Jon Fansmith: Hello and welcome to a special episode of dotEDU Live, and thank you so much for joining us today. Obviously a topic of great importance and one we’re going to dive pretty deeply into, but what happened in the elections that wrapped up last night. I am Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for Government Relations and National Engagement here at ACE. And for this discussion, I’m going to be joined by my regular colleagues, my regular co-host, Sarah Spreitzer, and our regular podcast co-host, Mushtaq Gunja, who, this is, Mushtaq, your first appearance on dotEDU Live, right?
Mushtaq Gunja: I think that’s right. I’m not sure what I’m doing here. You didn’t tell me what we were talking about.
Jon Fansmith: We wanted people to see your face. They’ve heard your voice. We need them to see your face. As Sarah said, you’re the eye candy, right?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. I stand by that statement.
Jon Fansmith: Before we jump into a more detailed analysis, quick recap of where we stand as of 2:30 Eastern Standard Time. As you likely know by now, former President Trump won the presidential election in convincing fashion. By the time all the votes are counted, it is expected he will have won the popular vote, all seven of the key swing states, and will have over 300 electoral college votes.
Continuing the strong performance of Republicans through the election, Republicans are going to retake control of the United States Senate. Right now, they hold 52 seats, so a clear majority there. And if current leads hold, it could be as many as 54 seats. That number, while within sort of the range of what could be expected, is probably at the high end of what people saw going into the election.
The biggest area of uncertainty right now is in the House, where control of that chamber won’t be known for at least a couple of days. Depending on who you talk to, both sides feel very confident about their ability to take control. Democrats won some seats against expectations, including in New York, and they have some winnable toss-up seats in California that they’re waiting on results on. Some sense of optimism there. Certainly, though, Republicans performed well across the board, flipped some seats in Pennsylvania that were big pickups for them, still have some opportunities in places like Virginia. And again, those seats out west that they’re still waiting on results for will tip control of the election.
It’s worth noting that in every new administration’s first term, going back to George Herbert Walker Bush’s first term, the incoming president has had uniform control of Congress by his party. So if we were to see the Democrats take control of the House, that would actually be a bit of a historical aberration in that regard. Obviously, there is a lot to go over here, not just about the election but especially about the election’s impact on higher education and our campuses. And so we are fortunate to be joined by ACE’s president, Ted Mitchell, to help us understand the election and what it means for all of you and all of our campuses. So Ted, welcome. Thank you for joining us
Ted Mitchell: Thanks, Jon.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. Know you have a lot going on. You’re not here with us for the whole time, but while we have you, can I ask first for your initial reaction to the election? And Sarah and Mushtaq, I’m going to come around to you guys too, but Ted, lead us off.
Ted Mitchell: Yeah. And thanks for letting me into this exclusive club, Jon. I’m really honored. Hope I don’t blow it. So I think you mentioned it already, I think that my big takeaway and my surprise was the strength of the Republican performance across the board. In particular, sort of county by county, the increase in the percentage of voters who have gone with the Republican Party, supporting former president, now President-elect, Trump. The depth and breadth of that is something I think we need to pay attention to as we think about the America that we serve.
Jon Fansmith: All right, Sarah, you’re up next.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, I think building off what Ted just said, I was surprised that the margins were so wide in support of President Trump. We had gone into this thinking that we... We had actually joked that we didn’t think we would have much to actually discuss on this podcast because the election may not have been called, and the fact that he won with a very clear majority, to me, was the most surprising thing.
Jon Fansmith: All right, Mushtaq, you’re up.
Mushtaq Gunja: I think the polls were pretty on actually. That was interesting. I think they told us that it was going to be at the national level sort of a 50-50, 49-49 sort of margin. It looks like we’re going to end up there, and it looks like President Trump might end up with a point or so victory in the popular vote, but that’s pretty close.
Like Ted, I think I was struck by the pretty uniform shift across all regions and across a lot of demographics. It looks like President-elect Trump will improve upon his margin by about four points, about three-ish points in the Rust Belt, about four-ish points in the Sun Belt, about five-ish points everywhere else in the country. That’s pretty interesting. It wasn’t just a small sliver of the country in which he really decided that he was going to focus his resources. It was a pretty uniform shift. And I think that that means, well, I’m not sure what it means, but it definitely is going to cause a lot of examination both on the part of the Democrats and I think also on the part of the Republicans as they think about how they can build upon that success.
How about you, Jon? What do you think? What’s the biggest takeaway?
Jon Fansmith: There is a lot. I will say probably my biggest takeaway, and I started thinking about this at 1:30 in the morning last night and processed my thoughts throughout the hours, when I noticed, both Sarah and Mushtaq, you stopped taking my texts. So I’m not accusing anyone of anything, but was a little disappointed that you weren’t there to help me chew this over. But I will say the thing that hit me the most was, and I’ve spent so much time as people who have tuned into this know and you all certainly know, trying to parse, well, what does this mean for suburban older white women? And does this Harris pronouncement position her for X? And how does shifts in polling indicate what? And the thought that occurred to me is maybe we just made this more complicated than it really was.
If you go back a year and a half, Americans were upset about inflation and turned very pessimistic on the economy. And public opinion in that area never really recovered. And President Biden’s approval rating dropped into the 30s, is hovering around 40 percentage points. Americans’ views of where the country’s headed right now, low 30s, I think the last time I looked at a poll. This is maybe the simplest explanation there is, and it’s the one that’s most consistent in American elections.
