The Trump White House has its sights set on reducing the size of government, including a proposal to dismantle the Department of Education. Rick Seltzer writes the Daily Briefing newsletter at The Chronicle of Higher Education. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss what the Department of Education does on a daily basis, which services might lapse in its absence, and the response from educators across the country over the possibility of shuttering the department.
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] When national testing shows public school students either gaining or losing ground on knowledge and skills compared with previous years, educators take notice declines in performance can spur school districts to seek improvement. For years, those tests were the responsibility of the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. Now that Elon Musk has stripped $900 million from the institute’s budget, it is not clear whether it can continue to exist. And that may be just the beginning. If President Trump gets his way, the entire Department of Education will be shut down. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think I’m Krys Boyd. Shuttering the federal education department would not mean your neighborhood school has to close. The funding and control of public schools happens mostly at the state and local levels, but there could be huge implications for students at every level, including those who need to borrow money to go to college. Journalist Rick Seltzer writes the Daily Briefing newsletter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, where he is a senior writer, and he’s been keeping tabs on the Trump administration’s moves toward dismantling the Department of Education. Rick, welcome to Think.
Rick Seltzer [00:01:08] Thank you so much for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:01:10] For listeners who may not keep up with the exact functions of federal agencies, we start by reminding us of what the primary responsibilities of the federal Department of Education are.
Rick Seltzer [00:01:22] So the Department of Education does a substantial amount of funding. It sends out a substantial amount of funding. It tracks statistics. So we know what is happening across various levels of the education system. And then there are also enforce it has an enforcement arm or enforcement arms that are very important for pursuing cases, such as sexual misconduct or sexual discrimination cases, race based discrimination cases, etc., etc. there are also elements of it to ensure that students who have disabilities are being treated appropriately and fairly. And so you have various enforcement mechanisms, various funding mechanisms, and various statistical mechanisms that are the pieces that that I see the most.
Krys Boyd [00:02:12] The education department is not actually as old as we might think, or at least it’s not as old as I thought it was when it was established during the Carter administration. What needs did it promise to fulfill?
Rick Seltzer [00:02:24] Yeah, the Carter administration managed to create it after a lengthy debate. And at the time, one of the core arguments for it was that it would help with civil rights enforcement. One of the core arguments against it was that the Constitution does not create education as a primary goal of the federal government or primary responsibility, and that it was something that should be left to the states. And really, that debate is something that is continuing today. You can see it throughout the 50 years, the department’s history, or nearly 50 years of the department’s history.
Krys Boyd [00:03:04] When you mention this lengthy debate, has the Department of Education always divided supporters and detractors, mostly along Partizan political lines?
Rick Seltzer [00:03:13] You know, I’m actually not as familiar with the history of the Partizan divide. My guess is that generally that would be right. Certainly within the last several decades, conservatives have pretty consistently wanted to, if not completely eliminate it or move some of its functions out, make some changes, and viewed it much more skeptically then than folks on the left side of the aisle.
Krys Boyd [00:03:44] Is it just about what this department costs taxpayers like? What are the arguments against maintaining this agency specifically?
Rick Seltzer [00:03:52] So I think one of the main arguments you hear, And certainly that President Trump’s education secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, has made is the states could do many of these functions better, or other federal agencies could do many of these functions better. And that if we back up for a second, is actually one thing that happened before the department was created, is some of its other functions were housed elsewhere in the federal government or, and therefore theoretically could be housed elsewhere in the federal government. Again. So something like civil rights enforcement in theory could be moved to the Department of Justice, something like overseeing federal student loans could be moved to the Treasury Department. Now, when you do that, you have a question of will those other departments give it the same focus, the same nuance, or treat those operations in the same way? So when you’re talking about something like student loans, the Education Department, especially under Democratic Administrations has had a certain focus on consumer protection. Now you want to wade into student loans. Many people who have student loans will tell you I don’t feel like a protected consumer. Nonetheless. Nonetheless, the Biden administration forgave a lot of loans, saying colleges defrauded students or the Public Service Loan forgiveness program didn’t function properly. If you move student loan administration to Department of the Treasury, does it just become a way for the government to collect revenue to make money? That’s the kind of question you get when you talk about moving some of these functions to other federal agencies. Then you get into the question of moving some of the functions to the states. So Linda McMahon, in her Senate confirmation hearing, was asked, do you want to limit the amount of money that is spent on education by the federal government? And she said, essentially, no, what we want to do is take the money that’s sent out today, package it into block grants that go to each state, and the states can decide how to spend the money as best suits their individual educational needs and their economies.
