The news from the United States these days, as far as higher education is concerned, sometimes seems uniformly bleak, but US higher education operates in an unbelievably decentralized environment. Not only are there differences across states, across the public-private divide, and to some extent across accreditation zones, but even within the federal system, there’s not necessarily a uniformity of approach, given three branches of government, and even within the executive sphere, different approaches from the major funders of education, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense, and of course the Department of Education. And that’s leaving aside the White House and the orange bad man who dwells within.
For those outside the United States, understanding how all of that fits together is not easy. So I thought it’d be helpful, for one episode, just to focus in on what’s been happening with a single player in that environment, specifically the US Department of Education.
It’s basically Schrodinger’s department, still in existence despite having allegedly been abolished, run by a former pro wrestling executive, Linda McMahon, and it’s hugely consequential—in charge of hundreds of billions of dollars in student assistance, with major policy roles in accreditation and regulation of institutions.
With me today to discuss what’s been going on in this department for the last 15 months are Dan Collier, an Assistant Professor of Higher and Adult Education in the Department of Leadership at the University of Memphis, and Mike Kofoed, an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
I asked these two on the show to help parse everything that’s going on, from its status to its policies on student assistance, accreditation, and DEI, and also what the future may hold for the department in the event of a big political shift following the midterms this fall.
Let’s listen to what they have to say.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.28 | You Can’t Kill the U.S. Department of Education (But You Can Break It)
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Dan, let’s start with the leadership of the Department of Education. Who is Linda McMahon and how did she get the job?
Daniel Collier (DC): Linda McMahon and Donald Trump have been friends for decades. Trump has been an avid supporter of the WWE, especially early on, hosting WrestleManias and even appearing on the product and whatnot. So they’ve been a close-knit group of individuals for a long time.
In the first Trump administration, Linda was the Administrator of the Small Business Administration. After that administration, she moved into a think tank focused on helping secure policy platforms for what they expected would be a future Trump administration—which did, in fact, happen. As a result, she was appointed Secretary of Education in this administration.
Obviously, it seems like she aligns with the current administration’s goal of weakening the Department of Education—hobbling it to a point where it can’t effectively function, probably for a while, without outright eliminating it, since they can’t do that without congressional help.
AU: Mike, they did abolish the Department of Education, right? I mean, I saw a big signing ceremony. Trump had his Sharpie out and was demonstrably getting rid of it. So why are we still talking about the Department of Education? Why is there still a Secretary of Education?
Mike Kofoed (MK): A lot of people need to understand that there’s a difference between executive orders and statute. Many times, those get conflated, and they have been across the last few administrations.
So, you might see a Rose Garden signing where there’s an executive order to do X. But unless that’s something purely within the executive’s domain, that executive order is more like a cheerleading card—it’s more like, “this is what we’d like to do.” Congress created the Department of Education back in the Carter administration, which means it would take an act of Congress to remove it.
What that means in practice is that you’d need about 60 votes in the Senate to make it happen. But the Department of Education contributes funds to major employers in many representatives’ districts across many states. So while people might say they want to get rid of it, they don’t really want to get rid of it.
There are a few reasons for that. From my perspective—though I should say I’m a bit center-right—there are three important aspects to the department: First, civil rights. Education is primarily a state-run function, but we want to make sure that a kid in Alabama has the same opportunities as a kid in California. Second, higher education isn’t confined to states. People move across state boundaries all the time, especially for private institutions, so there’s an interstate commerce argument there. And third—and this is a big one—the Department of Education has traditionally had one of the best data centers and data availability systems around.
Those three components mean that, as the executive, regardless of party, you have a lot of influence over how public policy in this domain is set. So if a party wanted to abolish the department, they’d also be giving up important tools for setting policy—and I don’t think anyone is truly interested in that.
