to higher education and the law if it became widely illegal to acknowledge race? To understand these cases and the future they could lead to, we spoke with Reginald C. Oh, who teaches constitutional law at Cleveland State University. A Monthly contributor, Oh is nationally known for his expertise in what the Constitution says about race.  

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. 

RW: So, Reggie, hi. First off, there’s this lawsuit against the Hispanic-serving institutions program, which the Department of Justice is declining to defend. Can you talk us through what the plaintiffs, the state of Tennessee and Students for Fair Admissions, are saying? 

RO: Okay, well, it really boils down to their argument that the HSI program is “illegal discrimination” in violation of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court’s decision from 2023 that struck down affirmative action. [Students for Fair Admissions was involved in both cases.] That’s the rationale both for the lawsuit and for the Trump administration saying, “Well, we don’t want to defend the lawsuit, because we also believe the program is illegal.”  

RW: Illegal how? 

RO: So that’s the key, right? When they say it’s illegal discrimination, what they’re really arguing is that it’s unconstitutional discrimination under SFFA v. Harvard. They’re substituting the word “illegal” for “unconstitutional,” which is a rhetorical move and an inaccurate statement of law. SFFA v. Harvard dealt solely with the admissions process, and whether race could be used as a criterion in admitting students. This issue has nothing to do with admissions or individual merit—it has to do with funding for schools that have a certain number of Latino or Hispanic students. [To be federally recognized as an HSI, a school must have at least 25 percent Hispanic students.] And that’s absolutely an open question.  

RW: Just to remind us, what part of the Constitution did SFFA v. Harvard say that affirmative action violated?  

RO: The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was intended to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. It says that states can’t deny the equal protection of the law to any person within their jurisdiction. The Court in SFFA v. Harvard held that the use of race in admissions was unconstitutional discrimination against Asian-American students in violation of equal protection.  

RW: What do you think about the norm-breaking aspects of this particular case? The federal government isn’t defending its own program, hoping it leads to the program’s demise. Still, this was duly passed by Congress. Are there any concerns about a future where, if you’re a president saddled with a program you don’t like, you invite a lawsuit and then sit back and do nothing? 

RO: The Trump administration’s refusal to defend the lawsuit is unprecedented. Their attempt to justify their inaction by saying, “We’re not going to defend the law because we agree with the plaintiffs,” raises serious separation of powers issues. We’re talking about Congress passing a statute that tells the executive branch, “Distribute these funds to those minority-serving schools,” and so when the president refuses to defend the law in the lawsuit, what he is actually doing is defying Congress. 

RW: Don’t presidents sometimes decline to enforce a particular law? And isn’t that a prerogative that’s been under debate, but there’s certainly precedent for? In what way is this different from President Obama’s DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), which gave people who were in the country illegally a chance to stay?  

RO: Yeah, so those raise two separate issues. DACA is really about the president creating his own program, right? But creating a program like DACA is considered lawmaking or legislation, which is the job of Congress, not the president. The job of the president is to faithfully execute the laws enacted by Congress. Congress didn’t create DACA, though, Obama did. So, the legal fight over DACA was about whether the president had the authority to create that kind of program without congressional approval. 

The HSI case is completely different, because Trump does have congressional authorization to distribute funds to eligible institutions. In fact, by law, Trump is required to distribute the funds. The Constitution doesn’t say the president may execute the laws enacted by Congress only if he thinks it’s a good idea; it says the president shall or must execute congressional programs. So, what’s the legal basis for Trump’s refusal to distribute the funds?   

RW: This makes me want to get back to something in this lawsuit. The plaintiffs are saying that these minority-serving programs are illegal under the SFFA v. Harvard decision. They’re arguing that the precedent, which outlaws affirmative action in admissions and says nothing about anything outside of admissions, should also apply to these programs. Do you think the Supreme Court will be favorable to this argument about what it was really saying in its own decision? 

RO: Honestly, yeah, I think they would be favorable to it. The Roberts Court is pretty hostile to race conscious policies. However, I don’t think you can say the outcome is written in stone, especially since the HSI issue is not about college admissions and individual merit, but about serving disadvantaged institutions that serve disadvantaged populations.  

RW: Okay, let’s move to September. The Trump administration announced that it would withdraw approximately $350 million in funding, the vast majority of which was going to HSIs. Some of it is being redirected to charter schools. Some is being sent to American history and civics grants. Some of it—somewhat confusingly, given the administration’s espoused views on race—is being sent to historically Black colleges and universities as part of a one-time infusion of upwards of $400 million. What was the reasoning there? 

RO: Well, in refusing to distribute the funds to HSIs, Trump is claiming to do so would be illegal DEI under SFFA v. Harvard. In diverting the funds to other programs like charter schools, Trump doesn’t really offer any reason or justification other than he’s the president. 

I want to explain further why Trump’s claim about “DEI is illegal discrimination” doesn’t make any sense. Even if a law is technically discrimination because it’s race conscious, that doesn’t make it automatically “illegal.” There’s another step involved called strict scrutiny [a very high standard of proof] in which the government can argue that the use of race was necessary to achieve a compelling interest. If they can do that, then the discrimination would be legal. Trump, however, never mentions the second step.  

RW: Can we touch a bit on the future this is creating? You know, if we’re in a world where it is illegal discrimination to have a program or to have funding that names a group of people, what happens long term? 

RO: In the scenario where the argument that it is all illegal discrimination wins, the future is race-blind policies about basically everything. You wouldn’t be able to consider race in any aspect of U.S. policy making, federal, state, or local.  

It may seem implausible, but the ultimate implication is that race as a concept gets eliminated from political and legal discourse. Think about it. After SFFA v. Harvard, some schools adopted policies barring admissions officers from knowing the race of applicants to ensure a “colorblind” process. But don’t people’s names identify their race? Asian names certainly do. So now admissions officers can’t know the names of applicants? And what about student essays—they now can’t write about their life experience if it would identify their race, right? You see where this goes. We’d end up in a world where even thinking or writing about race would be deemed dangerous because it could lead to “illegal discrimination,” and race functionally would no longer exist.  

Now think about the implications of all that.  

RW: The Supreme Court did mention that this is something you still could do—write an essay about your life experience that mentions race. 

RO: Yes, Roberts did say that. But Trump’s “any consideration of race is illegal discrimination” argument simply ignores that part of Roberts’s opinion. It’s like Trump is telling Roberts, I know you didn’t really mean that and so I’m just going to pretend that part doesn’t exist.  

RW: This leads to a broader point, as you’ve mentioned to me, with some historical parallels to the era of racial segregation in America. If you make law and policy unable to acknowledge something that is a fact in the real world, what kind of scenario does that create? Law and policy are denying realities on purpose, pretending they don’t exist so as to enforce a desired outcome, but without stating it. 

RO: That’s absolutely right. The goal of erasing race out of policymaking is ultimately to deny the reality of existing racial inequality, racial disparities, and racial segregation in K-12, in higher education, and in housing. Think about it. If we can’t consider or count race, then how can we measure and document the racial disparities we know exist? We can’t, and we’d be forced to pretend that racial disparities don’t exist and be unable to address them. And according to the Trump, it’s the Equal Protection Clause which requires this, which is bizarre, even absurd.   

RW: It’s upside down. 

RO: Yeah, we’re in bizarro world with a bizarro Equal Protection Clause in which equity violates equal protection, and racial inclusion or integration is illegal discrimination. If integration is illegal under equal protection, doesn’t that mean segregation is legal? Yeah, it’s absolutely reversed. It’s unequal protection, not equal protection. 

Bringing it back to HSIs, to be eligible for funding, schools must be at least 25 percent Hispanic and serve low-income students. In alleging that the HSI program is “illegal discrimination,” Trump’s goal is to end a policy assisting disadvantaged Hispanic serving colleges. If a law seeking to end racial inequality violates equal protection, then what the Equal Protection Clause protects is racial inequality.  

You know Bizarro, right? Go look up Bizarro Superman. 

RW: I don’t know Bizarro Superman. Oh, my god. [The WM editor is looking at a picture of Bizarro, a zombie clone of Superman who is his opposite in every way—nourished by kryptonite, weakened by sunlight.] 

RO: Yeah, yeah. That’s it. The Trump administration’s Bizarro Constitution.  

The post The Quiet War on Hispanic-Serving Colleges appeared first on Washington Monthly.

