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Host Alex Usher speaks with Daniel Collier and Michael Kofoed about the uncertain status and evolving role of the U.S. Department of Education under the Trump administration. They unpack why the department still exists despite efforts to dismantle it, and what that reveals about the limits of executive power.
The conversation explores key policy shifts around student aid, accreditation, and DEI, and how legally fragile or unclear directives are shaping institutional behaviour across higher education. They also examine major changes to student loan repayment, including the move to a new Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP), and what it means for borrowers.
Collier and Kofoed reflect on the risks of governing through executive action and how upcoming political shifts could reshape the future of federal higher education policy.
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👉 Episode Links:
- “A New Attitude: Why McMahon Isn’t DeVos 2.0” (Inside Higher Ed) by Daniel Collier
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What is The World of Higher Education?
The World of Higher Education is dedicated to exploring developments in higher education from a global perspective. Join host, Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates, as he speaks with new guests each week from different countries discussing developments in their regions.
Produced by Tiffany MacLennan and Samantha Pufek.
Alex Usher: Hi everyone. I'm Alex Usher and this is The World of Higher Education Podcast.
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 on 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.
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: Yeah, so essentially Linda McMahon and Donald Trump have been friends for decades and Donald Trump has been an avid supporter of the WWE, especially early on with hosting some Wrestlemanias and also being on the product and whatnot. So they have been a close knit group of individuals for a long time. In the first Trump administration, Linda was in the small business administration as the administrator, and then after the first Trump administration, she went off into a think tank that was focused basically on helping secure policy platforms for the next Trump administration, that they thought would've come around, which did. So in that she was rewarded to be the uh, secretary of Education during this administration. And obviously it seems like she aligns with the current administration's goal of destroying the Department of Education and hobbling it to a point where it can never be run probably for a while without outright killing it because they can't, without Congressional help.
Alex Usher: Okay, well we'll come back to that in a second, but I mean, I guess, you know, Mike they did abolish, the, the Department of Education, right? I mean, I saw a big signing ceremony. You know, Trump had his, his sharpie out and he was, you know, 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: Sure. I think a lot of people need to understand that there's a difference between executive orders and there's also difference between statute. And so, many times these have been conflated, amongst the last few administrations, sometimes this gets conflated. And so they wanna do like a nice rose garden signing to say, here's our executive order to do X. But unless that was something that was purely in the executive's domain, that executive order is more like a cheerleading card. It's more like a, this is what we would maybe like to do. Congress passed the Department of Education way back in the Carter administration and that means it's gonna take an act of Congress to remove it.
And what you've seen then is it would require 60 votes in the Senate essentially to make this happen. But the Department of Education you know, contributes funds to the major employers and many representatives, districts in many states. And so while people say that they might want to get rid of it, they really don't wanna get rid of it.
And there's a few reasons for that. One of the reasons for that is that the Department of Education, at least in my mind, who's a little bit center right. And the three most important aspects to it is first civil rights. Education is a state ran function, but we wanna make sure that a kid in Alabama has the same opportunities as a kid in California does.
Second aspect in my mind is that higher education in particular is not confined to states. People move across state boundaries all the time for higher education and especially private institutions. And so there's a little bit of interstate commerce argument to be made there.
And the big one I think that people recognize the importance for is the Department of Education traditionally has had one of the best data centers and data availability around.
And so those three components in it means that you as the executive, regardless of party, can have a lot of influence on how public policy on this domain is set. And so if a party wanted to abolish that department, they would also be giving up some tools in setting policy, and I don't think anyone truly is interested in that.
Alex Usher: Well, I mean, but that's an interesting question, right? Because I mean, 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, right?
And, and it's not the only area in higher education where that's the case. They've bucked him on, on cuts to the NIH. They bucked him on cuts to the National Science Foundation. There doesn't seem to be much of a push from Congressional or, or Senate Republicans to as you say, to get rid of it. So who are the Republicans who are bucking Trump on this? Like is there a definable caucus that's, that's pro Department of Education.