If people, the public as a whole doesn’t feel comfortable about where the country’s headed, they don’t feel the economy’s benefiting them, they want change. And it doesn’t really matter that the current president was the candidate on the ballot. Maybe why we’re seeing shifts across the board is just dissatisfaction with what’s happening and desire for something different. And sometimes it can be just that simple. This might just be not Trump ran a great campaign and Harris ran a terrible one, it may be that we stepped into a moment that fits very neatly within the patterns we’ve seen over the last few decades.
But theories you start at 1:30 in the morning are certainly subject to some revision and revisiting. So I’ll be doing that too. Ted, moving past takeaways and one of the reasons we’re really actually very happy to have you on here, we can talk about the election, Lord knows we will for a while, but people are tuning in to figure out what this means for higher education. And you have such a great broad view of what federal policy and election outcomes mean for our institutions. Can you just start by giving us your thoughts?
Ted Mitchell: Yeah, and that’s not just because I was in my spot when Andrew Jackson was elected president, but I do bring some of that background. So not to make light of it, I think that I’ll just be honest. I’m very anxious about this election. I think that going into the campaign, we had concerns about what a Republican administration might mean. I think going through the campaign, at least for me, those concerns deepened. We saw a campaign that was relentless in its attacks on higher education, and we have an administration and maybe a Congress that doesn’t believe that we’re a positive good for society. And Jon, you mentioned the right direction, wrong direction for the country as a whole, I think we all know and have talked about for some time now, the sense that an awful lot of Americans think that higher education is one of the forces that is moving American society in the wrong direction.
So this is more than a headwind. This is a set of matters of real concern for us. But I want to say in the light of that, we have been here before. And you don’t have to go back to Andrew Jackson to be able to identify important places where the government has shifted as the voting public has shifted and that all of us institutionalists in the world based on that can look at it and decide how to move on.
The good news is we’ve been here before. We’ve been here before as a country. We’ve certainly been here before as ACE. And I think one of the things that we have going for us is that long history of moving back and forth. We have a reputation of working with Republican administrations, working with Democratic administrations and Congresses that are split, that are together. So as upsetting as this is, and again, I’ll put my cards on the table, I’m very anxious, but we have been here before. We’re built for this.
As many of you know, we articulated a plan before the election, and we’re going to stick with that plan. And it’s a plan that really addresses the very basic important role that higher education has to play. Let’s fund students. Let’s hold institutions accountable. Let’s create a level playing field for students at our institutions. Let’s address affordability. So that’s not going to change. We’re going to stick with that and I look forward to working with the Republican administration and Congress or the split Congress as we pursue those goals. We will not back down on what we believe to be best for higher education. We will never back down, and we haven’t backed down. And so we look forward to not only supporting you but calling on you to help support us.
So with that as a general thing, let me just tell you a couple things that I am worried about. And I know, Jon, that you guys are going to talk about these a little bit.
I’ve already mentioned the relentless attacks on higher education. It’s my hope that now that the campaign is over, we can leave behind the heated rhetoric, the unwarranted attacks, and we can move to doing business. And if we can do that, I think that that will be a great first step. So I invite the Trump transition team, the Trump team, and the Congress to work with us on the real business of higher education and not to be distracted by the ephemera that has too often distracted us from our responsibility to educate the next generation of citizens and workers and leaders in America.
Second thing I’m worried about is oversight and regulation. I’m worried about potential shifts as they relate to civil rights, inclusion and belonging, and free speech. We’ve seen that one for the last several months. And in particular, there’s a nest of immigration and international issues that come together, whether it’s around tariffs or around deportations. Our continuing concern with DACA, visa processes, and potential caps on the number of international students. So all of those need to be untangled in a way that helps us help our students and the country.
So the other last one is some financial aid issues. And I know that you guys are going to dive into that in just a second.
So again, it’s an anxious moment. The sooner we can get to work with the new administration, the new Congress, the better. We will lobby hard for what we care about and what we believe strengthens all of you in the work that you do. We are not going to back down on our support for higher education. We are not going to back down in articulating the importance of higher education in building a great America. We have been a part of building a great America. We will continue to be, and we will fight against whatever headwinds there are. And we will embrace the opportunity to work collaboratively with our colleagues in the new administration.
Jon Fansmith: Not that it matters, Ted, but very well said. I want to highlight just two things you said there too because I think one of the things that truly always humbles me here working at ACE is that we often are talking about these issues, we’re talking about them with policymakers, with staff. And when we see our members actively engaging and supporting those efforts, working together as a community, it makes an enormous difference. And I think sometimes it gets lost. There can be frustration with our political process from people on both sides, whatever your views. But we’ve seen it time and time again that when we work together, we have an enormous impact. We are an important part of America in so many different areas and that does resonate. We have real power and authority when we work together. So thank you to you for leading us in this work, your commitment to this and really being such a galvanizing actor in terms of the broader higher education community.
I’d also note that we’re running out of your time, so I want to give you a moment if there’s anything left, anything else you want to say before you have to drop off. But also just thank you so much for joining us, taking the time today.