No U.S. president has ever laid siege to America’s colleges and universities as has Donald Trump in the first ten months of his second term. The success of his efforts to bend higher education to his will, however, is mixed. On the one hand, thanks to a submissive Republican Congress, he’s managed to cut billions in previously appropriated federal research dollars to universities. On the other, his attempts to force colleges to adopt conservative priorities in hiring and curricula have so far mostly failed. While a few institutions, like Columbia University, initially bowed to political pressure, the vast majority have resisted—bolstered by court rulings that his retributive funding cuts unconstitutionally violated the First Amendment, separation of powers, and various federal statutes. Still, Trump has three-plus more years in office to experiment with ways to dominate higher ed and it’s not clear how long universities can continue to resist. 

If Trump’s actions have no precedent​ at​ the federal level, they do at the state​. Over the course of two terms as Florida governor, Ron DeSantis has taken on that state’s public higher education system in ways that presaged Trump’s moves. Looking at the results of DeSantis’ experiment might provide clues to where Trump’s is headed. 

As Chris Mullin wrote recently in the Washington Monthly, DeSantis exploited Florida’s unusually centralized system of higher-education governance to insert political control directly into the classroom—stacking boards, replacing presidents, and rewriting curricula. His boldest gamble has been a complete takeover and ideological makeover of ​​New College of Florida, a small public liberal-arts college on Sarasota Bay known for its experimental pedagogy and progressive-left campus culture. Charging poor performance and ideological bias, DeSantis announced plans in early 2023 to transform the school into a “Hillsdale of the South”—a reference to the small, selective, conservative-leaning Michigan college that eschews government funds and focuses on teaching the classics. The governor appointed six new conservative trustees to New College, including activist Christopher Rufo, ​who then ​fired its President, Patricia Okker, and replaced her with former Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran ​at more than double Okker’s salary​. Within months, the new board abolished the gender​ studies program, dismissed faculty and administrators, created athletic teams, and secured tens of millions in state funding.

Two years later, the picture looks grim. New College’s four-year graduation rate has plummeted from 58.3 to 47.4 percent. The school’s U.S. News & World Report college ranking has fallen by nearly 60 spots, from 76th among national liberal-arts colleges in 2022 to 135th this year. Faculty and staff have fled, and students have followed them out the door. “It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme,” one professor told Inside Higher Ed. “Students keep leaving, so they have to recruit bigger and bigger cohorts.” Spending​ at the college​, meanwhile, has exploded. ​In Tallahassee, there is now open talk of either privatizing New College or shutting it down completely. 

DeSantis’s justification for the takeover was that New College was an educational disaster—a failed experiment in left-wing academic culture. Though the school ​had its problems (it struggled​​, for instance,​​ to reach its enrollment goals, as do many small, less-selective colleges around the country) and ​was indeed ​​left leaning, it was far from a disaster. In fact, by most objective measures, it was a model of what a small public liberal-arts institution could achieve. As Aalia Thomas reported in the Washington Monthly in 2023, New College consistently ranked near the top of the magazine’s l​ist of l​iberal​ ​arts ​colleges ​​for upward mobility, research, and service. ​​Its graduates earned PhDs at rates higher than many of the nation’s most prestigious private liberal arts colleges. Its curriculum mixed ​​postcolonial theory with Aristotle and Voltaire. The college charged about $7,000 a year for low-to-medium-income students—a bargain compared to most similar liberal arts colleges. It enrolled a high share of Pell​ ​​Grant recipients and produced civically engaged graduates—​​92.6 percent of its students were registered to vote in 2020. Far from failing, New College embodied many of the qualities conservatives say they prize in public higher education: affordability, rigor, civic virtue, and upward mobility. 

​​The governor’s appointees arrived convinced they were rescuing a failing school. ​​They replaced New College’s narrative-evaluation system with traditional grades. They bragged about making the college more “selective” (instead, the percentage of new students with a 4.0 or above high school grade point average decreased from 55.1 percent in 2022 to 42.1 percent in 2024)​.​ They recruited athletes and ​​self-described “normal” students to reshape the culture, ​​many of whom quickly transferred out. ​The campus began to change in telling ways: the reopened campus café, operated by a vendor tied to Corcoran, now serves coffee in cups printed with Bible verses, and the college has commissioned a statue of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk to stand on campus in honor of “free speech​.​​​” ​All this change has been financed by ​​an ​​eye-watering ​​boost​​ in ​​spending​​. The college’s budget has grown from​​ ​$53,232,164​​​​ ​​​​the year before the overhaul ​​​​to​​​​ ​​​​$93,043,119​​​​ ​​​​today​​​​—a​​​​ 75 percent​​​​ increase​​​​.​​​​ ​

​​​​​​​​Even DeSantis allies are turning on the project. “There can be no question anymore about what the numbers really are,” said Eric Silagy, a​​ DeSantis-appointed​​ member of the state Board of Governors. Nathan Allen, ​​who served as ​​​​vice president of strategy​​ for New College ​​during the conservative takeover but has since resigned​​, ​suggested where the blame for those numbers should be placed​: “​​New College is not a House or Senate project … It’s a Ron DeSantis project.”​​ ​​​Corcoran himself has said, ​​if New College doesn’t produce something different, “then we should be closed down.”  

“There is certainly room for improvement at New College,” the Washington Monthly reported in 2023. “But there is a lot more room to make the college worse, and plenty of reason to think that’s what the DeSantis administration will accomplish.”  

Those words proved prophetic and might well apply to Trump’s national crusade to remake universities. Just as DeSantis’s Florida experiment has collapsed under its own contradictions, so might Trump’s. Politics can seize a campus, but it can’t run one. 

The post Where Might Trump’s Attacks on Universities Lead? Just Look at Florida appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Amid the barrage of scary news, some Americans are trying to think through what might be possible in a post-Trump era. One idea favored by both parties is a fresh version of expanded national service. The Carnegie Corporation, and the indefatigable Alan Khazei, gathered a bipartisan group in New York last week to explore how to move national service from “nice” to “necessary”—from activities that help the poor to workforce readiness and a lifeline for the Anxious (and soon-to-be-unemployed) Generation, a way to get young people out from behind their phones to meet face-to-face, work together for decent pay on vital projects, and turn down the national temperature.

Most people don’t know that we already have national service. It’s called AmeriCorps, and more than 1.4 million Americans have served in it over the last three decades. AmeriCorps is so popular that when President Trump tried to defund it this year, many Republicans at the state and local level (where the decentralized programs are run) joined Democrats to save it.

Even so, the national service movement needs a shot in the arm. Students from elite colleges are no longer clamoring to join Teach For America, and exhortations to serve can sound musty, especially with so many poorly-designed mandatory community service projects in high schools.

Participants in last week’s Carnegie Summit on National Service—including high-ranking former military officers (e.g., former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin) and Republican governors (e.g., Utah Governor Spencer Cox)—gathered in New York to discuss how to perk up the movement. The preliminary goal is to establish one-year paid “Service Year Fellowships” with a certified non-profit, school, or public agency. Young people between the ages of 17 and 25 would experience a new rite of passage, with a “cultural expectation” that everyone serves.

Carnegie President Louise Richardson suggested that 2028 presidential candidates in both parties “compete creatively” with their national service ideas. That seems doable if the press can start pressing politicians about this with the same consistency they apply to, say, health care plans. Among potential candidates, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (who says “service can save us”) and Vice President J.D. Vance (a believer, at least in his Hillbilly Elegy days) could set the pace. One can envision a shapeshifting Vance using service to scale back his current nastiness and show, as Vice President George H.W. Bush did when running for president in 1988, that he was “kinder and gentler” than his predecessor. Opportunism in the service of service is no vice.

I’ve been attending “service summits” since the 20th century, and this one was a mix of movement veterans from the 1990s and inspiring young activists, united by a belief that a year of service could help unite—or at least de-polarize—the country. And there’s another agenda now, with a welcome unsentimental edge. Much of the focus this time was on national service as an economic pathway. With Gen X, Gen Z, and Generation Alpha (born after 2010) likely to face searing double-digit unemployment by the end of the decade, thanks to AI, national service might return to its roots as a jobs program in the 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt brought the military and government agencies together to put three million young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

The politics of national service were daunting then, and they’re more so now. Spencer Cox, a good man and important supporter of the movement, warned that service cannot be “left-coded,” noting that Climate Corps, a small AmeriCorps project, wouldn’t fly in conservative Utah. Mandatory service, unfortunately, won’t fly anywhere.

But the broader economic and cultural context is well-suited to a revival of the service movement. The most sobering statistic I heard at the summit was that AI might soon cost the economy five million entry-level jobs. Employers will find that young people who have had a service year are a step ahead in sharpening their emotional intelligence and learning the good work habits and people skills they will need in the workplace. With only 2 percent of Gen Z possessing the values that employers want, according to a recent survey published to great consternation in the Wall Street Journal, Service Year Fellowships could play an important role in bridging the gap between what young people want (pleasure, helping others) and what companies need (hard work, achievement).