AU: That’s an interesting question, right? Because Republicans, generally speaking—Republicans in Congress—are quite happy to do whatever President Trump wants. But in this case, they don’t seem to be. And it’s not the only area in higher education where that’s the case. They’ve bucked him on cuts to the NIH. They’ve bucked him on cuts to the National Science Foundation. There doesn’t seem to be much of a push from Congressional or Senate Republicans to, as you say, get rid of it. So who are the Republicans who are bucking Trump on this? Is there a definable caucus that’s pro–Department of Education?
MK: You know, I don’t think you’re going to hear anyone right now come out and say that their goal is to be pro–Department of Education. But the fact that it has not come to a vote is telling.
I used to work in government relations, and I learned that the most important part of politics is being able to count. You need to be able to count to 60 if you want to pass something in the Senate. You need to be able to count to a majority in the House. And no good leader puts a bill up if they can’t already count to a majority.
So what that signals to me is that while no one in the Republican caucus is going to come out publicly and say, “Actually, I think the Department of Education is a good thing and we want to keep it,” they’re probably saying that in private and refusing to vote for its abolishment. And that’s why it hasn’t been pushed forward.
AU: And this really is one of those areas where you need 60 votes—you can’t just sneak it through and do it in reconciliation?
MK: No, you can’t. I mean, maybe theoretically you could try to zero out the department’s budget through reconciliation. But again, we had the biggest opportunity to do that in the so-called “big, beautiful bill,” and we kind of did the opposite.
We expanded Pell Grants. We talked about funding tech and career and technical education. Once again, it sounds good on the surface—it’s good campaign fodder to say education is a state issue and we don’t need a federal agency. But when you actually get to pull the levers of public policy, you want to keep those tools in your purview.
AU: I suppose one of the reasons you might want to keep a Secretary of Education, if not a full department, is that someone has to organize all the confrontations with universities, right? Like someone’s got to be the Secretary of Confrontation.
And particularly, the big area where that’s happened in the first 15 months of the Trump administration is around DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion. Recently—I guess it was in January or February—I saw that the department is no longer appealing a court decision that struck down the department’s main DEI policy, which was a “Dear Colleague” letter to institutions telling them to stop doing anything that might be seen as helping people who weren’t white males.
So by not appealing that decision, is the department actually changing its policy, or does that just signal a change in tactics? Dan?
DC: This isn’t uncommon for the administration across many facets of how they operate. Usually, they’ll create an executive order or some kind of policy, and then they’ll get to a court case where the court might strike it down, or they might walk it back. This is common in HUD and in other sectors as well, so it’s pretty standard operating procedure.
It was similar in the first Trump administration, because the goal isn’t always to have the outcome in their favor. The goal is to change behavior—to make sure that people and organizations are looking over their shoulder and changing what they do preemptively.
And that’s what a lot of institutions have done, and may continue to do. As far as a pivot, they’re starting to look at accreditation issues. They’re starting to look at financial aid and tying it to certain expectations. It’s unclear whether they can actually do that, but if you’re an administrator and you see these things coming down at you, a lot of people will adjust in order to make sure that students—and the institution more broadly—aren’t harmed.
I’m not saying those other students don’t deserve focus, by the way. But institutions are trying to avoid harm to the general student body. A place like Harvard might be able to push back, like we’ve seen. But an institution like Northern Illinois University has no chance of fighting back in the same way—they don’t have the financial resources to do it.
So it’s about changing behavior. Whether it’s legal or not almost doesn’t matter.
AU: Yeah, and you don’t need to get people to follow a specific policy—you just need to freeze their actions because they don’t know what the policy is. That’s really the strategy.
DC: Absolutely, and you’re seeing that with nonprofits across the board, not just universities. This is a tactic that’s applied broadly—we’re just talking about higher ed specifically here.
AU: A few months ago, the department asked institutions to start collecting and reporting data on admissions based on race. Implicitly, the request seemed to suggest that the administration wanted to identify institutions where Black and other minority populations were getting a rising share of enrollments. What’s the policy rationale for this, and why did Democrats object when they’ve seemingly been asking for similar kinds of data for a very long time? Mike?