Ted Mitchell: Last thing as always, Jon, is I want to thank everybody who’s joined us for the hard work that you do day in and day out. It’s critically important to our students, to our communities, to America. So thanks as always for the great work that you do. If there’s anything that I can do or we can do to be of service to you, let us know.
Jon Fansmith: And I’ll note that, Ted, Gregory Schuckman loves you being our quarterback, and I’ll say among the ACE staff we share that opinion too. So thanks for coming in, throwing a few passes with us. I know you’re off to something we’ve probably kept you over time for.
Ted Mitchell: I bet it’s going to be a big surprise to you that it’s a couple of interviews with what we used to call newspapers.
Jon Fansmith: Media outlets, right?
Ted Mitchell: That’s right.
Jon Fansmith: Well, thanks again.
Ted Mitchell: Thank you all very much.
Sarah Spreitzer: Thanks, Ted.
Mushtaq Gunja: All right, friends, I’m going to try to play a little bit of emcee here, monitor the Q&A, monitor the chat, and see if I can field some of these questions. Jon and Sarah, I have a whole set of questions that we received in advance about what we think the new administration might tackle. I’m going to get some from the Q&A, but I just want to address maybe one campaign-ish question, came from Gabriela Weaver in the chat. I’m just going to read it out loud to you. “Your analysis for exploring issues around policy and economics. Both times that Trump won, he was running against a female. To what extent do you think that undercurrents of sexism and racism had a big influence on the shift to the right that we saw in the election last night?” So I know that data is very early, we don’t even have full, I mean we don’t have full results, but do you have reactions to the initial set of data that we’re seeing? Maybe first Jon, then you, Sarah?
Jon Fansmith: So I think it’s a completely valid question. As you said, we don’t have data and frankly a lot of times what you’ll see in exit polls is people won’t be, if that is a driving factor in their decision-making, they’re not honest about it. So it’s very hard to document. We saw a lot of very gendered rhetoric used by the Trump campaign, especially as we headed into the closing moments of the campaign. Certainly, he is known for an off-the-cuff speaking style, to put it mildly. But the consistency of that and the fact that it crossed over to surrogates makes it seem that there was at least some understanding or belief that drawing a contrast between the genders of the two candidates might have a down-ballot impact. So I certainly cannot speak to whether there was an intentionality to promote sexism or to try and leverage that, not making that statement in any way. But certainly, you can look at how things played out and say was it a factor? It’s hard for me to imagine it wasn’t a factor, at least for a segment of voters.
Sarah Spreitzer: I think already there’s started to be a lot of finger-pointing within the Democratic Party, kind of where they went wrong. But I think I saw somebody on the news today say Harris ran a flawless campaign and there was nothing that you could point to that she did wrong except that people support Donald Trump. And to me, it’s less about racism and sexism and more about the partisanship, that we’re not just seeing in this presidential election but what we’ve seen in the past few years in Congress, where the parties are moving more and more to the more extreme sides of whether you’re left or whether you’re right.
And so Trump, he made the statement; he’s coming in with a mandate. This is what America wants. And I think that he saw gains in Latino male voters. He saw gains from female voters. I think it’s really important to look at where those votes came from. It’s not from just the base that we thought, which would be Republican white males. There were a lot of groups that turned out to vote for him.
Mushtaq Gunja: Thanks, Gabriela, for the question. I think it’s a good one. I think there’ll be a lot of discussion in the media, all the medias, around it. And I think one thing I guess I might just encourage all of us to do is just wait for all of the election results to come in. I know that there was mentioned in the chat about the amount of vote that Harris has gotten, the raw number of votes that Harris has gotten, that Trump has gotten. I think we’re only 53% in from California, so we’ve got several million votes left to count. And I think it’ll be really interesting to see what the numbers look like when we have full voter registration data, which unfortunately is I think three months from now. But still, I think it’s good for us to really be talking from a complete set of data.
Let me start the biggest picture question. The Republicans have been arguing for a long time and Trump at various times sort of promised to abolish the Department of Education. So let’s start big picture. Is that going to happen? Is my former employer going to be no longer with us? Either of you, Jon, Sarah?
Jon Fansmith: So I’ve said this in a couple of different places leading up to today, there’s procedural things. You can’t abolish the Department of Education without getting legislation through Congress. And the last time something was proposed in the house, I think 40 or 50 Republicans voted in opposition. We’re going to have a razor-thin House in all likelihood. This just doesn’t seem like a broadly popular proposal. It’s been around for 40 years, we’ve never seen any substantive steps taken towards it.
But I think more importantly than procedural, this is one of those things where really politics is, I think, the really dominant factor here. We just went through an election, and frankly we’ve gone through a few election cycles, where K-12 especially but also higher education have been central to a lot of candidates campaigns. They have talked about issues of education, who controls it, what the curriculum is, how things should be taught, who participates, what that looks like, how it’s funded. These are kitchen table issues that American voters are increasingly focused on.
The Department of Education is a massive, influential, visible tool to reach into every school district, to reach into every college and university campus and exert at least attention and pressure and other things as to your administration’s policy priorities. Why would you give that up if that’s now within your authority? You can look at things that the Department of Education does. You can say, do we need to have an OCR at the Department of Education when the Department of Justice also does civil rights enforcement? There are questions that can be asked about what is the most appropriate way to do that. Should Treasury run the student loan portfolio? But realistically, this is a powerful tool for whoever’s in office to expand their policy priorities and have Americans see them pushing those priorities. It just doesn’t make a lot of practical sense to give that up when you’re the one actually in power. You hate it when you’re out of office; you love it when you’re in.