The good news is that national service is powerfully connected to today’s national conversation, even if it’s not yet part of it. Jonathan Reckford, who runs Habitat for Humanity, recalls Protestants and Catholics building houses together during “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland:

“When people work together, they focus on shared values and create the space for conversation.”

It seems as if the only thing both parties can agree on these days is banning cell phone in schools. Jonathan Haidt, author of the bestseller The Anxious Generation, says in speeches that he doesn’t even have to convince parents that their kids need more IRL human connections that ease loneliness and the burgeoning national mental health crisis: “It’s like pushing on an open door.” A year of service might be just what the doctor ordered.

To get there, colleges have to play a more active role, as John King, leading the way as president of SUNY (which has 370,000 students in New York), explained. Papia Debroy of Opportunity@Work introduced me to the concept of “the paper ceiling,” where applicants lose opportunities because they don’t have the right credentials. I was surprised to learn that only 12 percent of today’s college students live on campus; the rest—mostly at state and community colleges—are juggling work and other responsibilities and could use a paid service year as a bridge from school to work.

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, described a “false dichotomy between skills training and academic learning,” and explained that Brandeis now has two transcripts—one for academics and one for skills. Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America and Teach for All, said that corporate recruiters on campus must be compelled to compete on a more level playing field with those offering service jobs.

Secretary Austin, who sees service in a small-d democratic context (“What strengthens our democracy strengthens our national security”), argued that military recruiters should also present civilian options for those who don’t meet their physical and test-score standards, a much larger group than one might imagine. And the faith community has a natural connection to service. Cox, who says his Mormon mission changed his life, suggested that Charlie Kirk’s assassination “could be a tipping point. People are desperate for something different.”

To get to Khazei’s goal, a million Service Year Fellowships a year by 2030, the non-profit sector needs some re-structuring. Community foundations, many of them extraordinarily well-endowed, should move toward a Rotary Club International model, where thousands of young people are sent abroad on traveling fellowships. These foundations could start underwriting Service Year Fellowships for work at home. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, in outlining his surprisingly successful efforts to confront homelessness, says he has many job openings (with decent pay) in city support services. Bringing organized labor aboard, especially in heavily-unionized states, will be a challenge, as it was to FDR in establishing the CCC, but not an insurmountable one. And the marketing of national service needs an overhaul, with new strategies for tapping influencers. This, too, would be a good project for a foundation.

Retired Col. Robert Gordon, a former aide to Colin Powell and movement pioneer, laid out the challenges of scaling from the roughly 75,000 AmeriCorps service members to the millions necessary to change the country. But scale we must.

Khazei ended the summit with a quote from Margaret Mead that sounds Pollyannish in these grim times, but is indisputably true if one studies the history of social movements:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. It’s the only thing that ever has.”

The post How National Service Can De-Polarize America appeared first on Washington Monthly.

For a half century, the most recession-proof story in mainstream journalism has been declaring that college degrees aren’t recession-proof. Every economic downturn produces headlines warning that diplomas have lost—or are losing—their value. “Two things about these stories have remained constant,” Kevin Carey, who currently directs the education policy program at New America, wrote in The New Republic in 2011. “They always feature an over-educated bartender, and they are always wrong.”  

The genre dates back at least to the 1970s, when the Harvard labor economist Richard Freeman warned in his book The Overeducated American that too many people were earning degrees and that their long-term wages would suffer. The New York Times splashed the argument across its front page in 1975: “After generations during which going to college was assumed to be a sure route to the better life, college-educated Americans are losing their economic advantage.” But within the decade, the opposite happened: The wage premium for graduates soared, and it has only gone up more ever since.  

Census Bureau data shows that households headed by a bachelor’s-degree holder earn a median income of $132,700, more than double the $58,410 for those led by someone with only a high school diploma. Over the past two decades, degree-holding households saw real incomes rise by 13 percent, while high school-only households saw virtually no rise. As Carey wrote again in The Atlantic in 2023, that hasn’t stopped the cycle of headlines and sad profiles every time the economic cycle slows down.  

Which brings us to this fall’s entrant. On September 15, The New York Times published a story with the headline “The Newest Face of Long-Term Unemployment? The College Educated.” As of August 2025, there were about 1.9 million Americans classified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as “long-term unemployed”—roughly 26 percent of all jobless workers. (The BLS defines long-term unemployed as people who are jobless for 27 weeks or more.) A decade ago, only one in five of those classified as long-term unemployed had a college degree. The Times reports that today, it’s closer to one in three, or more than half a million people. Their stories are as affecting as ever: Sean Wittmeyer, profiled in the Times piece, has two master’s degrees, and said he can’t even get hired at his local board game store. “Anyone with a free subscription to Claude, ChatGPT, could do a decent amount of what I could do before,” he lamented.  

AI certainly can’t be what is preventing Wittmeyer from getting a retail job, but something real is happening. Job openings have fallen from 12.1 million in March 2022 to 7.2 million in July 2025. Despite recent cuts, interest rates remain high. Tariffs are sporadic and unpredictable. Federal agencies are being gutted. At the same time, employers are leaning into generative AI tools that automate exactly the kind of entry-level work that young people have historically used to get a foothold: research, drafting, data entry, analysis. OpenAI researchers have documented how ChatGPT can now perform more than 50 percent of tasks across 19 percent of all occupations. It’s the worst-case convergence—short-term economic chaos colliding with long-term technological change.  

The Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit labor market analytics firm, warns that the bottom rung of the career ladder is eroding. Its July 2025 report found that one year after graduation, 52 percent of the class of 2023 were working in jobs that didn’t require a degree. The report describes a “flipped pyramid”: steady demand for experienced workers paired with shrinking opportunities for new graduates. SignalFire, a venture capital firm, similarly found that between 2019 and 2024, there was a 50 percent decline in new roles for people with less than one year of experience at top tech firms. In sales, design, HR, engineering, and legal departments, the old footholds are vanishing. Add to that a brutal job search process. “Tinderized,” as Annie Lowrey ​​described it in The Atlantic—résumés screened by AI without human input, cookie-cutter cover letters written by AI, and hundreds of applications are disappearing into the ether. It’s no wonder that the Sean Wittmeyers of the world are discouraged.  

So the Times is not wrong to notice the strain. But the narrow focus on college grads risks obscuring the bigger story. The unemployment rate for recent college graduates (4.8 percent in June) is trending upward, but it’s still lower than that of all workers ages 22 to 27 (7.4 percent). In reality, the broader economy is wobbling: August’s 4.3 percent unemployment rate was the highest since 2021. BLS revisions shaved nearly a million jobs off the books between March 2024 and March 2025, ending a 53-month growth streak. Immigrant labor supply has fallen by 1.5 million workers in six months, further contributing to slowdowns in manufacturing and construction, which then reverberate to fields like real estate and architecture. Federal workforce cuts are on pace to eliminate 300,000 jobs by year’s end. In sum: The labor market is cooling for everyone. The present numbers, while sobering, do not tell the story of a collapse in the value of a college degree.  

Demographically, the long-term unemployed still skew less educated, nonwhite, and disabled. The roughly half-million long-term unemployed degree holders constitute less than half a percent of the U.S. labor force. And while college grads do make up a bigger slice of that pool than before, their overall unemployment rate remains far lower than that of workers without a degree. New grads as a group always take a certain amount of time to gain traction. “We graduate a new class of degree holders every year, who typically take seven to nine months to find a job that aligns with their skills,” says Courtney Brown of the Lumina Foundation. In a job market with nearly half as many openings as there were less than three years ago, that ramp-up is simply taking longer, Brown told me.  

History backs this up. The class of 2010 entered the workforce amid the wreckage of the Great Recession, with unemployment above 9 percent and 45 percent of the unemployed classified as long-term unemployed. At the time, they were branded a “lost generation.” Yet within a decade, their cohort’s wage premium over nongraduates had climbed back up even above normal levels, approaching an all-time high. Underemployment spikes for cohorts graduating into weak economies; then it falls as they move into better jobs.  

“The [career] ladder isn’t broken—it’s just being replaced with something that looks a lot flatter,” ​​Heather Doshay, formerly of the venture capital firm SignalFire, told CNBC. Today’s first job might be more technical or specialized—but it’s not inaccessible. “When the internet and email came on the scene as common corporate required skills,” Doshay noted, “new grads were well positioned to become experts by using them in school, and the same absolutely applies here with how accessible AI is.” The key, she said, “will be in how new grads harness their capabilities to become experts so they are seen as desirable tech-savvy workers who are at the forefront of AI’s advances.”  