Krys Boyd [00:06:09] The Biden administration undertook a very ambitious overhaul of the federal application for Student Aid platform, which is otherwise known as FAFSA. That rollout was very rough at the start. Did those frustrations help feed this antipathy toward the Department of Education?
Rick Seltzer [00:06:26] I think you would have seen a push to minimize, dismantle, disband, pick your term absent the FAFSA problems. But I do think that the FAFSA problems that the fire, I think it broadened the base of people who looked askew at the Department of Education. You know, it just it just cut trust in the agency because so many people had problems. And and one of the problems with the FAFSA rollout was that constituencies of the left or constituencies that the left thinks of itself as defending were some of those who had the most trouble with Fafsa, right? Underrepresented students, those who have a parent who was undocumented, were among those who had some of the biggest trouble filling out the form because it just didn’t work. If your parents didn’t have a Social Security number at first and very far into the process now, in the end, we’ve had conflicting data about what that actually ended up doing to enrollment. But when when an agency has years as the education department had to overhaul this form, even when it’s a hard job. And make no mistake, they had a lot of work to do to overhaul this form. There were very old systems that were in place before they they revamped it last year. But but when you have that kind of time and when you have problems. It just erodes trust. The other thing that happened with FAFSA was once the problems were apparent, the Biden Education Department was not particularly transparent about when fixes would be coming, and in some cases, not seen as responsive. And at least in the early days, in telling folks, okay, we’re still having problems. There was kind of an element of, hey, we we made this congressional deadline to have this done at the end of the fiscal year, or I’m sorry, at the end of the calendar year. And then you would hear but actually the things broken and then the ways that it were broken just kept coming out, new ways, new errors found. And ultimately, it took them about six months before they scrambled a team to really tackle the problem and really fix the FAFSA. And I think, yes, when you go through a process like that, whether you are a student, whether you are a college financial aid officer, whether you are just a policymaker watching this. I think you do throw up your hands. That said, I’m not sure that I have seen any actual policymaker or policy wonk on the left saying the problems with the FAFSA mean that we should disband the department.
Krys Boyd [00:09:11] To be really clear, closing down the Department of Education does not include a plan to cancel outstanding debt for people who borrowed to pursue higher education. What would happen to folks who owe student loan repayments to the federal government? If the Department of Education is no longer operating.
Rick Seltzer [00:09:28] Those loans would still be collected. They may be collected under the Treasury Department. It’s not really clear what the plan there is or if there is a plan. I don’t see any indication that the Trump administration wants to do anything but collect on every student loan that has been issued and is issued, There is this idea that if you borrowed the money, you should pay it back. And if you went back to the first Trump administration, that Department of Education Under Secretary Betsy DeVos allegedly slow walked Public Service Loan Forgiveness, a program that allows folks like firefighters and teachers to make payments based on their income. And then, if they haven’t paid back the loan balance after a certain amount of time, ten years, that money gets, the remaining balances get get eliminated. So there’s kind of a track record of of Trump appointees wanting to maximize the amount of loans that are collected. Now, there’s one wrinkle you see kind of floating around on the right. I don’t know how much credence to give it that the student loan portfolio could be sold off, privately owned and used to raise money up front, and then the government wouldn’t have to collect on it. Generally, you see critics on the right saying that that the federal government should not be in the business of student lending. It might want to guarantee loans so that private lenders are in the business. And that’s the way the system worked several decades ago. But it’s not really clear if that’s what this administration wants to do. That’s just a criticism. You’ll often hear from the right.