Mike Kofoed: You know, I don't think you're gonna hear anyone right now come out and say that my goal is to be Pro Department of Education, but the fact that it has not come to a vote. So I used to work in government relations and I learned that the most important part of politics is being able to count. And so you should be able to count to 60 if you wanna pass something in the Senate. We wanna be able to account to, you know, to halfway in the House, and that no good leader puts up a bill if they already can't count to a majority. And so what that signals to me is that while no one's gonna come out in the Republican caucus and say, actually I think the Department of Education's a good thing, and we want to keep it that way, in public, they are probably saying this in private and refusing to vote for it, the abolishment. And that's why it hasn't been pushed forward.
Alex Usher: And this really is one of those areas where you need 60 votes? You can't get 51 and, and do it in reconciliation.
Mike Kofoed: Nope. No, and and maybe theoretically what we could do is we could zero out the department's budget in reconciliation, but there again, we had the biggest opportunity to do that in the one big, beautiful bill, and we kind of almost did the opposite, right? We added, expanded Pell Grants. We talked about funding techs, career and technical education. And once again, it sounds good on the surface. It's good campaign fodder to say education is a state thing, we don't need a federal agency, until you actually get to pull the levers of public policy, and then you want to keep those things in your purview.
Alex Usher: Got it. Well, I suppose one of the reasons that you might wanna 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 gotta be the secretary of confrontation. And particularly, I mean, the big area where that's happened in the first 15 months of the Trump administration is around DEI, right? So, so diversity, equity, and inclusion. But 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 departments main DEI policy, which was a, what you guys call a dear colleague letter to, to institutions, which basically told 'em to stop doing anything that smelled remotely of trying to help 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?
Daniel Collier: This isn't uncommon for the administration across many facets of how they operate. Usually they will create an executive order or some kind of policy, and then they will get up to a court case and the court might smack it down or they might walk it back. And this is common in HUD, this is common in other sectors as well. So this is pretty much a standard operational procedure. And it, it was similar in the first Trump administration because the goal here isn't to always have the outcome in their favor. The goal here is to change behaviors. And the goal here is to make sure that people are looking, or in organizations, are looking over their back and they're changing their behaviors preemptively.
And that's what a lot of institutions have done, and they may continue doing those things in the future. As far as like a pivot, they're starting to look at accreditation issues. They are starting to look at financial aid and tying it to certain expectations, and it's unclear whether they can or can't do that.
But if you know as an administrator that these things are coming down on you, a lot of people will pivot to start in order to make sure that students, other students that they're not focused on, the general student body, and I'm not saying those other students don't deserve focus by the way, but the general student body in the institution are not harmed to the degree for which they could be because an institution like Harvard, maybe they can fight back a little bit, like what we've seen. But an institution like Northern Illinois University, no chance of fighting back that way. There's no financial resources to do it. So, you know, it's, it's, it's changing the behavior of people, whether it's legal or not, it doesn't matter.
Alex Usher: Yeah, and you don't need to get people to follow a certain policy, you need to freeze their action because they don't know what the policy is, right? Like that's, that's the strategy really.
Daniel Collier: Ya, absolutely. And you're seeing that with nonprofits across, you know, the board and not just universities. Again, this is a tactic that they spread out with a wide blanket and not just in higher ed. It's just, we're talking about higher ed right now. Specifically, though.
Alex Usher: Got it. So a few months ago, the department asked institutions to start collecting data and reporting data on admissions based on race and implicitly, the request seemed to imply 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 seemingly had been asking for similar kinds of data for a very long time? Mike?
Mike Kofoed: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a few issues at play here. First off, is that the department as it was getting going is, kind of the confusion that you talked about at the beginning, is there gonna be a department or not, started asking in university administrators to fill out very onerous data requests. Which kind of gave mixed signals, right? We're gonna close NCES, but also if this ipeds we want this expanded data set, you know, and, and survey that we want you to fill out.
Alex Usher: NCES is the National
Mike Kofoed: National Center for Education Statistics. Yeah, that's right. Which, you know, is probably one of the best within the federal government, the best collectors of the best data made available to researchers.