Wages tend to follow productivity, and the workers best positioned to harness new technologies like AI in today’s economy are, by and large, college graduates. That is one reason degrees continue to command a premium. When the Great Recession hit, millions of Americans lost their jobs, but college graduates were the most likely to be employed at the outset and least likely to be unemployed as the crisis went on.

Economists also caution against declaring AI a job killer just yet. Anders Humlum, an economist at the University of Chicago, points out that predictions about AI’s long-term labor market impact are still highly speculative. “We now have two and a half years of experience with generative AI chatbots diffusing widely throughout the economy,” Humlum told CNBC, and “these tools have not made a significant difference for employment or earnings in any occupation thus far.”  

Universities are responding too—purchasing premium and university-specific services from companies ​​like OpenAI and Anthropic, offering hands-on AI courses, and transforming campuses into training grounds for a more digitally fluent workforce.  

So the education-to-employment conveyor belt might be noisier and slower than in the past, but it’s still moving. AI is reshaping the early stages of careers, not eliminating them entirely. A twenty-year-old can use AI to polish a cover letter, build a pitch deck, or practice job interviews. A designer can generate prototypes, a welder can simulate repairs. Many skills that used to require formal apprenticeship or classroom time are now teachable by machine. As Bruno V. Manno argued recently in the Monthly, AI raises the bar for demonstrated expertise—but it lowers the barrier to acquiring it.  

And if the short-term picture is cloudy, the long-term fundamentals point in the opposite direction. A new Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce report, Falling Behind, projects that by 2032 the U.S. will be short 5.25 million workers with postsecondary credentials, including 4.5 million with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Managers, teachers, nurses, engineers, accountants, and physicians are all on the shortage list. The culprits: Baby Boomer retirements, declining college enrollment and completion, and restrictive immigration policy. Far from being oversupplied with college graduates, the nation is on track for a severe shortage.  

Jobs demanding higher-order human skills—problem solving, communication, leadership—are likely to keep expanding, even in an AI-saturated economy. Those skills are exactly what college educations develop, and what AI cannot replace. That’s consistent with what we already see in the labor market. Even during today’s slowdown, degree holders earn far more, face lower unemployment, and enjoy better long-term prospects than their peers without diplomas. They live longer, are healthier, and are more likely to own homes.  

Why does the myth endure? Not because the reporting is false—the Times is right that more graduates are showing up among the long-term unemployed, and their stories deserve attention. What’s misleading is the leap from moment to meaning: the implication that the degree itself is losing value in the labor market. As Carey wrote almost 15 years ago, “People naturally tend to project current trends into the future, missing the up-and-down nature of the business cycle.” Today’s pain reflects two overlapping shocks: the economic whiplash of Trump’s second term, and AI tools that are rapidly automating the lowest rungs of white-collar work. Those forces make it harder for new graduates to get started—but history and data both show that the long-term premium on higher education is rising, not collapsing. 

Misreading cyclical pain as structural collapse has consequences. It erodes public confidence in higher education. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in higher ed. By 2024, that had fallen to 36 percent, while the share expressing little or no confidence more than tripled, to 32 percent. When students absorb the message that college isn’t worth it, whether because of rising costs, wokeness, or the rise of AI, they’re more likely to forgo it. That fuels a cycle that benefits no one: not the student’s long-term health and wages, not the economy that needs more educated workers, and not colleges that depend on enrollment. 

None of this diminishes the difficulty of Sean Wittmeyer’s job search. But it’s worth noting, as the Times buried at the end of its story, that he is now using his design skills to develop and sell board games. The college degree has endured for a reason. What we need isn’t fewer of them, but better-aligned ones: programs tailored to workforce demand, policies that boost affordability and completion, and institutions that help students translate education into opportunity. The bartender with a doctorate will always be good copy. But the degree remains the surest, sturdiest path to prosperity.  

The post The College Degree Is Not Losing Value   appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Donald Trump has opened a new, terribly ill-advised battle in his war on affirmative action. His target is no longer just racial preferences, an issue where Trump had strong public support. Instead, Trump’s new enemy appears to be racial diversity itself—something most Americans support in educational settings when it is achieved by giving a break to the economically disadvantaged of all races. A Trump Department of Justice memorandum, for instance, has declared that “criteria like socioeconomic status, first-generation status, or geographic diversity must not be used” if a university’s goal is to further racial integration on campus. 

Given the president’s appalling history on matters of race, this development, while troubling, is not particularly surprising. What is mystifying is that a pillar of the higher education establishment recently went along with Trump. Earlier this month, the College Board, which administers the SAT, announced it would stop making a tool called Landscape available to colleges, which is designed to help identify high-achieving low-income students of all races. The organization cited as its reason the way in which “federal and state policy continues to evolve around how institutions use demographic and geographic information in admissions.” 

The decision represents the worst kind of capitulation. Landscape, as the College Board noted, “was intentionally developed without the use or consideration of data on race or ethnicity.” Instead, it allowed colleges to consider a student’s achievement in light of the socioeconomic makeup of his or her neighborhood and high school. Neighborhood factors included median family income, typical educational attainment, the share of families headed by a single parent, and crime rates. High school factors included the share of students eligible for subsidized lunch, the proportion taking AP exams, and the average SAT score. The idea was that if a student does pretty well academically despite these educational challenges, they have something special to offer. 

As a critic of racial preferences and a strong supporter of affirmative action based on economic class, I was enthusiastic about Landscape and proud of a small role in its development. I served as a sounding board as the College Board developed the tool. As an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, which challenged racial preferences at Harvard, the University of North Carolina, and later the U.S. Naval Academy, I testified that looking at the socioeconomic status of neighborhoods and high schools was both fair and a good way of promoting racial and economic diversity without racial preferences. In September 2024, I favorably cited Landscape in my testimony for Students for Fair Admissions in the Naval Academy case, arguing that it was an important tool that could be used to promote racial diversity without racial preferences. 

After Donald Trump was elected in November 2024, the administration and conservative activists and thinkers sought to move the legal goalposts. Last month, Commentary magazine published a cover story by Naomi Schaefer Riley, the conservative writer, arguing that the College Board’s Landscape tool was a tool for racial discrimination.  

Riley was particularly suspicious that many of the factors that the College Board selected for Landscape—such as coming from a neighborhood with a high share of single-parent homes and with high crime rates—have a strong correlation with race. She noted: “In 2022, about 24 percent of white children were living in a home with only a mother, compared with 63 percent of all black children.” She was also dubious of employing crime statistics. “Incorporating crime rates by census tract into any admissions decisions, even controlling for income, will likely favor black students,” Riley wrote. She concluded that Landscape provided “a way to find out a student’s race without asking for it,” and “a way of surfacing race-based information surreptitiously.”  

This analysis is wrong on two fronts. To begin with, Riley’s notion that Landscape is a problem because it allows administrators to detect a student’s race is misplaced. There are much more efficient ways for admissions officers to know a student’s racial identity: through extracurriculars (are they a member of the Black Students Association?) and essays (what do they say when asked how they would contribute to a diverse student body?) The problem is not that admissions officers know a student’s race; it’s when they use that information to employ a racial preference. 

The second flaw in Riley’s analysis is that, as a matter of fairness, it’s relevant to consider whether a student grew up in a high-crime or low-crime area, or where a lot of their peers come from single-parent homes. As Raj Chetty and his colleagues have found, living in a neighborhood with a large share of single-parent households predicts opportunity in America. A student of any race who lives in such a neighborhood and nevertheless does fairly well shows grit and determination. The fact that, on average, Black students face this extra disadvantage is hardly a reason to ignore this factor. 

The irony is that while Riley thinks Landscape is a surreptitious route for achieving racial diversity, die-hard advocates of racial preferences fault it for the opposite reason. They worry that too many white and Asian students will benefit from race-neutral strategies. These supporters of racial preferences fault the economic approach for failing to help well-off Black and Hispanic students whom they believe bring important diversity to campus. Paradoxically, those of the far right and the far left, preoccupied by race, ignore larger issues of economic inequality.  

The College Board’s decision to jettison Landscape is particularly perplexing because a majority of Supreme Court justices were clear in their landmark 2023 decision, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, that using socioeconomic factors is perfectly legal. In his concurring opinion in the Students for Fair Admissions case, for example, Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed favorably to my expert testimony that “Harvard could nearly replicate the current racial composition of its student body without resorting to race-based practices if it: 1. provided socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants just half of the tip it gives recruited athletes; and 2. eliminated tips for the children of donors, alumni, and faculty.” 