MK: There are a few issues at play here. First is the confusion you mentioned at the beginning—whether there’s going to be a department or not. As all of that was unfolding, the department started asking university administrators to fill out very onerous data requests, which sent mixed signals.
On the one hand, it was, “We’re going to close the National Centre for Education Statistics,” but on the other hand, “We want this expanded dataset in IPEDS, and we want you to fill out these additional surveys.” It’s probably one of the best data collection agencies in the federal government, and it makes high-quality data available to researchers. There’s some great data over in HHS as well, but NCES data is really the gold standard.
So on one hand, we’re saying we’re going to cut off these datasets, and on the other hand, we’re asking for more data collection on this question. I think that really threw university administrators for a loop in terms of what the actual goal was.
Then you layer in some of the lawsuits suggesting there may have been what some would call “reverse discrimination”—that majority racial groups and male students weren’t getting equal access to selective institutions.
So I think Democrats were asking: how is this data going to be used? You’d have to ask them directly, of course. But from my perspective, the core issue was that there were large data requests coming from the administration, paired with low trust and very quick turnaround timelines. That’s what really drove the concern.
AU: But a court did just strike this initiative down quite recently. Dan, why was that? What was the rationale for the judge’s decision?
DC: They’re likely able to get this data legally—the judge suggested that this is something the government could do. But the issue was the timeline. It put undue stress on institutions, and they probably couldn’t compile everything in the required time.
It also didn’t go through proper rulemaking procedures and things like that.
AU: Procedural rather than substantive.
DC: Yeah, I would expect the Trump administration to try this again, but in a more measured way, like they’ve done with other things—like the public service loan forgiveness authority and similar moves.
MK: Also, they cut a lot of the employees who would have actually been responsible for collecting and processing this data.
As someone who’s maybe a bit more center-right, that’s always confused me. If you want to make a policy pivot away from things that were unpopular or legally questionable over the last four years, you still need the administrative capacity to implement those changes. But then you fired the people who would help you comply with those goals.
So again, it feels like a bit of a bag of cats—trying to figure out what exactly policymakers want to do.
AU: I want to shift the discussion a bit to talk about student assistance. In this year’s budget request—which I think went to Congress about a week ago—I understand there’s actually a boost in funding for Pell Grants. That suggests to me that the Trump administration now sees some benefit in helping low-income students. Previous budget requests, I think, had sought to lower Pell funding. Why the shift, Mike?
MK: I think one big shift is that the Trump administration—and this is something I actually agree with—is recognizing the need for career and technical education.
Some of the emphasis you’re seeing with Pell Grants is expanding their use at community colleges and technical colleges. The idea is to help students who may not be on a traditional college path. We have a lot of students who want to go to college and are ready for it—and for them, college is a great option.
But we also have students who don’t want to go to college, or whose skills are better suited elsewhere. The question is: how do we get them into good jobs that pay well? A high school diploma alone often isn’t enough anymore. So expanding Pell to support technical training is, I think, a really positive step.
But again, you need the Department of Education to allocate those funds effectively.
I also think there’s a political dimension. If you’ve run on a more populist message—helping the “little guy”—it’s hard to justify cutting Pell Grants, which are one of the highest-return investments in terms of helping low-income students access education.
So there may be some recognition of that. And this might also be another example of congressional and Senate Republicans quietly nudging the administration toward a more workable policy behind the scenes.
AU: The other piece about student aid is that the Department of Education manages one of the biggest loan portfolios in the United States. So whatever the department’s views on Pell Grants, it seems pretty insistent on making life harder for students with debt. But before we get into what they’re doing, can you help me make sense of the alphabet soup here? You’ve got ICR, PAYE, SAVE—what are all these different loan programs? What were the differences, and where does each one stand now, Dan?
