How to Destroy American Higher Education
Trump 2.0 plans to raise the cost of college, undermine quality, and eliminate opportunity for underreprestened students.
Having worked on federal education programs for many years as a Congressional aide, attorney, and public policy advocate, I am particularly appalled at President Trump’s proposal to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and to cut or eliminate many education programs. Higher education has been essential to economic and social opportunity in the U.S. for decades. America would not be the rich and powerful country it is today without our colleges and universities.
Presidents Trump and Musk have both called for the “termination” of the Education Department and have already dismissed hundreds of employees and canceled dozens (hundreds?) of grants and contracts that it deems to be “waste, fraud, and abuse.” These include programs to promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), programs the administration sees as “woke” (don’t ask me for their definition), and things it just sees as wasteful.
My weekly column in Spy Community Media’s newspapers on the Eastern Shore of Maryland addressed how Trump and Musk’s actions threaten higher education. In writing this column, I hoped to inform readers of what is at stake as the administration implements its Project 2025-inspired plans.
The column as published in the Spy may be found here and below.
How to Destroy American Higher Education
Change is in the air in Washington—and on the campuses of America’s colleges and universities. As President Trump implements his campaign to reduce the cost of government, eliminate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, American higher education will change. Given that American higher education has been the envy of the world for more than a century, this is not a good thing.
The Trump administration and conservative Republicans believe that Washington is responsible for what it sees as a liberal bias at many schools. The administration sees higher education, with rare exceptions, as hostile to the GOP. It also believes it is the source of initiatives that are obstacles to America becoming “great” again—things like DEI, academic offerings it sees as “woke,” and efforts to curtail free speech by prohibiting right-wing speakers from campus.
The new administration, with help from Republicans in Congress, has already attacked elite institutions as anti-Semitic and accused all higher education of wastefulness.
As the FY 2026 Budget is determined, Republicans see an opportunity to kill more than one bird with the stones of their Project 2025-inspired agenda. Several initiatives already are underway via Executive Orders and institutions have taken notice. African American and gay and lesbian studies have been curtailed at some schools, DEI offices closed, gender or ethnic-specific clubs have been banned. The goal is not to be targeted by Trump for deeper penalties.
The efforts to “get in line” may work for some institutions, but the changes in spending and policy under consideration on Capitol Hill and within the Trump administration will change American higher education for the worse.
The writers of Project 2025 proposed:
The next Administration should work with Congress to eliminate or move OPE [Office of Postsecondary Education] programs to The ETA [Employment and Training Administration] at the Department of Labor.
This proposal includes major modifications to institutional accreditation to prevent accreditors from requiring things like DEI programs. The goal also is to reorient higher education to increase its focus on job-training. That change conflicts directly with the mission of hundreds of small liberal arts colleges and universities.
Project 2025 proposed:
Funding to institutions should be block-granted and narrowed to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and tribally controlled colleges.
This short-sighted proposal is based on a misunderstanding of federal support for HBCUs and tribally controlled colleges. More Black and other minority students are served at non-HBCUs than at them. If the goal is to increase college attainment for underrepresented populations, cutting funding to institutions that serve such students is a major mistake. For reasons that are not clear, Project 2025 ignores Hispanic-serving institutions altogether.
Research and other grants are important to hundreds of smaller but high-quality colleges and universities, including public institutions. The ability of these institutions to maintain their quality will be undermined if resources are eliminated.
The Administration also seeks to move programs deemed important to our national security interests to the Department of State. How is the Department of State supposed to oversee such programs if its staff is cut? And given that most funds involved in these programs involve colleges and universities, the State Department doesn’t have the expertise to administer them.
Project 2025 calls for a complete restructuring of federal student loan programs:
The next Administration should completely reverse the student loan federalization of 2010 and work with Congress to spin off FSA [The Office of Federal Student Aid] and its student loan obligations to a new government corporation with professional governance and management.
This proposal calls for returning student lending to banks and other private sector institutions, an action taken in 2010 to reduce the cost of providing student loans. Presumably, the authors of Project 2025 believe creating a “new government corporation” would save money. Maybe call it Sallie Mae 2.0? Hopefully, The Trump Organization is NOT planning to enter the student loan business.
More important than this change is the proposal to eliminate loan forgiveness and income contingent loan repayment plans including SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education). Project 2025 provides:
The new Administration must end abuses in the loan forgiveness programs. Borrowers should be expected to repay their loans.
It is unclear what “abuses” Project 2025 was referencing. The language in Project 2025 also would have been more honest had it added, “or not borrow federal student loans at all.”
The proposed changes would dramatically increase the cost of borrowing for college. Hundreds of thousands of students would not be able to afford college, most of them from low to moderate-income families.
The increased cost of borrowing would also result in hundreds of smaller institutions, many affiliated with churches, closing because they will be unaffordable for most students and the schools have little or no endowment or other means of subsidizing tuition.
House Republicans have also called for an “excise tax” on the endowments of elite colleges and universities (those with large endowments). The rate is already 1.4 percent. Proposals are now under discussion to increase that rate to 14 or even 20 percent.
This tax increase is seen as a means of punishing elite schools for their “liberal bias, “but also would produce revenue savings that could be used to help pay for extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts. One unforeseen result is likely to be a decrease in donations to elite colleges and universities, something that, in the long run, will undermine their excellence.
There are other changes to higher education beyond those referenced in this column. The administration would change Title IX (Ensuring Gender Equity in Education), for example, in a way that would result in fewer athletic opportunities for women attending college.
If you agree that one of the reasons America is great today is because of our colleges and universities and widespread educational opportunity, be afraid of the Republican proposals. They would kill the higher education system that the rest of the world has sought to replicate and put an end to American leadership in technology, science, and engineering.
© Copyright 2025 John Dean and Spy Community Media, all rights reserved.
The Spy newspapers provide critically needed hyper-local, community-based news to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. In addition to in-depth news on the communities they serve, the papers also include interesting news on culture, life, public affairs, and politics (including my column and those of nationally known political experts like Al Fron and Craig Fuller).
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As an educator for more than 30 years in University from the 70’s until 8 years ago education has done plenty to ruin itself. If TrumptDumpt did nothing it would continue its path to destruction. I often think we all could do better creating new educational efforts to replace the top heavy we are only interested in your money institutions we have.