In oral arguments before the Court over the use of race in admissions at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the justices peppered Students for Fair Admissions about whether it would challenge policies like socioeconomic preferences as a form of proxy discrimination.  

In response, Patrick Strawbridge, a lawyer for Students for Fair Admissions, said that while SFFA would likely oppose “a pure proxy for race” such as a preference for the descendants of those who were enslaved, other programs—such as socioeconomic or geographic preferences—would be legal because there would be a “race-neutral justification” for adopting those plans. Strawbridge declared, “If the only reason to do it [adopt a race-neutral strategy] is through the narrow lens of race and there is no other race-neutral justification, that’s the only scenario where it would create problems.” The College Board’s Landscape tool can be justified on multiple grounds—as a way to pursue true merit (accomplishments in light of hurdles surmounted), to achieve the benefits of socioeconomic diversity, and to garner more ideological diversity (given America’s diploma divide in voting)—as well as to achieve more racial diversity. 

Since the 2023 SFFA decision, further evidence has emerged that a Landscape-like program is on solid legal ground. In 2024, when the Pacific Legal Foundation pressed the argument that using socioeconomic and geographic factors constitutes “proxy discrimination,” the Supreme Court twice turned down the opportunity to pursue that path. Over the vigorous dissents of the most conservative justices, the Court declined to hear a case involving Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, in February and another involving the Boston Exam Schools in December. 

Given this, the real shame is that Democratic activists and politicians have not vocally challenged the College Board for its puzzling surrender. For years, Democrats were on the defensive on affirmative action, given the unpopularity of racial preferences. Now they (as well as Republicans and Independents) can champion a legally sound and politically popular approach to boost social mobility and racial integration. The silence is deafening. 

The post The College Board Capitulates to Trump appeared first on Washington Monthly.

In comparison to its glitzy neighbor in Princeton, New Jersey’s Montclair State University cuts a relatively low profile. But its impact on the region is just as profound. Montclair is New Jersey’s second largest public university, with 21,000 students—the majority of whom are racial minorities and half of whom are the first in their families to go to college. 

Montclair is also among the top-ranked colleges in Washington Monthly’s 2025 College Guide and Rankings as a “Best Bang for the Buck” institution in the Northeast. In this sponsored episode, senior editor Anne Kim speaks with Montclair’s president, Jonathan Koppell, about the unique features of his school. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available on Spotify, iTunes and YouTube.

Anne Kim: Tell us a little bit more about Montclair State University. I know that you’re located just outside New York City, and the photos and videos I’ve seen show a gorgeous campus with white buildings and red roofs, but can you give us a little bit more about the geography and the history of the school?

Jonathan Koppell: People see the pictures of our campus and say, “You must be in Southern California!” or something like that, because we’ve got this Spanish mission-style architecture. But as you noted, we’re actually in northern New Jersey, about 10 miles due west of midtown Manhattan. We may be as well known to people as we should be, but we’re the second largest university in New Jersey.

We’re proud of the fact that we are ranked by Washington Monthly as a top-ranked university in New Jersey, owing to our status as an engine of economic social mobility. About half of our students are on track to be the first in their family to graduate from college. We are a majority minority institution—a majority of our students are from underrepresented groups.

And our outcomes vastly exceed what one might project based on the demographics of our students. But what really is important thing is that we are a better institution because of this profile with outstanding outcomes from an academic point of view. 

And that’s what I’m particularly proud about. There’s this unstated notion that if you’re accessible, you must be making compromises. We’re not making compromises. We are highly accessible, but also a high achieving university. 

We’re very much committed to public service, both in terms of the university’s community engagement and at the same time encouraging public service in our students.

Montclair is a little bit of a hidden treasure, but we’re trying to change that. It’s a school that I think more people need to know about because it shows what higher education can and should be.

In some ways, we are producing more significant outcomes in terms of the contribution to the dynamism  of the economy and the delivery on the promise of the American dream that if you work hard and apply yourself, you can be put in a position to change the fortunes, not only for yourself, but for your family and your community.

The majority of our students are working; they’re balancing family and jobs. About a third of our students live on campus. The majority do not. 

Anne Kim: One of the reasons that Montclair is among the top ranked schools in the Washington Monthly’s College Guide is as a “Best Bang for the Buck” institution in the Northeast is affordability. I want to drill down a little bit on this question because that is probably one of the biggest concerns that a lot of students and parents have. According to the numbers that we have for you, the net price of attending Montclair is about $11,300, which is below the national average net price. So can you talk a little bit more about what Montclair does to offer an affordable education? And in particular, I saw on your website two really interesting programs, the Red Hawk Advantage Award and the Garden State Guarantee. 

Jonathan Koppell: First of all, I think it is important to say that while we’re proud of those numbers, they are, I think in many cases, still a lift for a lot of families to figure out. And so I don’t want to ever seem glib and say like, well, it’s no big deal. It is a big deal and it’s a stretch for a lot of our families. 

And of course the numbers you gave are averages. Some people are in a different spot. Some people pay nothing because of the nature of financial aid.

I think that we do a good job of keeping costs down. We’re proud that we have the fewest number of employees per degree in the state of New Jersey, and we try to be efficient, being mindful of our students and their families at every step of the way. 

But it’s also the case that the degree has to have value in order for that equation to work. I think a lot of times people say that the way to make college more affordable is just to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. We don’t do that. We try to ensure that the programs are of high quality and that the preparation for our students is such that they enter the job market in a position to do well and to thrive. Giving somebody an inexpensive degree is not necessarily giving them a valuable degree.

I’m a little bit reluctant to lean too far into the income argument because a lot of our students are not trying to optimize their income. If you’re coming here to be a teacher or a nurse or a social worker or a counselor or any number of professions, it’s not because you think you’re going to be a millionaire. It’s because you want to be in a place to do good in the world, to have a satisfying career, and to take care of your family. 

What do we do to try and help make it affordable? You mentioned the Garden State Guarantee. The Garden State Guarantee is a state program  which ensures that people at certain income levels can attend  at no cost. 

But we wanted to complement that with our own program, the Red Hawk Advantage, which extend that support higher up the income ladder. One of the concerns I have about the way we do financial aid is that folks in the middle economically are squeezed because they don’t have access to state financial aid and they don’t have access to Pell, but they’re not wealthy enough where they can easily just write a check. And so we’ve tried to extend our provision of financial aid from our university resources beyond the levels of the Garden State Guarantee or Pell because we do recognize how difficult it is to make college affordable. 

Anne Kim: I want to talk a little bit more about what kinds of experiences students get to prepare themselves for the workforce. I understand what you’re saying about that’s not the only reason students should come to college. And I think that there has been a very transactional characterization of the college-student relationship with a huge amount of emphasis on ROI to the detriment of the college experience. That being said, it does seem, based on your website, that students are having incredible work-based learning experiences. The College Tour video featured on your website talks about students interning on Wall Street and working on Broadway. You have the best college radio station in the country. These seem like incredible experiences that will set people up well.

Jonathan Koppell: I want to be clear that I think most students do have in mind that college is going to set them up for a professional, for professional success. I just don’t think that everybody judges professional success by the size of their paycheck.

 We have one of the finest performing arts colleges in the country, bar none, and our students are on Broadway and they are in Hollywood and they’re on television and they’re fantastic dancers and musicians. Very few people in those professions, notwithstanding Taylor Swift, end up as billionaires or millionaires, but they have very fulfilling careers.

And they’re set up to be successful in part because we are really focused on giving students opportunities to learn with hands-on experiences while they’re still in school. So you mentioned our award-winning radio station, WMSC, but we have a variety of places like that radio station where students are learning while they’re doing. 

We just launched our School of Communications and Media as a standalone college of communications and media. And the record there of students finding employment afterwards is phenomenal. 

We are unique in hosting our own streaming platform, which no other university has. We have our own Red Hawk Sports Network where every Montclair State University sporting event is covered by a crew of students  producing high-level broadcasts of baseball, football, you name it. 

We’ve now emerged as an R2 research university.  Our research funding has gone up. That creates learning opportunities for our students and it puts them in a better position when they graduate. 

We’re going to continue to try and improve in this regard and in particular try to level the playing field. One of the issues when you have a population like ours is that it’s awfully difficult for a student who’s working, in many cases full time, to afford to be able to go to college and also take an unpaid internship. 

We’re trying to figure out how to not only create those learning opportunities, but have them be paid learning opportunities so that they’re accessible to the full range of our student population. 