Sarah Spreitzer: I think I disagree with you on that, Jon, not surprisingly. I think that the way that this abolishment of the Department of Education was laid out in the Project 2025 document from the Heritage Foundation was actually done in a very thoughtful manner. It wasn’t just a talking point of let’s abolish the Department of Ed and everybody’s thinking, “Well, what would that mean?” It is a multi-page, step-by-step guide about moving the Office of Civil Rights, OCR, from the Department of Education to the Department of Justice, moving the student loan programs from the Department of Education over to Treasury, limiting the role of the federal government in making those student loans.
I don’t think it’s something that the Trump administration can just wave a magic wand and make it happen through executive authority, but I definitely think that there will be a push to start to shave off some of those things that the department already does, put them in different agencies to give it a smaller role. Because I do think that that was a message that resonated with voters. I don’t think they think of the Department of Education as a federal bureaucracy, but when they think about their complaints about education, blame the US Department of Education. So I could see them moving some of the big pieces of the Department of Ed and then you’re kind of left with a much smaller footprint of the department.
Mushtaq Gunja: And I’ll just note of course that the Republicans have been talking about getting rid of the Department of Education now for 40 years and haven’t quite done it, but maybe they’re more interested in doing some of that in the next four years. I want to talk about what President-elect Trump is going to do in the first a hundred days, what he can do by executive action. I have a whole set of questions about that. But before we get there, can I just ask Jon, Sarah, what are you anticipating that the Biden administration might do in these last couple of months of their term?
Jon Fansmith: There’s one that pops immediately to mind, and I think it’s a really interesting and... I’m not going to answer the question, but I’m going to talk about something. The gainful employment, financial value transparency reporting requirements, the deadline for that is January 15th. We know that that regulation is intensely disliked by congressional Republicans. They have made multiple efforts to try and use a process called the Congressional Review Act to include in other legislation to strike those regulations from the books. Every guarantee, we had a gainful employment regulation that came out of the Obama administration; the Trump administration almost immediately got rid of it. I feel highly confident the second Trump administration will do the same with this one.
And yet we have this January 15th deadline for schools to report massive amounts of very complicated information. The process to compile that information is ongoing. We hear every day, honestly, from schools who are worried they won’t be able to make these deadlines. And you look at it and you wonder a little bit for the current, the waning days of the Biden Department of Education, do they look at something like this and say, is this enough of a priority that we’re going to hold to a deadline like that knowing that five days after the deadline, if it goes into the hands of an administration openly hostile to it, that’s likely to eliminate it? It’s a really interesting question.
I think there’s a bunch of regulations in particular hanging out there. They could move forward on finalizing, we’re past the November 1st deadline where they would take effect for a lot of the financial aid ones next year, so even if they finalize them, they theoretically wouldn’t take effect until 2026. What is the utility of doing that if you think your successors are going to strike them as soon as they come in the door?
You have policy priorities, you have constituencies that you work with, you have goals you want to achieve. There is certainly rationale for pushing on those things. But Mushtaq, I might actually throw this back at you. You were there at the waning days of the Obama administration. There were things that were pushed out. The completion of processes had been underway for years and there was the opportunity to do it. I think people would love to hear your perspective a little bit on what that looks like.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. I haven’t been following the regulatory work quite as closely, and I’m not sure if there’s a couple of last regulations they might be able to push over the finish line. I do think that one thing that we might see are the last batch of loan forgiveness that might of pending in the borrower defense world or maybe some closed school discharge stuff because I think it’s very clear that the Trump administration is not particularly interested in student loan forgiveness. So to the extent that there’s anything that the Biden administration might be able to do, I think we might be able to see some work there. Maybe there’s something else around financial aid, but that’s what I anticipate.
I’m just cognizant of time. We have so many questions here. So I’m going to try to move us to the first hundred days of the Trump administration. What do we think is going to be first on their priority list? What do we think they can do? And a couple of folks in the chat have noted that Congress will be unsettled. We won’t know exactly what’s happening. What can the Trump administration do by executive action or just by themselves in those first hundred days? So what are you guys tracking there?
Sarah Spreitzer: I think that the Trump administration, like previous administrations in our recent history have used executive action a lot, especially because they had a divided Congress. I could see some of the executive actions that were overturned by the Biden administration brought back immediately. For me, the first one that comes to mind is the travel ban. The travel ban was very popular, I think, with Trump supporters. It showed action being taken on immigration even though it was focused on visas.
Remember the Trump administration issued three travel bans. The first two were stopped by the courts because they were constitutionally illegal. And they ended up with the third one, which banned any visas from certain countries, but they also included Venezuela, so it was clear that it wasn’t just focused on Muslim-majority countries and it was those that were related to political figures in Venezuela, and then included Iran, but there was an exemption carved out for students from Iran.
