One of the most amazing things about Joe Biden’s presidency is that we don’t have to hear about it all the time.  For days – nay, weeks – on end, we can go about our business without thinking about what the US Head of State is doing or saying.  It’s brilliant.  But while the vacation is nice, it’s time to start paying attention again because very big things are afoot in DC with respect to higher education. It’s worth surveying what is going on, because some of it will have ramifications up here.

There are basically three pieces to this puzzle: the American Rescue Plan, the American Families Plan, and the American Jobs Act.  Here, in brief, is what each does:

American Rescue Plan.  This was the $1.9 trillion “stimulus” bill that Congress passed in March to plug holes in the system.  Financially, the biggest piece of this was $350 billion in direct aid to states to help balance their budgets to prevent swingeing cuts to services like higher education (state cuts to higher education were not that large in fiscal 2021, down less than a percentage point, though the cuts were highly concentrated in community colleges; this year may be a different story).  The plan also contained $40 billion in direct assistance to higher education institutions, though building on last year’s CARES Act, institutions are being directed to pass half of this money on to students in the form of emergency student aid, which is certainly testing the ability of institutions to do needs assessment on their own.

American Families Plan.  Thishasn’t passed Congress yet, but it seems likely to pass without too many amendments.  It adds two years of universal free education – two years of pre-school childcare and two years of community college (technically, the latter is a Targeted Free Tuition proposal – free to those from families making less than $125,000/year –  but since high-income Americans tend to send their kids to 4-year institutions this is tantamount to universal free tuition).  The community college education is to be paid for by transfers to the states: the basic deal being that the federal government will pay 75% of the cost of reducing tuition to zero if the state agrees to pay the other 25%.  However, Democrats differ on the specifics here: Bernie Sanders wants a version where the 75% varies by state, which would produce very large transfers to the states who spend the least on community colleges, while the White House prefers a version where states get a per-student subsidy equal to 75 percent of average national community college tuition.  A fair number of high-tuition states – including Sanders’ Vermont, as it happens, might not participate in the latter scheme.  (There’s an excellent explainer on all this from the New America’s Kevin Carey in the New York Times, here). 

The AFP also provides tens of billions of dollars specifically to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) and bumps up the maximum Pell grant by $1,400 to $7,895 (the actual 2021-22 Budget – a separate document – bumps it up another $400).  It also creates a new $62 billion program to improve retention at schools that mainly serve low-income students (yes, it’s an eye-popping number, but keep in mind that American budgeting conventions require spending announcements to be priced over ten years).  It is really not clear how this will work, who will be eligible, or what will be funded, but it is an interesting shift in prioritizing success as well as access.

American Jobs Plan.  Like the Families plan, this hasn’t yet passed Congress, but since it is mostly an infrastructure bill, I have a feeling there will be a lot of fooling around with the specifics before it emerges for Biden’s signature.  There has a bunch of money in here for community college infrastructure, and it contains a big $180 billion increase in money for Research and Development.  The headline story is an extra $50 billion for the National Science Foundation, specifically to focus on technology in fields such as semiconductors and advanced computing, advanced communications technology, advanced energy technologies, and biotechnology.  There is also $40 billion for an upgrade in research infrastructure, with a large portion marked out specifically for HBCUs and other MSIs.

This is not the only money for research: the budget itself also includes new money for the Centre for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and NASA.  Nature magazine puts most of these agencies’ funding bumps at over 20% just for fiscal 2022.  And the money keeps coming: the Endless Frontier Act, which just passed out of committee in the Senate last week, appears to double the size of that NSF technology fund. 

In other words: there is a lot going on down there.  But one thing that has not happened – or not yet, anyways – is any movement on student debt forgiveness, which was very high on the wish-list for many Democrats just a few months ago.  Biden was always much less interested in this proposal than his party: his preference always seemed to be to put more money into helping future students than past ones.  What now seems likely is debt relief on the very limited end of the various proposals circulating late last year, and the left seems unlikely to give him much stick about it because he has been so much bolder on macroeconomic policy and the need to claim a “win” on student debt specifically seems much diminished.

What should Canadians take from all this?  A couple of things, I think.  First: this is a lot of money for post-secondary education institutions, but intriguingly, the government seems to be trying to keep that money out of the hands of institutions which serve the white middle-class.  It’s nearly all going to community colleges, HBCUs and MSIs.  In other words, it’s a pro-higher education package which takes social and economic stratification seriously.  It’s hard to imagine what a Canadian equivalent to this would be, simply because unlike the US, our colleges get more or less the same per-student investments as do universities. 

Second: on student aid and affordability you are seeing a similar push on equity: i) more money for grants to low-income students than for tuition subsidies, ii) to the extent there are tuition subsidies, they are going to go to institutions which middle- and upper-middle-class students typically avoid and iii) on debt cancellation, the version that is likely to be adopted is the one that puts the least money, either proportionately or in absolute terms, into the hands of graduates from upper middle-class families.

Third: the numbers of science are big: big enough that it will become a lot harder for Canadian universities to compete for top talent.  But it’s not clear that this is a win for those who believe in purely inquiry-based research.  The majority of funds, from what I can tell, are going into very applied areas of technology dedicated to re-establishing US technological superiority over China.  One wonders how this will play out – and whether the funding will last past the next Congress.

In short, I would argue that in many ways the United States are moving in Canada’s direction policy-wise on institutional funding and student aid but moving well ahead of us on science funding.