Anne Kim: What is the university doing to make sure that students do, in fact, walk across the stage to collect their diplomas? I saw on your site that you have several programs that are actually geared toward that, especially because you have so many first-generation students coming through your doors. It seems like you have an early college program and a summer bridge program. Can you talk a little bit more about what these programs are as well as other supports that you might offer?

Jonathan Koppell: I appreciate you calling attention to that question because as you know, there’s a lot of critical attention around higher education these days. Part of it is this notion that college isn’t worth it and so on, but part of the frustration is that a lot of people go to college and never finish.

And they are right to be frustrated. I actually think you could make the argument that somebody who starts college and doesn’t finish is worse off than if they never started at all because now they’ve got some debt, they have a psychological burden of having failed. 

From my perspective, when a student arrives at our campus, it’s our moral obligation to see them walk across the stage. And we can’t just say, well, you need to try harder. We have to look in the mirror and say, “Well, what do we need to do differently in order to make sure those students succeed?” 

So our summer bridge program gives students the opportunity to engage and to learn how to be a college student in the summer before they start so that they’re not hitting the college campus cold. They get some training and experience in how to live at a college and how  take on coursework independently. For many students, this is a big transition. 

Part of it is just getting people comfortable with the language and the mechanics of college and just establishing that this is a place where they belong. And that’s a big part of what we’re trying to do with our students who maybe have nagging voices in the back of their head telling them, “I don’t know if I can do this” and so on. 

We try to be very intentional about creating that sense of belonging,  and we have wrapped a good portion of our student life programs under something we call the Office of Student Belonging because we think that’s a major hurdle that many students have to overcome. 

We try to also monitor very carefully how students are progressing on their journey so that if they are running into hurdles or even a little hiccup, we identify that early, we intervene and try and help them before it’s too late. 

Anne Kim: Let’s go back now to something you said early on in this conversation about how Montclair is not just a public university but a public serving university. Can you talk a little bit more about that? 

Jonathan Koppell: When people say public university, what they usually mean by that is you get some portion of your budget from the state, which we do. Unfortunately, as a percentage of the total budget, it goes down every year, but we’re very grateful for the people’s investment  in the university. 

But our publicness is more about our mission than our budget. And I consider our mission to serve the public interest. And certainly we do that in the ways that we already talked about by making education accessible to a population that’s representative of the whole state. But I believe universities can do much more. 

We have thousands of smart, energetic, passionate people. We have students who are eager to serve and to apply the things that they’re learning in the classroom. We have faculty who are doing cutting-edge research and are knowledgeable about many of the challenges that our society faces. And we have a staff that creates  centers and programs that have capacity to engage the world. And if you just torqued all of those things a little bit and pointed them outwards, you can have a massive impact in the community. 

Now you can’t waltz into the neighborhood and say, we have all the answers, we know what to do. You have to be humble  and be a good partner, which means listening to the community, asking them what they want, asking them how we can be  supportive, not big footing all over the place and saying, you know, we’re in charge. But if you build those partnerships, you can do phenomenal things. 

We’re very excited about, for example, our work in Paterson, which is an unappreciated or underappreciated city here in northern New Jersey, remarkable history. We’ve set up the One Square Mile program there, which is about trying to catalyze transformation in a distinct geography in a tough community. I think that by concentrating our effort there and dealing with things like public health, economic stability, financial literacy, quality of schools, and housing, we can have a big effect. We also have a unique partnership with the Montclair Department of Public Health, which is linked with our School of Public Health.

Our business students are out there doing all kinds of interesting things, working with small businesses, helping residents do their tax returns. Our science students are out there in the community, measuring water quality, looking for algae blooms and other disruptors to save drinking water. Our education programs are creating pipelines of teachers through  Red Hawks Rising, a signature program in Newark, which is having a huge effect on schools there. You can orient a university around the needs and aspirations of your community, and at the same time, each of those programs creates learning opportunities for our students.

We’re not the only university that’s doing this, but I think all universities should embrace this idea. And frankly, I think that the more higher education does that, the more positive the feeling will be about higher education generally. 

The post SPONSORED: Montclair State—An Engine of Opportunity for First-Generation Students appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The onslaught of AI into higher education has been especially worrisome for college admissions officers: Are the students they admit chatbots in disguise? According to one 2024 survey, as many as one in three high school seniors applying to college in the 2023-24 school year used AI for their essays.

In response, a growing number of colleges and universities are inviting applicants to submit a “video introduction” of themselves, in addition to the usual gauntlet of personal essays, academic transcripts, extracurricular activities, and test scores. Many of these schools are highly selective, like Brown, Duke, Vanderbilt, the University of Chicago, and Claremont McKenna. But lower-profile schools like Babson College in Massachusetts and Lawrence University in Wisconsin encourage video submissions too.

Proponents argue that video submissions are a cheat-proof antidote to the rising scourge of AI-written essays. “When people ask me why colleges are using this, I think there are three reasons: ChatGPT, ChatGPT, and ChatGPT,” says Terry Crawford, CEO of the video interview and admissions company InitialView. “Essays don’t really have value anymore—that’s just the reality.” Crawford moreover argues that videos are arguably an easy lift for the digital natives of Gen Z and beyond, many of whom already share their lives on social media. “Students are on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube, and that is the way they communicate—via video,” he said.

According to Crawford, more than 30 schools have signed up for his company’s Glimpse platform since its launch in 2023. Students record 90-second “talking-head” videos from their phones or computers, which they can send to participating schools just like they send their SAT scores via the College Board or their applications through the Common App. Crawford says the platform expects to handle at least 50,000 video submissions this admissions cycle, but the total could be triple that. The number of colleges signing up, he said, is “growing daily.”

But video college applications also give wealthy applicants another leg up over less-affluent peers, especially when videos are slickly produced and the applicants well-scripted. Moreover, they worsen the risk of bias and even legal liability—a particular hazard in the anti-DEI era of Trump—because it’s impossible to avoid seeing what applicants look like. At worst, TikTok-style self-promotion could exacerbate inequities that have put elite colleges in the crosshairs.

Even before AI, college admissions essays were burnished by parents, teachers, counselors, and paid consultants. One fourth of Harvard’s Class of 2027 reportedly relied on paid help for their applications. Videos, however, elevate adult assistance to a new level of extravagance. “The whole process rewards people who can pay for help with these things,” said admissions counselor Anna Ivey, founder of Anna Ivey Consulting. “This is just one more thing that benefits people who can get paid help.”

To its credit, Glimpse’s platform does not allow students to upload lavish, Oscar-worthy productions, which means schools that sign up for Glimpse see a relatively uniform format.

Schools like Brown and the University of Chicago, however, have no such restrictions on format (although Brown also offers Glimpse as an option). This tacitly invites all sorts of over-the-top submissions—and is fueling a new cottage industry. Many private college counselors now offer video submission consultations as part of their services, while specialized college application video production companies have begun to sprout. Already, this option has launched an arms race among applicants posting their submissions online.

Anika Suman’s college admissions video, for instance, has racked up more than 905,000 views on YouTube. Titled “ACCEPTED Brown Video Portfolio (Class of 2027),” the video is a two-minute showcase of Anika’s accomplishments—performing with a traditional Indian dance troupe, singing in a choir, conducting research at a neuroscience lab to develop robotic prosthetics for amputees, and founding a STEM club at her school. Her presentation is charming, articulate, and confident—guaranteed to send envious parents and aspiring students spiraling into self-doubt. She might have skipped hiring a consultant – but only because of her comically perfect Ivy League resume and video editing skills.

Search for “college application videos” on YouTube, and you’ll find dozens more videos from overwhelmingly impressive—and creative—applicants. One student—whose video had amassed 188,000 views—used stuffed animals to introduce facets of his life, from rollercoaster enthusiast to poetry performer at national competitions. Another video (810,000 views) used an animated imaginary friend to highlight the student’s artistic skills.

Most videos feature engaging music, eye-catching graphics, seamless editing, and compelling narration. Every one of these adolescents has perfect skin. Most of these students appear affluent. Bedrooms and kitchens are well-appointed, and wardrobes are stylish. Exotic travel figures prominently in their digital autobiographies. While it’s possible that students edited these videos themselves, someone else was likely holding the camera. Someone might have also helped with the script, and parents certainly bankrolled the many activities captured on video. Ironically, AI video tools can enhance digital stories, even though digital stories are themselves supposed to be a check on AI.