Krys Boyd [00:11:07] To federal education loans, as they exist, currently represent a huge net cost to the federal government. Assuming that most people who borrow money to study eventually will repay those loans with interest.
Rick Seltzer [00:11:21] It depends on which assumptions you’re making and how you define cost. The loan portfolio essentially took a huge write down when the Biden administration forgave a lot of debt. Now, the Biden administration didn’t forgive nearly as much debt as it wanted to. The courts blocked it from doing so, but they tried to roll out a more generous income based repayment program that would have made the portfolio much less lucrative and operate with much higher losses than it does now that that income based repayment program was blocked by the courts. So it depends what kind of assumptions you’re making on who’s going to repay and how long it’s going to take them to repay. If you want to split it politically, generally, the right says this thing should be profitable for the government and the left says no. This is a way to subsidize students. It may make some of the money or all of the money back, but the primary goal is not for it to serve as an aspiration tax that’s levied on on students who tried to go to college, and then they have to repay it regardless of whether or not it paid off.
Krys Boyd [00:12:26] When you talk about Biden’s efforts to forgive student loans, this is the thing called the safe plan.
Rick Seltzer [00:12:31] The safe plan was the the income based repayment program I was referencing. Yes, the Biden administration had any number of other efforts to forgive student loans, some of them successful, some of them not. But yes, the safe plan is that that income based repayment program that I was talking about. Sorry for all of the different wonky policies that we have to throw around here.
Krys Boyd [00:12:50] No problem. I’m just clarifying because there may be people listening closely to hear what the status might be of of wherever they are. The safe plan is not dead in the water, is that right? It’s been completely eliminated. Or will be.
Rick Seltzer [00:13:03] That is correct. I believe a caught just in the last few days. But what I would expect to be the final nail in the coffin on that plan. And so there will not be any new ability to sign up in that going forward. Unless. Unless Congress somehow were to act and resuscitate that. And there is a snowball’s chance of that happening, I’d say.
Krys Boyd [00:13:27] What about people who had debt forgiven under the safe plan? I mean, do those debts come back to life for them?
Rick Seltzer [00:13:36] I have not seen anything that would suggest that. My understanding is that if the money was cleared, it is clear I would expect we would need to see some legal developments there. You know, I can’t say definitively I’m not a lawyer. I have not dug into that one super deeply, but nothing has come across my desk to make me expect anything but forgiveness that is out the door is really out the door, and you’re in the clear.
Krys Boyd [00:14:01] Rick. If nobody for now is proposing an end to federal student loan programs entirely, what reason is there to eliminate the department that was set up specifically to handle all this? Like what would be the fiscal advantages of rolling this up under, say, the Treasury Department?
Rick Seltzer [00:14:22] Well, real quickly, it’s not that no one is proposing eliminating all of the lending programs, the lending programs for undergraduates. I have not seen a major push to eliminate, but there are ideas out there to eliminate some programs for graduate students and for parents of students who borrow on behalf of their students. So there is some interest in cutting some lending programs that have proven to be very expensive, both for borrowers and the government in some cases. So there are some, and I don’t even wanna say ancillary. There are some lending programs that could have a substantial change in particularly grad students and some minority serving institutions. HBCUs traditionally have had a pretty high percentage of grad students who use some of these programs that they’re talking about eliminating.
Krys Boyd [00:15:13] Are there a lot of students who qualify for federally administered student loans, as they have existed in recent years, who might not receive equivalent loan office offers from some private lender?
Rick Seltzer [00:15:26] That has always been the argument here: is how many of these students who either come from low income families or are enrolling in majors that probably will not get them high paying jobs. How many of those students will actually be able to pay back their loans? And therefore, how many of those students would private lenders want to lend to? And so that’s why you wade into this argument and it is a wonky argument. Again, I apologize about whether the government should simply backstop private student loans. So if there are losses, then the government is kind of saying we will handle those losses when folks like social workers struggle to repay their loans versus the government is just the lender. And we have in this country done both at the federal level in history. Right now we have the government as as the primary lender. You can get a private loan. Very few students do it.