So I think that when we think about the travel ban, it was narrowed down by the time that the courts let it stand. But the damage was done in the messaging that went along with the travel ban for the one that was stopped almost immediately by the courts. I can definitely see something like that coming back. And remember that was in January of his first term.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, what about you? What else are you tracking?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I think I’ve touched on this a little bit in terms of executive action. I think we’re going to see a whole slew of Biden administration regulations rescinded. I think will begin... It’s also important to note 52 to 54 Senate Republican majority gives them some comfort margin in terms of getting appointees in place quickly. So one of the things you’ve seen administrations struggle at times is getting their nominees in to start their work. They should be able to start doing some of these things right out of the gates.
And as you look around, I think you almost certainly expect to see action around Title IX. It takes a while. It will be complicated and time-consuming to write new Title IX regulations to replace the Biden ones, but that will be a clear area of emphasis. Again, it was a lot of the issues, particularly around trans student participation in athletics were repeated in campaign ads, both Trump nationally and in local races, statewide races. So an area of emphasis that I think their voters will expect to see action on relatively soon. So executive action-wise, I’m very heavily focused in the regulatory space.
Mushtaq Gunja: We have several questions in the chat, in the Q&A, around funding, funding from our big funding agencies, NIH and NSF and NASA and the others. But there’s also, of course, just sort of regular funding that goes through the Department of Education. What are you seeing there? What has the president and his team said about any of that, and where’s your head?
Sarah Spreitzer: We haven’t talked about reconciliation, and I’ll let Jon get into those details, but that has budgetary impacts. I think when you’re talking about the regular appropriations process, especially from some of our science agencies, look, the science agencies have a lot of bipartisan support. The National Science Foundation is not going anywhere. I think that there may be some changes made to NIH for political reasons, but I think the funding of those extramural grants is not going to go away. But I think the appropriators in Congress are going to be very, very fiscally conservative. So we are likely in a stage where we’re going to see some cuts and maybe level funding is what we can be most hopeful for.
I also think under the first Trump administration, what we saw was some things that they were trying to do around the edges that would demonstrate that with level funding, they were increasing the amount of money they had to make grants. So the idea that they would restructure the National Institutes of Health and do away with some of the centers or institutes that might have a global focus or might have a focus that the administration doesn’t support, that those would be absorbed into another institution at NIH or that NSF might have more of a focus on applied research. And so there will likely be changes, but I don’t see the funding levels being cut or going away like we’ve seen proposed for the Department of Education.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And I think, first and foremost, everything we say is qualified by who controls the House, right? A split Congress is a very different funding situation than a unified control Congress, especially with a Republican administration that will pass any legislation that comes out of that Congress. We have certainly on the student aid side seen proposals coming out of the House when they’ve been in the majority the last two years that would have respectively in certain years eliminated Federal Work-Study funding or cut it in half. There is a very clear policy interest in reducing overall federal spending, particularly across non-defense domestic programs. So if we have unified party control, expect to see those areas cut.
Now, the caveat there is always administrations love to propose big budgetary changes; they love to announce their priorities; they love to announce new programs. Democrats, Republicans, we see this year after year, but especially the first couple of years of a new administration. Very rarely do we actually see Congress act on those. Congress prefers to assert their own priorities. You do see cuts sometimes. You see money shifted to other areas. But usually members of Congress, and again, I’d call on our members here too, we do this a lot, they are responsive to their constituents. And it’s one thing to say, “I want to slash federal spending.” It’s a whole nother thing to say, “I want the constituents from my district to pay more to go to college because I’m cutting Pell Grants, I’m cutting Work-Study, I’m cutting Supplemental Education Opportunity Grants.” That’s the importance of letting them know that these impact you and impact your district because when the rubber hits the road, members of Congress care what their voters think. So a lot more noise, certainly the protections of a divided Congress in terms of radical change may not be there with one party control, but worth still paying attention to.
The other thing I do want to go quickly into because I think this is really important, Sarah touched on reconciliation. She touched on it as a budgetary process. I don’t think anybody-
Sarah Spreitzer: That’s what it’s supposed to be. I mean, right?
Jon Fansmith: It is supposed to be. Right, but we’re laughing because reconciliation gets used to do everything but find budget savings these days, which is what it was created to do. And for those of you who don’t know, and this is a smart audience, I know a lot of you do know this, but reconciliation is a special Congressional procedure that allows legislation to move with simple majority votes in both chambers. So it gets you past the filibuster in the Senate. And it’s the vehicle that got used to pass the Affordable Care Act. It’s the vehicle that got used to pass the 2017 so-called Trump tax cuts.
We already know Republicans have said that if they have one party control of Congress, they would like as soon as the first a hundred days to move a massive tax bill. A lot of those 2017 tax provisions are expiring next year; there will have to be action one way or the other on those provisions. This is something President Trump has promised his constituents and his funders that he would take action in this area.
I think from the higher ed space, tax is certainly important. I don’t want to diminish the importance of things like the endowment tax or the taxability of Pell Grants, where there might be possibilities for positive changes too. But the other thing we know is that the College Cost Reduction Act introduced in the House by Virginia Foxx, a bill we have been very concerned about since its introduction, would impose risk-sharing payment penalties on colleges and universities, fundamentally reshape student loans to be less generous to students. It saves $185 billion by Congressional Budget Office accounting. That means it frees up $185 billion for members of Congress to spend on other priorities if you attach it to a reconciliation package. So that is the kind of thing where a lot of it is actually policy-focused, but because of the financial implications, it’s a natural fit for a reconciliation bill if that is on the table. So an area, one of the many reasons we’re closely watching what happens in the House.