I mean, there's some great data over in HHS as well, but NCES data is probably the gold standard. So on the one hand we were saying we're gonna cut off these data sets, and on the other hand we want you to fill out more surveys on this question. I think that kind of really through university administrators for a loop on what exactly the goal is here.
And then you put that in some lawsuits that have been showing that perhaps there has been some of this kinda like reverse discrimination you would hear, from other aspects, right? That maybe majority racial and male students were not being able to have equal access to, to these selective institutions.
And so I think Democrats might be asking themselves then, how is this data gonna be used? You'd have to go ask kind of them. I think really the issue became huge requests for data from the administration with maybe low trust and a quick turnaround. And that's what I think was really kind of the big issue here.
Alex Usher: But a court did just strike this initiative down, or quite recently. Dan, why was that? What was the rationale for the judge's decision?
Daniel Collier: So, they likely are able to get this data legally. The judge suggests that this could be a thing that the government could do, but it was the timeline that was a problem. It put undue stress on institutions and they probably couldn't have been put it all in at the time. So, and then it didn't go through rule making procedures and stuff like that.
Alex Usher: Procedural rather than substantive.
Daniel Collier: Yeah. I would expect the Trump administration to try this again, but in a more measured way, like they've done other things like the public service loan forgiveness, kind of authority grabbing and whatnot.
Mike Kofoed: And also that they cut all those employees that they were supposed to be calling in and turning this survey into, and so. I mean, as someone again, who's maybe more on the center-right, this always confused me, was we wanna make a policy pivot away from some things that were blatantly unpopular and maybe a little bit legally sketchy over the last four years, and then you fired everyone that would help you comply with those ideas. And so again, kind of this kind of, I don't know, bag of cats trying to figure out what exactly you, you wanted policymakers to do.
Alex Usher: We're gonna take a short break. We'll be right back.
And we're back. Guys, I wanna shift the discussion a bit to talk about student assistance. In this year's budget request, which I think I think went to Congress about a week ago, I understand there's actually a boost in funding for Pell Grants, which suggests to me that the Trump administration now sees some benefit in helping low income students. Previous budget requests I think, had, had sought to lower Pell funding. Why the shift? Mike?
Mike Kofoed: So I think one big shift is because the Trump administration, and, and this is something I actually do agree with them, is seeing the need for career and technical education. And so some of the Pell Grant emphasis that you've seen in here is also the ability to use this at community colleges, at technical colleges being able to help folks that, you know, one big question that I have is, we have a lot of kids that wanna go to college or ready to go to college, and college is a fantastic thing for those students. And then you have some kids that don't want to go to college or maybe aren't on that track where their skills live elsewhere. How are we gonna get them into jobs that really matter, that pay well? A high school diploma's not gonna cut it anymore. So making Pell expanded so that it now can help kids go to technical school, I think that's a great thing.
But again, you're gonna need a Department of Education to allocate those funds to accomplish those goals. I think also, when you ran on kind of a populous, we wanna help the little man out, it seems very odd to then cut out Pell Grants, which are one of the, one of the biggest returns on investment and helps gets low income kids to college.
So maybe a recognition there. And also I think this is where you might see some Congressional and Senate Republicans, quietly behind the scenes, nudging the administration towards a better solution as well.
Alex Usher: And uh, you know, the, I guess the other issue about student aid is that the Department of Education manages one of the biggest loan portfolios, I guess, in all of the United States, right? And whatever the department's views on Pell Grants, it seems pretty insistent about making life harder for students with debt, right?
So, but before we get into, into what they're doing, can you help me make sense of an, an alphabet soup here? Like you've had a lot of student loan programs over while you got ICR and PAYE and SAVE. What are all these different loan programs and like, what were the differences and where does each one stand now, Dan?
Daniel Collier: So, yeah we could have an entire podcast on what all of these different programs are. And for decades borrowers have been very confused and the government has had very confusing messaging on what is good, what is optimal, when to get in it, what to do. So right now you have essentially IBR, which is the legally mandated one from Congress, and that one will stay.