Krys Boyd [00:16:28] With the government as the primary lender. Have we seen more students as a percentage of the population attending college, you know, college or school after high school?
Rick Seltzer [00:16:39] There has been a general upward trajectory to that. If you look over decades. And the most recent year, the data is actually very messy because there were some tabulation errors and in the quickest data that’s coming out. But but generally speaking, we have seen an uptick. The question is do we want them studying what they’re studying or one of the questions is do we want them studying what they’re studying? There’s this argument that. If you’re borrowing to go to college, shouldn’t you get a degree that pays off? That’s a very important argument right now. If you talk to anyone who is a teenager, you talk to my nieces and nephews. They are very focused on careers that pay off. But the more traditional argument, the argument actually when I went to college that I remember was, well, there is real value in many careers. You know, I mentioned social work is always the example that everyone gives because it doesn’t pay particularly well. But we need social workers and it can be very expensive depending on where you go to college. And so why? Because I am a student from a low income family who who wants to go into public service work or something else that’s not going to pay well but requires education. Why should I have less of an opportunity to do that? Simply because the lending market wants me to have to pay back my loans? I mean, that’s that’s kind of the fundamental clash here. And as we try different lending programs over time, you see the where society lands on that or what the the idea of the day seems to be shifts, but it’s still all kind of boils down to that question. And I’m, I’m not sure there’s the right answer there. I think that’s a value judgment that that we’re just going to constantly be redefining.
Krys Boyd [00:18:28] What do we know about the future of federal programs that offer low income students money? They don’t have to pay back things like Pell grants.
Rick Seltzer [00:18:37] Yeah, Pell grants the Trump administration has not made any suggestion that they would cut Pell Grants. Linda McMahon said that, in fact, she wanted to expand Pell Grants by making them available to more types of programs, shorter term programs for credentials, workforce based programs, that kind of thing. The Pell program is I should back up and say the the major grant program that that students do not have to pay back. It’s it’s for low income, middle income students. However, there’s a caveat here because of the way Pell is funded, and I will not put your listeners to sleep by going into how it’s funded. But because of the way it’s funded, there is a shortfall looming. The program needs an infusion of cash from Congress if it is going to continue to offer the amounts of money that it has offered in recent years, will Congress do that? It is hard to say. No one wants to see eligibility for Pell Cut or the maximum grant cut that each student can get. However, Congress also is looking at doing a tax package that it needs to pay for. It is unclear whether the GOP can get through a package that does all of its tax priorities, and fully funds Pell in a way that allows it to offer as much money as it’s been offering, or more. There are always efforts to raise the Pell Grant, and then offer it to as many students who have drawn it in the past, and then also expand it to students who are taking low. I’m sorry, short term programs that have it that it has not been able to be used for in the past. Those are a lot of priorities to put in at a time when, because of the way Congress works and because of the federal budget deficit, they are trying not to raise the price tag of very many programs. And in fact, as we see elsewhere, tried to cut a lot of programs.
Krys Boyd [00:20:40] I realize Rick that you are not a political analyst. I don’t want to put you too much on the spot here, but maybe you can help me understand something. I do recognize that many Republican lawmakers have expressed this concern that college is kind of a progressive indoctrination for students who go there and they’re concerned about, you know, subsidizing this, this system that they believe ultimately might, you know, turn people’s politics against the Republican interests and conservative interests. At the same time, if those same Republicans ideally want as many wealthy Americans as possible, help me understand, why not support students ability to go to college and make more money than the generations before them?