Mushtaq Gunja: So maybe not a standalone CCRA, but it somehow gets subsumed in a broader package?
Jon Fansmith: $185 billion worth of savings is a pretty convincing argument for including it.
Mushtaq Gunja: Okay.
Sarah Spreitzer: Jon, we had a question about DACA. And I’ll just remind you, I think it was on the reconciliation bill that established the Inflation Reduction Act under President Biden. They did try to attach a DACA bill and it was rejected by the Senate parliamentarian because of the lack of budgetary impact. So it can be used to move a lot of things, but they do say no sometimes.
Mushtaq Gunja: One thing that Republicans writ large and President Trump in particular seem to really key in on is ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in, well, across higher education, across primary and secondary school as well. Jon, Sarah, what are you seeing there? What do you anticipate might happen in the DEI space?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, so I think there’s a couple layers to this onion. The first is that congressional action in this area, first of all, would be incredibly complicated to draft and probably run afoul of all sorts of other civil liberties protections. That said, attacks on DEI programs, DEIB programs in the education space, both at colleges, universities and the K-12 level, have been a recurring feature of a lot of Republican candidates’ campaigns over the last couple cycles.
If you are, and I think there’s reason to be concerned about how this administration will approach it, the first and obvious one would be they have a big, powerful megaphone to both raise issues and draw attention to policies and practices they don’t like.
The other is that they have a pretty powerful tool in the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education. And a lot of this messaging has been not that these programs are inherently pointless or that they don’t serve a purpose; the critique is that they’re inherently discriminatory against other groups of students. If you believe that a DEIB program is discriminatory against groups of students on a campus, then theoretically that opens a campus using those programs up to, at a minimum, an investigation by the Office of Civil Rights. And I would say that this is the kind of thing you don’t have to do at every campus that has a program. If you do it at five or 10 high-profile institutions and you publicize it, the chilling effect may be worth the fact that an investigation may not be able to lead to an outcome.
I think that’s the threat we see around DEIB. I think it’s far less likely, people probably know that, well, they probably don’t know, but the General Educational Provisions Act, sort of the incorporating documents for the Department of Education, has a very strong and explicit bar on the federal government getting involved in curriculum, programs, staffing, faculty. Clearly, there’s some variation around the edges of how that’s been interpreted in statute. But this is exactly the kind of thing that would have to have some legal changes to do if you want to actually bar schools, especially private institutions, from pursuing these programs. But you can do a lot to shift the discussion around them to draw attention in a way that favors your concerns and amplifies your critiques if that’s where you choose to go.
Sarah Spreitzer: So Jon, there were some executive orders though in the last year of the Trump administration around DEI that would bar government contractors from having anything that mentioned DEI or critical race theory or some special terms that they had called out. I think the Trump administration can easily dust that off and put it back in place. And I don’t remember that being tested in the courts because it was at the very end. And so the hook that I think that they will always have is that federal funding. Whether it’s through your grant agreement or whether it’s through your program participation agreement, putting new requirements in there is, I think, the hook that they will use.
Jon Fansmith: Just on that point too, Sarah, because I think that’s a really, add a little more confusion to this issue, there are a number of federal grant programs or other federal programs that actually have requirements or award priorities for programs that are inclusive, that seek a diversity of applicants or serve a diversity of audiences. And we’ve certainly seen the courts being much more skeptical of programs that seek to advantage underrepresented communities. So there’s a legal element to this. There is a statutory requirement side that the administration may need changes to laws to change how these programs are administered. And then, as you said, executive actions they could take that could put their thumb on the scale against these programs. There’s a lot of different pathways here. I’m not entirely clear which of them could advance or how they would advance in concert.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah, it’s going to be funny because over the last four years, we’ve seen Republicans sue to block bills and they often will cherry-pick which court they go to to get a temporary stay or more of an injunction on the implementation of some of these regulations. And I imagine that we’re going to see a lot of things end up in the courts and a lot of legal challenges. I know, by the way, let me just note that we’re coming up on time, but Jon, Sarah, are you available to stay for another 15 minutes or so?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah.
Mushtaq Gunja: Because there are a lot of questions in the chat.
Jon Fansmith: I feel like we’re only scratching the surface here.
Mushtaq Gunja: So many things I want to ask about. So hang with us if you can, if you want to, audience, that’d be great. Let me just ask one last question about DEI. It seems to me that this is a spot where I think it’s likely that the Department of Education, the administration more broadly, might take action. Do you have advice for our campuses in of how they should evaluate their programs, how they might want to modify them, anything that you’ve seen that has worked, any advice that you might have for them?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And I wish I had some of our other ACE colleagues who, like Pete McDonough would be a great person to talk about this; he’s given us a lot of thought and research.
And so let me qualify by, there have been a slew of recent court decisions around, and not just the consideration of race in admissions but how different programs can be administered, how they can be applied. And I think what we have generally found, and I think frankly also tends to correlate with the programs that have had the most success for institutions, are ones that are truly broadly inclusive, that look at identifying the full range of populations an institution serves and looking at ways to make sure that every student on that campus does truly feel as if they belong, does truly feel included. I recognize that’s something that’s easy to say from this perspective. The practical applications of really diverse and varying student bodies across different schools and institution types makes that, I think, probably a great standard and the practical challenges remain.