Then you have RAP, which I know we're gonna talk about. But then you had pay and repay, which were created by the administrations and not by Congress themselves, and they're gonna be phased out here real soon. These were based upon your AGI discretionary income AGI, 10% of it, plus family adjustments and whatnot. And essentially you would find forgiveness after 20 years of reliable payment all the way through. And if you were in public service loan forgiveness, which is another add-on, on everything, if you worked for an, in a university, a government if you were a cop firefighter, you could have forgiveness within 10 years, 120 reliable payments.
The problem with a lot of these programs over time, there was a good GAO report I think 2019, 2020, somewhere around there, was that the government and servicers were bad, absolutely atrocious at keeping records and keeping counts, and they were putting people behind and people had to fight for what they believed they were owed.
And then the public service loan forgiveness program was not always clear on which organizations that counted for. So people were working in jobs that paid lower for organizations or in positions that did not count. So there's been a lot of variation on, on what these programs actually will do for people.
And people have been counting on this now for a long time to get out of debt because in all of these programs, if you did not make your, I mean you, you would make a payment, but your balances for a majority of the people in the programs would rise. Negative amortization was a factor for a lot of people. And if you don't get forgiveness, then you've just have an entire lifetime of acuring debt by doing the thing that the government told you you're supposed to do.
Alex Usher: Right. And uh, 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 because there's a new program coming in, which they call Repayment Assistance Program RAP, which is actually what we call our ICR program in Canada, right? That's so, it's a little, it's a little confusing for Canadian listeners. Anyway, RAP is considerably less generous as I understand it, than either PAYE and SAVE. So what does RAP do? How are borrowers gonna feel the difference come, I dunno, three months from now when this all kicks in?
Daniel Collier: Yeah, so real quickly, the SAVE program, since I didn't touch upon that, borrowers were looped from repay directly into SAVE, and now they've been in stasis for quite a while and none of the being in forbearance did not count toward their repayment. So they're just literally in stasis. And now they've entered a worse economic condition than they would've over the last couple of years. So now they're behind in a lot of way. But that. program is effectively dead. The Trump administration cut a deal with the people that were suing for it, and the courts told them, cut that deal, you're done. So, and then this RAP program this is another congressionally approved program. I will say there's one great benefit to the program, especially for newer borrowers and people coming outta grad school with larger debts in that it does stem at uh, negative amortization.
So, that's very helpful for people in their mental distress and when looking at buying durable goods, because that doesn't count towards their debt, you know, it will just not skyrocket like a lot of other individuals have found. But on average, the monthly payments for these individuals will be much higher than it was for SAVE and higher than it would've been for pay and repay as well.
Alex Usher: Okay. And it's gonna kick in right before the midterms, so that's good news, right?
Daniel Collier: It depends uh, for some people it's already kicked in for them. For other people, like on the SAVE forbearance, they have 30 days from July. So, yeah, let's be honest, like Mike said about the Department of Ed, they fired a whole bunch of people that are gonna be helping other uh, millions of people transition from all these various plans into one of two plans.
And I don't expect that to go very smoothly at all. And I can already tell you after talking to people that it's, it months are the timeline. They're confused by who's doing what. Additionally, this administration doesn't seem to be focused on keeping some of the servicers up to par with the level of trust that Biden, the Biden administration did, or keep them accountable. And it seems like some things are slipping through the cracks as everybody's trying to navigate an extremely confusing situation and timeframe.
Mike Kofoed: It's It's probably gonna end up like infrastructure week or the Iran War. We'll just have another two weeks. We'll postpone another two weeks, and then two weeks will end up with two years being gone.
Alex Usher: So may, maybe beyond November.
So look, 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 achieve it? And I guess, you know, what are the chances of success?
Mike Kofoed: Yeah, I think this has been a battle for a long time where, because particularly in the for-profit industry, when they couldn't get accredited originally with the regional accreditation like middle states, when I was at West Point or southern states here at University of Tennessee, what happened was they just went and created their own accreditation industry. And what they said is, we're now nationally accredited because regionally accredited sounds smaller than nationally accredited. But this is where you really control higher education, right? Because it's a, if I'm a public institution like my employer, it's state-based. If I'm a private institution or a religious based institution, then the federal government can control some things, but it really can't control everything.