DC: We could probably do an entire podcast just on these programs. For decades, borrowers have been very confused, and the government hasn’t always communicated clearly about what’s best, what’s optimal, when to enroll, or what to do.
Right now, you essentially have IBR, which is the legally mandated program created by Congress, and that one is likely to stay. Then you have REPAYE and PAYE, which were created by administrations rather than Congress, and those are being phased out.
These programs were based on your adjusted gross income—usually around 10% of discretionary income—with adjustments for family size and other factors. The idea was that after 20 years of consistent payments, you could receive loan forgiveness.
On top of that, there’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which overlays these programs. If you worked in a qualifying job—like at a university, in government, or as a firefighter or police officer—you could receive forgiveness after 10 years, or 120 qualifying payments.
The problem over time is that, according to a GAO report around 2019 or 2020, the government and loan servicers were often very poor at keeping records and tracking payments. People were frequently put behind and had to fight to get credit for payments they believed they had made.
Public Service Loan Forgiveness also had issues with clarity—people would work in jobs they thought qualified, often at lower pay, only to find out later that their employer or role didn’t meet the criteria.
So there’s been a lot of inconsistency in how these programs actually work in practice. And many borrowers have been relying on them for years to eventually get out of debt. The issue is that under many of these plans, even while making payments, balances could still grow—what we call negative amortization.
So if forgiveness doesn’t materialize, borrowers can end up with a lifetime of accumulating debt, despite doing exactly what the government told them to do.
AU: So, the key point there is that PAYE and SAVE were not congressionally approved, and therefore they’re on the chopping block. Is that fair?
And there’s a new program coming in—what they call the Repayment Assistance Program, or RAP—which is actually similar to what we call our program in Canada. So it’s a little confusing for Canadian listeners. But, RAP is considerably less generous, as I understand it, than PAYE or SAVE. So what does RAP do, and how are borrowers going to feel the difference, say, three months from now when this all kicks in?
DC: Just to quickly go back—on the SAVE program, since I didn’t touch on that—borrowers were moved from REPAYE directly into SAVE. But they’ve now been in a kind of stasis for quite a while. The forbearance period they’ve been in doesn’t count toward repayment, so they’re essentially stuck. And in many cases, they’re now in a worse economic position than they were a couple of years ago.
That program is effectively dead. The Trump administration reached a deal with the groups that were suing over it, and the courts essentially said, “That’s it—you’re done.”
Now, with RAP—this is another congressionally approved program. One positive aspect, especially for newer borrowers and those coming out of grad school with larger debts, is that it limits negative amortization. So balances won’t grow in the same way they did under some of the previous plans.
That’s helpful from a mental health perspective, and also when people are thinking about major purchases, since their debt won’t keep ballooning.
But on average, monthly payments under RAP will be higher than they were under SAVE, and also higher than they would have been under PAYE or REPAYE.
AU: Okay. And it’s going to kick in right before the midterms, so that’s good news, right?
DC: It depends. For some people, it’s already kicked in. For others—like those still in SAVE forbearance—they’ll have about 30 days from July.
But let’s be honest: like Mike said about the Department of Education, they fired a lot of the people who would be responsible for helping millions of borrowers transition from all these different plans into one of two options. I don’t expect that transition to go smoothly at all.
From what I’m hearing, timelines are stretching into months. People are confused about who’s responsible for what. And the administration doesn’t seem to be putting the same level of pressure on loan servicers to maintain standards or accountability as the Biden administration did.
So things are slipping through the cracks as everyone tries to navigate a very complicated situation on a tight timeline.
MK: It’ll probably end up like infrastructure week or the Iran war—just another two weeks, and then another two weeks, and suddenly two weeks turns into two years.
AU: So, maybe beyond November. Another area where the department has been active is in trying to achieve reform of institutional accreditation. Mike, what’s the administration trying to achieve in this area, and how is it trying to do it? And I guess, what are the chances of success?