While Chicago advises its applicants that the “recommended video profile” does not need to be extensively rehearsed or polished, the highly polished videos posted by accepted students on YouTube suggest otherwise. While a lower-income student could create an extraordinary video, similar to how a low-budget indie film sometimes becomes a hit, wealthier students—like a big-budget franchise flick—are likelier to be the winners.

Video submissions could also favor the beautiful as well as the rich- another way they make the admissions process less fair. Research has long shown evidence of a “beauty bias”—where attractive people are “perceived to be more successful, dominant, sociable, trustworthy, mentally stable and intelligent than unattractive people,” as a 2016 study by researchers at Scotland’s St. Andrews concluded. In a 2025 study of college admissions in China, researchers found that attractive students were more likely to be accepted into higher-ranked universities. On the flip side, a 2019 study published by the Association of American Medical Colleges found evidence of “discrimination against facially unattractive and obese applicants” seeking residencies in radiology.

Video submissions may not benefit colleges either. On the one hand, videos uploaded to Glimpse or its competitor Vericant are likely preferable to the alumni interviews many schools conduct. The relative standardization of Glimpse videos eliminates some of the hazards of in-person interviews, where it’s “hard to ensure what alumni might be asking 17-year-olds,” as InitialView’s Crawford points out.

On the other hand, video may not offer colleges much more than a splashier presentation of students’ resumes. In fact, colleges should question the fundamental premise of video applications—that the intrinsically shallow medium of video can, in fact, be more “authentic” than traditional essays. Do videos truly show a student’s true character, or their presentation of one? “You don’t see the child’s personality,” argues Mandee Adler, founder of International College Counselors, an admissions consulting firm. “You see the child’s personality on film.”

Videos, Adler argues, reward performance over authenticity and even achievement. “There are students who are just better at performing and presenting than other kids—so is that the attribute that we’re looking for?” she said. “I’ve had students who are extremely intelligent, who have done everything right on grades and test scores, and they’re not great in front of a camera.”

The potentially tenuous connection between a student’s video performance and their likelihood of college success is one reason the institution known for pioneering video applications no longer relies on them. In 2014, Maryland’s Goucher College made headlines by announcing it would accept two-minute videos in lieu of traditional applications. Initial cohorts of video applicants were strong performers, and the college was credited both for its creativity and for opening opportunities to students who might not shine on traditional metrics.

Perhaps surprisingly, the video option never took off, and the college has since returned to a traditional application process (videos aren’t even an option). “Not nearly as many students took advantage of it as you would have thought,” said Tania Rachkoskie, Goucher’s associate vice president for enrollment management. Ultimately, video applications became a relatively limited tool for admissions decision-making. “What was great about it was it gave students who maybe had some hidden talent or some hidden non-tangible application qualities—whether it’s grit or determination or those intangibles that won’t necessarily come through in a traditional application—an opportunity to showcase that information,” Rachkoskie said.

However, she continued, “There were some students admitted who perhaps didn’t have the academic ability or the preparation that they needed coming out of high school, and without seeing a transcript, without hearing from a school counselor, without seeing if they want to submit test scores, without seeing those other quantitative data points, it became more challenging to make a decision—can this student be successful here”?

Yet another risk for colleges from the rise of video submissions is legal. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling to end race-based affirmative action in college admissions, and the Trump Administration’s unrelenting hostility toward all things “DEI,” colleges can’t be too careful in how they make admissions decisions.

InitialView’s Crawford says his platform does not ask students about race when they upload a video, but it’s still potentially obvious to the universities receiving submissions. “Arguably, it would expose the university to some risk, for the same reason that under employment law, companies do not want you attaching a photo to your resume,” said admissions consultant Ivey, who also has a law degree from the University of Chicago. It’s the same reason universities stopped requesting photos with applications long ago. With the Trump administration now demanding that colleges hand over admissions data—including data on race—video submissions are just one more thing that could be weaponized against schools.

“Fairness” in college admissions may forever be an elusive goal, and AI is unquestionably making that task harder. Videos, however, would move the needle in the wrong direction.

But assuming video submissions are here to stay, the “fairest” way to administer them is to standardize them on platforms—like Glimpse or Vericant—without allowing uploads of professionally produced extravaganzas where the only “authentic” element is the privilege a student enjoys. Backgrounds should be neutral, as with passport photos (no Mt. Everest or Carnegie Hall). One creative way to level the field is the approach at Bowdoin, where students who opt for a video must respond spontaneously to a random question. While this doesn’t preclude professional coaching, students are less likely to be heavily scripted.

Videos should also remain optional, so students who don’t submit won’t be penalized. And for students who skip the video and want their voice to come through, the advice from admissions counselors is simple: Don’t use AI.

The post AI Is Killing the College Essay. Enter the “Video Essay” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Congress enacted drastic changes to federal student loan and repayment programs with the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed earlier this year. 

Graduate students face new limits on their borrowing, as do parents of college students. Medical students in particular could find it hard to finance their education, thanks to a new annual cap on borrowing of $50,000 a year. (The total cost of attendance for one year of medical schools runs as high as $113,746 at a private institution like Harvard, but it’s still $66,176 at state school like the University of Texas-Southwestern.) 

In addition, Congress overhauled student loan repayment plans to limit the number of options available and to lengthen the period before a loan is forgiven.  Moreover, students who qualify for loan forgiveness under income-driven repayment plans could face significant tax bills for this benefit, beginning in 2026. 

Given the decimation of the Department of Education earlier this year, the implementation of all these changes—and the processing of student loan applications this fall—could be challenging, says Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and one of the nation’s leading experts on student debt and college affordability. More concerning, she says, is the lack of a coherent rationale for all of these changes in the first place. “The most positive way of looking at it would be to say the changes to student loans are designed to eventually make the system simpler to ensure that more people repay their loans so that taxpayers are not on the hook,” she said. “On the other hand, it’s pretty clear that the overarching goal is not increased access to college.”

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Anne Kim: The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” contained a ton of provisions that affect student loans and college financial aid. If you had to break it down to the bottom line, who are the students most affected by the new law?

Sandy Baum: Well, the bill is so complex that it’s hard to get to all of the details. But the student aid changes that are most significant have to do with student loans. But it’s not undergraduate students whose borrowing capacity is affected. It is graduate students and parents of undergraduate students. 

Currently, graduate students can borrow almost an infinite amount from Grad Plus loans and cover all of their educational expenses. That’s gone, and there are now new limits on the total amount that graduate students can borrow. 

There are also new limits on how much parents can borrow to support their undergraduate students. It used to be that they could borrow up to the full cost of attendance to cover all of the expenses not covered by other financial aid, but now there will be limits. 

Anne Kim: For the graduate students, I’m assuming that professional students—like medical students, law students and business school students—are going to be in the most trouble. In fact, the president of the American Medical Association called the graduate student loan limits “a punch in the face.” How impactful is this going to be on the future supply of doctors, lawyers, MBAs, and professors?

Sandy Baum: First of all, professional students will be able to borrow more than master’s degree students and research doctoral students. But it’s not entirely clear which programs will be categorized as “professional.” 

So for example, one of the programs that would be very much affected if you don’t call it a “professional” program is the “PsyD”—psychology doctoral degrees. About half of those students would be very much affected by the limits. But if they are categorized as “professional” degree students, then loan limits would be significantly higher, and it might not be a problem.

You’re right to mention doctors because doctors and dentists are much more likely to hit the limit. A much larger share of people studying medicine and dentistry now borrow more than what the new limits will allow them. So it will not be surprising that medical schools will be making noise about this, and I could imagine that being something that could change and be adjusted in the near future.

Anne Kim: What about Parent PLUS loans?  Is it middle-class parents who take out Parent PLUS or is it lower income parents who are more likely to take out Parent PLUS? Whom are those limits going to affect?

Sandy Baum: Well, the Parent PLUS Loan was initially designed to make it easier for middle- and upper- income families to come up with the cash—people who could afford to pay but didn’t have the liquid assets and needed to pay over time. That makes sense. But increasingly, more and more middle- and low income families have been taking Parent PLUS Loans because they don’t have any other way to pay. 

A shocking share of people with zero ability to pay take out Parent PLUS loans. Many people who would never get a loan if they went to the bank get Parent PLUS loans and have no hope of repaying it. It’s not that low-income borrowers are more likely to borrow than higher income, but a disturbing share of Parent PLUS borrowers are low-income. However, it’s the higher-income parent borrowers who borrow large amounts. So it seems like the limits on Parent PLUS will mean that they are less useful to the more affluent families who are using this as a financing mechanism. 

But these limits won’t solve the problem of low-income families taking out Parent PLUS loans because very few really low-income parents are going to hit the limit.