And that's actually a beautiful thing in higher ed because it creates a real marketplace. But the accrediting boards are those that kind of create the platform for the basic rules of this marketplace. And so I think there are some things that are very archaic, and there's some things that are making it hard to innovate because of these accrediting boards.
Because really what happens is, is if I can kind of show that nothing's changed from 10 years ago when I last was accredited, then I can kind of get that rubber stamp and move on, and it seems to be kind of a wasteful process of just moving these deck chairs on the Titanic a little bit.
So I could see a world where any administration would be like, well, why are these accrediting boards, that are private and not government related, the ones that are really calling the policy shots in this market that has a huge part of our federal budget. Now, what's gonna happen though, is that if they try to interfere with this too much, then the question's gonna be, how do I sort out publics, privates, and religious schools? I think what you're gonna find there is that you're gonna either have to fracture these so that like if I'm a religious school, I get accredited from a religious accreditation body, or it's just gonna find out that these are really way too entrenched and you're gonna need a scalpel to get anything done here as opposed to a, you know, a butcher knife.
Alex Usher: Right. So last question and I'll, 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 change quite a bit if the midterm elections this fall return a Democratic majority in the House and perhaps the Senate. What will Linden Man and the department have to do differently if Republicans lose one or both chambers?
Dan, start with you.
Daniel Collier: They're gonna be at the hill quite a bit, answering a lot of questions, and probably very uncomfortable questions to them, and they're not used to that right now, so that'll be interesting to watch. But I don't think they're gonna change a lot of their core behaviors. Like, the President will create EO's, and the Secretary of Education will engage those EO's and they will try to freeze people and make sure that organizations and college presidents and whoever else, accreditors adhere to what they want them to adhere to regardless whether it's legal or not, or legally justifiable or not.
So, I just think that this is, this is the playbook that the Trump administration previously engaged the first time around with a lot of policies. Now the guardrails are definitely off because there's not people standing in the way from engaging these things. Additionally, I believe a lot of people believe that the uh, president will just pardon them on their way out, blanket pardons, because he's already done it. And so what's, what's the lever here to force people that you appoint, that you put in your government to follow the courts, follow the law, if you know that you gotta get out a free jail card, most likely on the way out.
Alex Usher: Mike, what's your take?
Mike Kofoed: So maybe this is more optimistic and Dan knows that I can be overly Pollyannish, but I think one of the lessons I'm hoping that we learn is that it is not an effective way to govern truly through the executive branch. And so, I mean, we saw this with the Obama administration to a degree, the Biden administration of student loan forgiveness, and now through the Trump administration. Presidents want, it's human nature, they want have a legacy, but their legacy goes away instantly if they don't work through the legislative branch. And so what I'm hoping will happen here is that a lot of the, both parties, have kind of over time, neglected education policy as something that they want to get excited about, that they want to do the hard work on, and instead are happy just to kind of turn it over to regulators in the executive branch.
And so what happens then is some of the whiplash that Dan talked about through the student loan forgiveness is because there's no continuity. When I go to get a student loan, I'm not hoping that partisan handovers is gonna jolt how my payments are done every , two to four years.
So what I'm hoping that will happen regardless of the outcome of this election, one, we learn that just because I'm in power today doesn't mean that I'll be in power tomorrow. And so thus I might want to be able to pass things through compromise through the legislative branch, through a deliberative process and not just run everything by EO. And so whether that lesson needs to be learned by having divided government again, that would then maybe push some of the policymaking away from rule makers and unelected kind of bureaucrats, even though I don't really like to say it that way, but nestle it back onto our elected officials in Congress to come up with better policy that then, then will stand the test of time because it is actually passed by law.
Alex Usher: Mike, Dan, thanks so much for being on the program today.
Mike Kofoed: Yeah. Thank you for having us.
Alex Usher: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you, our listeners and readers for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today's episode or suggestions for future episodes, don't hesitate to get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com.
Next week is a break week, but join us again on April 30th where my guest will be Nicholas Dirks. He's the President of the New York Academy of Sciences, the former Chancellor of the University of California Berkeley, and the author of a new book, "City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University." Bye for now.