But being very thoughtful about that your programs are not targeted to certain groups that you may be most concerned about or have been the most poorly served either by higher education in general or your institution in particular, but you have to do that work in partnership with making sure that what applies to your Black and Brown students applies to your veteran students and your students with disabilities and your rural students and that there is a true campus culture of inclusion and belonging that is writ large.
Sarah Spreitzer: We have seen a lot of states pass state-specific rules that apply to their public institutions that I think can provide some sort of roadmap. I think under the first Trump administration, we also saw them pick up things that were being passed in the states and try to implement on a federal level. And many times when it wasn’t implemented on the federal level, then it would go back to the states. So I guess I would encourage those institutions to look at how those states have been doing, whether it’s Florida or Texas or their colleagues that may be dealing with these state DEI-focused pieces of legislation.
Mushtaq Gunja: Hey, we’ve gotten a couple of questions about accreditation, a topic near and dear to my heart. How do you think about what the possible changes to accreditation might look like? We saw this move to change the way we think about regional accreditation. Is there a next set of steps that are coming in the accreditation landscape?
Jon Fansmith: And I would actually, this is another one, Mushtaq, where I think your insights would be really helpful here. I will say the Trump campaign picked up on what’s been a steady drumbeat around accreditation, especially from Republicans, but from some Democrats as well over the last, I’d say, decade. And they follow the common theme that is a critique of accreditors as varying terms of they’re the cartel or the gatekeepers for access to higher education, which in many ways, rightfully so, accreditors are, and they serve an incredibly important function about who should be allowed to access federal funds for the purposes of serving students.
Certainly, we have seen efforts, proposals, Marco Rubio is one of the first to propose this, but the Trump campaign reiterated of devolving accreditation down to the state level. And proposals even in statute, CCRA includes language along these lines to say that not just states, but states could recognize industry partners to be accreditors and all of these arrangements would allow for access to federal Title IV funds.
There is a definite emphasis on the idea of moving accreditation away, decentralizing it, moving away in some ways from the current system of regional and national creditors recognized directly by the Department of Education. What that actually looks like in practice? Again, there’s a statutory requirement for a lot of these elements. The administration has some latitude. They can do things. They can certainly, using then the NACIQI recognition process, put some pressure on accreditors in terms of the behaviors they’d like to see from them. But I don’t know that sitting here today we have a clear sense of exactly the specific steps that would be taken. But Sarah, Mushtaq, I know you both have great insights.
Sarah Spreitzer: My insight would just be they know that they don’t like it, but what’s going to happen, I’m not sure. They agree they want to do something. And we’ve seen proposals that would allow states to become accreditors, kind of watering down accreditors’ abilities to recognize schools. But it’s been a lot of stuff. Just the agreement I think is that they don’t like the accreditation process.
Mushtaq Gunja: I think that unlike some of the other things that we’ve talked about, some of the more executive action-like things that the administration might be able to do around immigration, around DEI, even around funding, I think that because some of this work around accreditation is embedded in statute, I think it would take a pretty significant and serious effort on the part of the administration to completely overhaul accreditation.
And I’m just not sure. I guess we’ll have to see who the new secretary of education is and whether this is one of the top two or three priorities. If it is, then sure, in four years you might be able to, by the end, really completely overhaul it.
In the short term, I think there are all sorts of ways in which the department could put their thumb on the scale at the Department of Education, the accreditation office there, to try to put a little bit more pressure on that office to have a little bit more latitude in the NACIQI process on the types of new models that we might be able to see in higher education. I think the cartelness critique is really about, in Republicans’ minds, maybe stifling some educational innovation. So there might be things that happen around the edges there. I would think that a complete overhaul would be a pretty significant lift. But that my quick sense there.
I think that you two probably have been monitoring the chat too. Other things to hit quickly?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. I would just say there were some questions about the impact on international students. And I would say in the last Trump administration, we saw a lot of things happen in the beginning that weren’t solely focused on international students but that did impact our international student enrollments. President Trump did talk on the campaign trail about wanting to reduce the overall number of international students in the United States. Many of the other English-speaking countries like Canada, Australia, even the UK, took some actions to limit international student enrollment because of some of the oversubscription that they saw in their own countries.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they look to some of those policies to say how do we cap this. I think there was also a question about whether or not the China initiative comes back. And I think most definitely, that’s a shift from looking at research security from the side of the research agencies looking into whether or not researchers are reporting federal funding and looking more at criminal cases that might be brought forward by the Department of Justice. So those are my issues that were raised in the chat.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I think one of the things that I saw popping up again and again was concerns about what the new Congress and the administration might mean for Minority Serving Institutions. And I think this is one, we’ve talked a little bit about this I think in sort of broader terms but not specific to those institutions. Generally. I would say that those institutions are bipartisanly popular and do tend to enjoy pretty strong political support. Certainly, President-elect Trump during the campaign made an effort to court HBCUs in particular and to highlight his work in his first administration around HBCUs. So this does not seem to be a case where you have an incoming Congress or administration that’s hostile to those institutions.