Rick Seltzer [00:21:27] Well, so your first point. I am not a political analyst, but it’s harder and harder to cover higher education these days without at least paying a lot of attention to politics because so much money flows through the political system. I think to your actual question, though, what is the best way for students to have a return on investment? Is college providing an adequate return on investment for students and putting them in the careers that we want them to have? I think that is the kind of underlying argument and push that you’re seeing among critics. There are a lot of technical careers that potentially give students better earnings than their parents had. Depending on local economic conditions, you know, welding is the one that’s been rolled out as as a it’s almost a trope at this point to say we need welders in many markets across the country. But there are others, you know, those are shorter term programs. That’s not college. And the way that that many people think of college, right, a four year degree. But there are also two year programs. There are a lot of workforce needs for folks in health care that require shorter term programs than a four year degree. And so the question is, is the four year degree the engine of economic mobility that it has always been seen as. Now you look on the aggregate, you look at the top level data. Yes. For your median student it will be. But that median student also then has to pay off student loans. And in a changing economy, there is no guarantee as there’s never any guarantee that what happened, what worked for past cohorts of students is going to work for future cohorts of students. It’s a very ungainly system to try to align the needs of the economy ten years from now, when who knows what artificial intelligence and other changes will do to the white collar workforce. It’s hard to align that fuzzy vision of the future with the earnings and debt data we have, which is several years old every time we get it. You know, it’s it’s you’re you’re you’re really trying to hit a moving target there.
Krys Boyd [00:23:44] So this idea of higher education as a potential engine, as you say, of economic mobility, this is not disputed, I don’t think, in any corner and has been something that we’ve understood as Americans for some time now. There was a time, though, when sort of additional and perhaps equivalent reason for going to college was about being a well-informed citizen individual just knowing about the world. Have we lost that as a as a reason for attending college? Like, is that just too much of a luxury in the current economy?
Rick Seltzer [00:24:22] I’m so glad you asked that question. I personally always found one of the most compelling pitches that the higher ed sector had to be the idea that going to college will enrich your life, whether or not it really improves your economic prospects. Right. It gives you an appreciation. It should give you an appreciation for whether it’s art, whether it’s literature, or whether it’s some other part of culture. It gives you a way to understand it, unpack it, analyze it in a way that you just don’t have. If you went to high school and then, you know, went into the workforce because IT classes will force you to dive more deeply and expose you to different ideas on some of these things. You know, it makes you ideally a better informed citizen, better understanding of how the government works. Better understanding of things like international relations. We could go on and on and on. There are people who say, and I think there is some truth to this, that that is a luxury good. And there are folks who will say that communications technologies, information technologies change that to a certain degree. And I think that’s certainly true. It’s it’s easier for anyone to find all sorts of materials on whether it’s art appreciation or government. You know, the internet makes that more available to many today than it than it used to. Where I land on this, as I look at it and I kind of think about what’s going on, I think I think we as a society are very focused on the economy right now, and the higher ed sector has followed in its arguments. But I do think there is a deeper question of whether we value the idea of deeper engagement with material, the idea of deeper engagement with academic ideas, whether we value the idea of a search for truth rather than just a noisy argument on Twitter of from our political tribes and. I don’t know, number one, that colleges have made a consistent effort to appeal to kind of that traditional academic field or that traditional academic appeal. And number two, how well they deliver really does vary based on the institution. There are many institutions that do a great job on this. There are probably others that don’t. And I think that makes it very hard to have this conversation at a national level, because people’s experiences and values vary. And a lot of what we talk about in society right now really is kind of edging towards the short term and away from this kind of long term engagement quest for truth, scientific method, debate and consensus model that colleges have have relied on for a long time. It’s very different. It’s a very different world than the world that you see in the mass media.
Krys Boyd [00:27:25] There’s a real irony here, Rick, which is that most of the people in a position to have public conversations about this, people like you and I, are college educated. Most of the people in a position to make a change to any of this, as lawmakers have had a college education. Do we know that much about how people are feeling about these issues from within populations that maybe haven’t historically had generations of college educations behind them?