MK: This has been a long-running issue—particularly in the for-profit sector. When some institutions couldn’t get accredited through the traditional regional bodies, like Middle States when I was at West Point or Southern States here at the University of Tennessee, they essentially created their own accreditation structures.
They branded themselves as “nationally accredited,” which sounds more impressive than “regionally accredited,” even though, in practice, regional accreditation has historically carried more weight.
But this is really where higher education is governed. If you’re a public institution, you’re primarily state-based. If you’re private or religious, the federal government has some influence, but not total control. And in many ways, that’s a strength—it creates a kind of marketplace.
Accrediting bodies are the ones that set the basic rules of that marketplace. But there are definitely elements of the system that feel outdated, and in some cases, they can make innovation harder.
What often happens is that if an institution can show that not much has changed since its last accreditation cycle, it can get a kind of rubber stamp and move on. It becomes a bit of a box-checking exercise—rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
So I can see why an administration might look at this and say: why are these private, non-governmental accrediting bodies effectively calling the policy shots in a sector that accounts for a significant portion of federal spending?
The challenge is that if the government tries to intervene too aggressively, it runs into a structural problem: how do you handle the differences between public, private, and religious institutions?
You could imagine a system where those categories are further separated—say, religious institutions being accredited by specifically religious bodies. But more likely, what you’ll find is that these systems are so entrenched that meaningful reform will require a scalpel, not a butcher knife.
AU: Last question—and I’ll ask it to both of you. The Department of Education is an executive agency, so it’s responsible to the President. But presumably the politics could change quite a bit. If the midterm elections this fall return a Democratic majority in the House, and perhaps the Senate, what will Linda McMahon and the department have to do differently if Republicans lose one or both chambers?
DC: They’re going to be on the Hill quite a bit, answering a lot of questions—probably very uncomfortable questions. And they’re not used to that right now, so that’ll be interesting to watch.
But I don’t think they’ll change a lot of their core behavior. The president will continue to issue executive orders, and the Secretary of Education will implement them. They’ll keep trying to influence behavior—freezing institutions, prompting organizations, college presidents, accreditors, and others to comply with what they want, regardless of whether it’s legally justified.
This is the same playbook the Trump administration used the first time around. The difference now is that many of the guardrails are gone—there are fewer people pushing back internally.
There’s also a perception that officials may expect to be protected—potentially through pardons—based on what’s already happened. So the question becomes: what incentive is there for appointees to strictly follow legal or judicial constraints if they believe they’ll be shielded on the way out?
AU: Mike, what’s your take?
MK: Maybe this is a bit optimistic—and Dan will tell you I can be overly Pollyannish—but I’m hoping one lesson that comes out of this is that it’s not an effective way to govern solely through the executive branch.
We’ve seen this across multiple administrations—Obama, Biden on student loan forgiveness, and now Trump. Presidents naturally want a legacy, but if that legacy isn’t grounded in legislation, it can disappear very quickly.
What I’d like to see is both parties re-engage with education policy through the legislative process. Over time, they’ve kind of stepped back from doing the hard work and instead let the executive branch and regulators take the lead.
That creates policy whiplash. As Dan mentioned with student loans, borrowers shouldn’t have to worry that a change in administration every two to four years will completely alter how their repayment works.
So regardless of the outcome of the election, I hope there’s a recognition that governing requires compromise and durability. That means working through Congress—through a deliberative process—rather than relying on executive orders.
If that lesson comes through—whether because of divided government or otherwise—it could shift policymaking back toward elected officials and produce policies that actually stand the test of time.
AU: Mike, Dan—thanks so much for being on the program today.
MK: Yeah, thank you for having us.
AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you—our readers and listeners—for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, or suggestions for future ones, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Next week is a break week, but the week after, join us—we’ll be speaking with Nicholas Dirks. He’s the President of the National Academy of Sciences, former Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a new book, City of Intellect. We’ll be talking about what it takes to run a top global university. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