That said, particularly once you get beyond HBCUs and Tribal Colleges and Universities, you tend to see some things that might be a little bit more concerning. And the Trump campaign was very clear that they did not participate in the drafting of the Project 2025 document, but a lot of the people who would be likely to come into a Trump administration were participating or worked at the organizations that were participating in that. And so as a imprecise blueprint of what we might see, one of the recommendations was the elimination of Title III and Title V and reducing all of the funding in those programs to support a wide range of different Minority Serving Institutions and directing those resources just to HBCUs and TCUs.
So there are things that have been proposed despite a lot of, I think, broad congressional support for those institutions. Certainly worth keeping an eye on as they go forward. Again, I think unlikely to get congressional support, but certainly we don’t want to skip past that.
The other one that popped up that I can’t believe we haven’t gotten to yet is I would love to hear from you two speculation on who will be a Trump secretary of education. Anybody have the inside scoop here?
Sarah Spreitzer: Not Betsy DeVos. That’s the one thing I think we can be sure of. We didn’t get a chance to talk about the transition, but I think this will be a slightly different transition than what we saw with the first Trump administration. The transition team has been having meetings, has been thinking about cabinet members. The first election, I think the incoming Trump administration was a little surprised and they hadn’t done any of the traditional transition activities that you think of. I think anybody coming into Education knowing that the administration is focusing on dissolving it may not be somebody who’s really in the weeds on a lot of the policy areas but may be more of a true believer in what the Trump administration wants to push out on education. So that’s just my two cents.
Mushtaq Gunja: I have no insight here, and I hesitate to speculate. I honestly have not given it really any thought. Jon, I know that’s not true for you. You’ve been following both who’s been speculated about in the press and might have some additional thoughts too. Where’s your head?
Jon Fansmith: And “speculated” is the right word here. There’s some of the other positions, certainly you’ve heard talk about secretary of defense or secretary of state, where you’ve been hearing speculation and President-elect Trump has even made reference to possible candidates or things he’s looking for. We don’t have quite that level of depth.
There have been times where on the campaign trail he has mentioned various figures that he’s been impressed by the work in the education space. He made a real point of attending the Moms for Liberty national meeting and praised one of the co-founders, I believe her name’s Tiffany Justice, correct me if I’m wrong on that, but as somebody who would make a good education secretary, particularly given their work in the K-12 space. The superintendent of schools for Oklahoma has been referenced by President-elect Trump as somebody who’s aligned with his priorities. Again, these are very K-12 focused, which to be honest, is the pattern we generally see for secretary of education. It is very rare to have a higher ed-focused secretary of ed.
Glenn Youngkin, not someone Trump has referenced, but somebody who’s been very active in the education space. Education-focused issues were part of how he won the seat as governor of Virginia. And then I think it was mentioned in the chat too, that Christopher Rufo, who has been certainly played an outsized role in critiquing higher education, the structure of higher education, very much seen as a leading voice on the far right around higher education policy, certainly somebody you could see receiving consideration in a Trump administration. Betsy DeVos, interestingly enough, has been talked about too. And I know Sarah said there’s no way she’s coming back. She was asked-
Sarah Spreitzer: I just don’t think she’d want to do it again.
Jon Fansmith: Well, this is it. She was asked, “Would you come back as secretary of education?” She’s sort of, I believe, closed the rift that she had with President Trump. She had renounced his actions on January 6th while she was still secretary of education but has recently been closer to him, contributed to the campaign. She was asked and she said, “The only way I would accept that job is if I was coming back to dismantle the agency,” which from a former secretary of that agency is a pretty compelling statement.
Mushtaq Gunja: It’s not a no, I guess.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah.
Jon Fansmith: It’s not a no. And if you think they’re actually like Sarah does, that there will actually be efforts to demolish the Department of Ed, maybe that’s the rationale for coming back.
Sarah Spreitzer: Reorganization, Jon. I think that’ll be the messaging.
Jon Fansmith: Reorg, not demolish. Okay.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, no matter who it is, ACE will be there, and we will do our best to work with this Department of Education for the betterment of higher education overall. And it’ll be an interesting four years for sure. It’ll be impactful, it’ll be eventful, and we will need all of you. Jon, Sarah, last thoughts before we wrap up this wonderful webinar.
Jon Fansmith: I just want to thank all of the people who joined this and who join these that we do all the time. And I don’t want to go overboard about this, but it really is so important to us at ACE to have colleagues across the country who know and who care and are doing the good work day in, day out, whether that’s in the advocacy space or teaching and educating or serving students in other ways. And it can be tough at times. You see an election, election’s an inflection point no matter what your political viewpoints are. It’s also a great time to stop and take a look at the work we do and how important it is and recognize that whatever the challenges may be, we’ve been there as a community; we will face them; we will overcome them. We’re a great group of people to be sharing the space with and these challenges in this moment with, so I appreciate all of your work.
Sarah Spreitzer: And our producers just wanted us to mention that this recording will be up actually I think tomorrow on the podcast platform and that our next dotEDU Live will be December 10th when we’ll be discussing even more about what we know about the incoming administration and the new Congress.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, thank you, everybody. And we will see you December 10th for the next dotEDU Live. And in the meantime, go find your favorite students and make sure you give them a hug and make sure they’re okay and we’ll see you next time. Thanks all.
Sarah Spreitzer: Thanks.
Jon Fansmith: Thanks, everyone.
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