Rick Seltzer [00:27:55] Generally speaking, if you look at the behavior and you look at the polling data I am familiar with broadly, most people would send their students to some form of college after high school or some form of post-secondary training. Not everyone. And I think in the last few years, you see the political discussion, to your point bubbling up and the idea of college for all. It was very popular ten, 15 years ago. You know, even the Democratic Party has basically said college for all is dead. However, most people, given the opportunity and given the price point, would do some sort of post-secondary training. Now, that might be a short term certificate. Today, that might be a two year degree instead of a four year degree. And certainly we’re seeing some real concerns about interest in grad school and PhDs, PhD in particular, because those tended to feed academic jobs that simply because of population trends, there just aren’t going to be likely as many of those that growth isn’t there, that it was in the past on on academic jobs for PhDs. So there are all these different markets. And so that makes it very hard to unpack. But at your high level, there is still interest in this idea of sending your your student to college. The question is which type of degree are they going to pursue. And then the other question is, are they getting it at a price point we can afford or are willing to pay? And I think that price sensitivity, intense price sensitivity is something that has changed between this generation of students and cohorts from ten or 15 or 20 years ago. Today’s students are much more focused on the economy, much more focused on their turn, much more focused on the price. And I think this diode sector is really still struggling to get their arms around how to speak to that.
Krys Boyd [00:29:57] Yeah. I was going to ask you if schools are competing to be a good value.
Rick Seltzer [00:30:01] There’s a very strange dynamic going on there on the at the average, the cost of tuition has actually not been increasing. If you factor in inflation in recent years. And yet the public narrative is if I’ve seen this once, I’ve seen it a million times the ever increasing cost of tuition. What? There’s there’s a saying in folks who advise colleges on things like price point and the academic programs they offer, and that is, if you are competing on price, you don’t have anything to sell yourself on. I think there is some truth to that. At the same time, in the last year, I have seen a tremendous amount of colleges trying to get attention for being affordable. There are a bunch of different strategies that we could go into if you wanted to, but. But the overall thrust is, yes, they want to be seen as affordable, and yet it’s really hard to break through and be seen as affordable and also not be seen as kind of a second choice institution. Is that is the fear in the sector?
Krys Boyd [00:31:06] Rick, has anyone talked about the effect that making student loans, perhaps broadly less available by eliminating some sources of federal funding for these loans, federal guarantees, how that would affect family wealth, because I know a lot of working class and middle class families that will happily have their students take out loans, or even the parents take out loans where that’s possible, but will absolutely sacrifice whatever it takes to get an education for their students if those loans are somehow not available.
Rick Seltzer [00:31:40] Yeah, there are, as with everything competing arguments here, there there is an argument that the federal government, by making loans more available, is effectively subsidizing the cost of college to the point where institutions can raise prices more than they would be able to otherwise. In other words, by making borrowing more available, you create more borrowers. And and many of those borrowers actually have ended up in and could potentially end up in, in the future in programs where they don’t finish. And that is that is the outcome that no one wants. Because if you don’t finish your program but you borrowed for it. You still have to repay the debt. In most cases. And so then you. You have some debt, but you don’t have the earnings, Bob, that comes with the credential you get from whether it’s a two year degree, a certificate or a four year degree. If you don’t get those, you don’t you don’t get an earnings call, but you still have the debt. Some of the folks who struggle to repay their loans the most are those who have what we would call relatively small loan balances, but no degree. It’s because they don’t have that earnings. But then you get into though, well, if you do not have loans widely available, students simply aren’t going to be able to get into college at the level that they can today. They’re not going to have to pay for it. They’re not going be able to enroll. And that means that you have fewer people with an opportunity to study either their passions or things that they’re very good at. Because I think the danger that everyone’s worried about, or everyone should worry about is they have a really talented, low income student who wants to be, you know, we’ll use the the kind of obvious example a doctor or a lawyer, a very expensive thing. And they could do that, but they don’t do it because they are so fearful of the debt or they are unable to get someone to fund them. That’s the worst case scenario. They’re so, so finding finding the way to make sure that the students who borrow complete college is a way to thread that needle. It has been a focus. It’s it’s we’ve moved the needle on that as a country. And many states have moved the needle on that. But that is that is a real struggle.