Anne Kim: Right. So the new limits for Parent Plus are $65,000 in the aggregate per child and $20,000 a year. And looking at some of the tuitions that are out there now—where a few schools have hit $100,000 a year in costs—that $20,000 per year limits seems like a suddenly small amount to some parents, I’m sure.

Sandy Baum: That’s right, although for many of the low-income parents, they’re getting the financial aid that pays a big part of that. 

One of the interesting things about the loan limits is that if it’s $20,000 a year and $65,000 overall, you can borrow $20,000 a year for the first three years, but not the fourth year. It’s a little confusing. And master’s degree students, the annual limits don’t add up either. If you’re in a two-year master’s program or even a three-year master’s program, you’re not going to hit the aggregate $100,000 limit because it doesn’t take you that long to get a degree. So that’s very odd.

Anne Kim: It’s very odd. So from what you’re saying, the implication is that what the administration and the GOP are trying to do here is to limit the likelihood of default by certain borrowers. But is that actually going to be the effect? What unintended consequences do you see?

Sandy Baum: It’s not clear that there was a reasoned way of thinking about limiting default because affluent parents don’t default on Parent PLUS loans. It’s the low-income parents who should have been given a bigger Pell Grant instead of Parent PLUS loans who are likely to default and still going to be defaulting. Graduate students are increasingly having default problems, but medical students aren’t very likely to default. 

Anne Kim: So let’s talk about repayment plans, and this is a little bit confusing as well. It sounds like new borrowers are going to have basically only two options available to them, but it’s  unclear what’s going to happen to current borrowers. Can you explain what these two new options are going to be and how that’s going to affect students’ experiences?

Sandy Baum: Well, first, let me say that we now have a crazy number of options, and students have no idea how to pick what they’re going to do. So limiting the number of plans is not in and of itself a problem. 

There will be one fixed payment plan with a term of 10 years, but if you borrow a lot of money, you’ll be able to extend that for a longer period of time so you have lower monthly payments. And then there’ll be one income-driven plan–the Repayment Assistance or “RAP” plan. And it’s interesting because when you look at its provisions, it’s not simple to figure out who will be helped and who will be hurt. 

When the Biden administration tried to implement this new plan called SAVE, which the courts struck down, it was incredibly generous, and many more people would have ended up having their balances forgiven. So if you compare the new plan to that plan, it looks worse for almost everybody.

But that’s not how people have been repaying their loans because SAVE really never went into effect. So it makes much more sense to compare the new plan to the way that students have been repaying. And in some ways, it’s going to be harder for students, and in some ways, it’s going to be easier. 

So for students in income-driven plans, your monthly payment depends on your income, not how much you borrowed, and you keep paying until you’ve paid it all off or until your balances are forgiven. Under current plans, your balances are forgiven after 20 years if you have only undergraduate loans, or 25 years if you have graduate loans. Under the new plan, everybody will have to pay for 30 years so loan forgiveness is farther in the future. 

A lot of people also now have zero expected payment because their income is below 150 percent of the poverty line. But under the new plan, everybody pays at least $10 a month.

There are arguments for and against that. I mean, if you have no money, how are you going to come up with $10 a month? On the other hand, $10 a month is a pretty small amount. And some people think that this will help people get in the habit of paying their student loans. 

In some ways, the new plan is more generous. Right now, one big problem is that if your payments don’t cover your interest, your balances increase over time. And it’s really a problem that a lot of people see their balances balloon. 

But under the new plan, if your payment doesn’t cover your interest, that interest is forgiven. Now that’s going to be huge.

Take a recent medical school graduate who may have borrowed $300,000 and they’re in residency. Their payments can’t pay all of the interest on that loan, so their interest will be forgiven. And in fact, if you have a $50 payment, they’ll apply it first to your principal and then forgive your interest. So in that sense, that’s much more generous. 

Anne Kim: That’s interesting. And do we know at this point whether current borrowers are going to be allowed—or forced—to switch into one of these plans? 

Sandy Baum: The people who signed up for the SAVE program that never really happened are going to have to be in one of these plans. But people who are already borrowing can keep their plan for a couple of years and then they will have some other options. It’s very confusing. I would recommend checking in with the school, with the lender, with whoever’s collecting the payments, because eventually everybody is going to go into one of these two plans. But current borrowers have some respite.

Anne Kim: Okay. I want to turn a little bit to low-income students and in particular Pell grants. Now, they did manage to dodge a bullet with this new law because earlier versions of the legislation, if I remember right, included some pretty steep cuts to Pell Grants for low-income students, but because there was so much outcry from community colleges and from student advocates, the final law did not go forward with these cuts.

But there’s at least one very significant change to the Pell grant and that is the ability now to use Pell grants for short-term job training programs. This could mean that adult learners have access to Pell that they didn’t have before, but there are also lot of questions about the quality of these programs and whether there are sufficient safeguards. What’s your overall take on so-called “workforce Pell” and if it’s going to have the beneficial impact intended?

Sandy Baum: I have mixed reactions to “workforce Pell.” On one hand, currently, the program has to be 15 weeks long to be covered. There are a lot of programs that we currently cover with Pell that aren’t very good and that don’t do much for students. Lowering the length of the time period to eight weeks is almost certainly going to let in some programs that don’t serve students well, but it’s not clear that the current dividing line is solving that problem either. 

So the real question is the protections. To what extent are they eliminating programs that don’t have good outcomes? They claim to have some protections in place, but I think a lot of people think those protections are not going to be very effective. 

Now, it’s going to help some low-income students enroll in programs that really can help them get a job. Community colleges like it for that reason.

It’s really hard to know. It’s easy to say, “Wouldn’t it be great if everybody could just get a few weeks of training and get a good job?” But the problem is that a lot of people go get short-term training, and they can’t get a good job. Workforce Pell could add to this problem, but it doesn’t really create a new problem. It’s a problem that we just haven’t solved. 

There’s also a new accountability measure, but it excludes certificate programs, which are the programs that have the biggest problems. 

Anne Kim: So let’s turn to that and talk a little bit about the so-called “accountability earnings” test. As I understand it, an undergraduate program can lose access to federal loans if graduates earn less than someone with a high school diploma. And the idea here is to improve quality and guarantee a return on investment. So you’ve already mentioned one problem with that—which is the exclusion of certificate programs—but what other problems do you see?  Are students going to be able to tell which programs are worth it and which not? How are the data going to be deployed?

Sandy Baum: I don’t know about the data because we don’t have anybody in the Department of Education who’s overseeing data anymore. They fired all those people. The Department of Education has been so demolished that any of these things are going to be very difficult to implement—it’s hard to imagine how any of this will be carried out. 

But these earnings tests are not going to have a huge impact because you have choices in how to make comparisons between programs. It can be median earnings nationally for high school graduates or it could be in your state.  And you have to remember that some schools, particularly community colleges, don’t participate in the federal student loan program anyway. Those students get Pell grants, and that will still be the case. 

There will be a few programs affected, but this is not going to have a very big impact because it’s not a stringent enough requirement and because of the limitations in the programs.

Anne Kim: So if you had to take a step back and look at the overall impact of this new law for college students and affordability, what do you think is the underlying rationale or philosophy for all of these changes? What is the administration trying to do?

Sandy Baum: You know, it’s impossible to determine what the administration is trying to do. They’re trying to stir things up. The most positive way of looking at it would be to say that the changes to student loans are designed to make the system simpler, to ensure that more people repay their loans so that taxpayers are not on the hook for unpaid balances. That’s the best way you can look at it. And some of the changes do suggest that they’re trying to do that. 

On the other hand, it’s pretty clear that the overarching goal is not increased access to college. And all of these things have been put together very quickly, so there are going to be a lot of unforeseen consequences.

Anne Kim: If there’s one thing that you could have done to fix the student loan system that was not in this bill, what would it have been?

Sandy Baum: So two things. One is that we should adjust for inflation. When you put an earnings threshold, for example, in the new student loan repayment system, an income that’s between $10,000 and $20,000 today is going to look really different ten years from now. We don’t do enough adjusting for inflation, and we should do more of that. 

Second, many students default or are delinquent on their loans because they really can’t afford the payments. But for others, it’s because they don’t know how to make the payments, and it’s bureaucratically very difficult to get into an income-driven repayment plan. 

In other countries, you are automatically placed in an income-driven repayment plan so your payments are automatically an affordable share of your income. We could do that. Other countries just withhold from paychecks, and students don’t have to worry about how to make their payments. I know there are arguments against this, but to me, making the program simpler and easier for students to manage could be huge, and we haven’t done that.

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