Krys Boyd [00:34:06] So can you talk a little bit about the the testing that the Department of Education has carried out in K-12 public schools.
Rick Seltzer [00:34:16] At a very high level? My understanding is over decades there, there’s been a push for more accountability, more evaluation at the K-12 level. There’s been a mounting backlash or backlash over time. Both of my parents are actually teachers, so I heard a lot about this when I was younger. You know, we’re only teaching the test. We’re putting them through so many tests that we don’t have time to actually educate and or instill a fire for learning in the students. And I think there’s a balance there, because you really do want to make sure that students are learning. But at the same time, you you don’t want to kind of beat out the joy of learning by making them take what we used to call Scantron tests. I don’t know if they call them sketch contests anymore, where you’re filling in the little bubble with the number two pencil so much that you’re, you know, you’re just clawing your eyes out. Having said all that One area that has recently come on my radar in the last few years is, and I think it speaks to how important testing is. Even if we decide that we need to roll back testing a little bit. The test numbers post-pandemic are very poor. Students are really behind in math and reading, and as much as the sitting students down for days or weeks or whatever it is to to evaluate what they’ve learned. As much as that may be a time tax on them and be hard. We would not have the national picture that is emerging of learning loss during the pandemic and how how much we really need to do to correct it. It would be a much more anecdotal thing if we didn’t have this this data from from K-12 schools.
Krys Boyd [00:36:11] You mentioned earlier civil rights. What does the Department of Civil Rights within the Department of Education do?
Rick Seltzer [00:36:18] So OCR as it’s as it’s known, the Office of Civil Rights has, in my world most recently been in the news for antisemitism investigations. So you may recall in the last year, year plus, the fighting in the Middle East set off campus protests and set off many very fraught clashes. So there were cases. There was one particular case that gets cited a lot, where student protesters, student pro-Palestinian protesters were moving through a building, moving through a campus, and some Jewish students basically were shot in the library. And and the protesters pounded on the door. And, and, you know, that eventually moved on. There have been some other cases. At UCLA, there was an encampment. There were allegations at the time that they were blocking Jewish students from crossing the quad or getting into buildings in some cases. OCR did investigations in cases like that. And OCR also did investigations. Of anti-Arab anti-Muslim allegations as well behavior on campus. So it will look at that kind of discrete alleged discrimination. Typically what has happened there is they will look at what an institution did when it received reports, what it did to try to prevent a hostile environment from forming on campus and basically settle with the institutions to say, this is what you did, this is what you could have done better. This is what you’re going to do in the future to prevent it from happening again or to do better. So those are the kinds of investigations that you’ll see OCR do. Now it’ll you know, it’s not just this case that sets the most recent case of the types of investigations that have been in the news. There are other types, all sorts of other types of discrimination that it will look at as well.
Krys Boyd [00:38:26] Switching gears once again here. How controversial is loan forgiveness with average Americans? Student loan forgiveness.
Rick Seltzer [00:38:33] With average Americans? I think it is. This is anecdotal. I actually don’t remember any polling data off the top of my head, but I would say that it is among the biggest divides that I see by class. Or by political affiliation. Also, I think it is much more popular on the left and among the educated than it is on the right and among those who did not attend college. Because there is, I think it’s a very a very powerful argument, which is why should folks who never went to college subsidize those who did Now, I think I think the argument is actually much more complex than that. But you borrowed it. You pay it back is a pretty strong principle to to argue against.
Krys Boyd [00:39:27] So Linda McMahon is President Trump’s choice for secretary of Education. If the administration moves ahead with stated plans to abolish the department, what would there be for McMahon to do what her job effectively be shuttering this agency? And then perhaps she goes on and does something else?
Rick Seltzer [00:39:44] It could be. One of the things that is important to note here is that Congress would have to act to completely close the Department. It is considered pretty unlikely that Congress will do that. There are certain things that legally the Department must continue to do, and Congress would have to change the law if it were not to have to do that. So Linda McMahon has said that she wants to work with Congress. One of her roles would be to work with Congress to find ways to shutter the department shift some of the functions to other agencies. I think even if Congress does not completely shutter the department, she could still have a big role in shifting things to other agencies, but also using the existing department functions to achieve the Trump administration’s goals. So we mentioned or I mentioned earlier, anti-Semitism investigations. That’s something the Trump administration is very interested in ratcheting up right now against colleges. They want to do more. They want to be more punitive. There was recently a piece of guidance they put forward. The administration put forward attempting to push campuses to eliminate all instances of diversity, equity and inclusion, whether they are public colleges or private colleges. They’re threatening federal funding there. The Department of Education has enforcement mechanisms to start doing those things. Now, it would be a very long, arduous process to do it. And one of the kind of interesting questions for the administration is they’re almost talking out of both sides of their mouth right now when they talk about closing the education department, and then also forcing colleges to do all of these things, that it might actually be easiest for them to force colleges to do if the department remains open and if they have it staffed. So within it means job is going to be to figure out exactly what they want the department to do, what they want it to focus on, and how much they want to either move its operations to other agencies or simply just slow walk or not do some of the things it does, because that’s that’s the other thing that that she can do. Any education secretary can do, which is you can emphasize some things more than others, even if it’s legally required. You can dedicate more people resources to certain work than other work. And she has a big job on her hands to figure out what they’re going to close, what they’re going to move, and what they might emphasize.
Krys Boyd [00:42:37] So let’s take this to the perhaps logical extreme, Rick. If if Congress shuts down the Department of Education, how hard would it be for some subsequent administration to revive the department?
Rick Seltzer [00:42:51] Well, to revive it, they would presumably need to convince a future Congress to pass legislation to create it. And I think that how hard it would be, how hard that ask would be, would depend on how things go when the department is shuttered. I think most folks expect it to be a pretty heavy lift if that were to happen. If if they were to essentially put it on ice without getting Congress to act. It would, in theory, be a little easier to revive its work. But you know how it is. It’s a lot easier to destroy anything than it is to build something, right? It’s a lot easier to cut than it is to build back. In any case, no matter what the legal mechanisms or the money pots available are. You know, I could probably knock down a shed. I couldn’t build a shed in my backyard. It’s kind of a similar principle when you talk about an agency, right? You you have staff in place right now, although they’ve started trying to cut staff, but you have staff in place right now who have been doing what they do for a long time. You know, I personally think the department has been understaffed and overmatched in certain areas. We talked about Fafsa. That’s a good example. It has to contract out a lot of its work already. But once you start cutting things or once you start doing work, let’s talk about data gathering as an example. They recently moved to cut or did cut contracts with a lot of contractors who help them gather data that we use to assess the education system. You know, maybe you can cut to a certain point, but once you start gathering data on graduation rates or the number of people employed at a college, even if you restart that in a few years, you have lost a window for a certain period of time. And I think, I think it’s really hard to recover from something like that. You lose investigators who know how the law works. You lose lawyers who can help you move one way or the other. You just kind of become less organized and it’s then becomes a bigger lift to start reorganizing things. Now, certainly there may be some upside to anyone who who then would come in and be able to build a more efficient or more functionally a better functioning department. But but I think it would be a real, real tall hill to climb.
Krys Boyd [00:45:33] Journalist Rick Seltzer is a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education, where he writes the Daily Briefing newsletter and has been keeping tabs on the Trump administration’s interest in dismantling the Department of Education. Rick, thank you for sharing all this information with us.
Rick Seltzer [00:45:48] Thank you so much. I hope we managed to keep it from going too wonky.
Krys Boyd [00:45:52] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram and wherever you get podcasts or at our website think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
