Welcome to the Pendulum

Political Animus Toward Universities is not New; It’s Just New to You.

Many Americans know of President Biden’s high-profile efforts to forgive large swaths of student loans across broad classes of borrowers, first as part of Covid relief efforts and then as part of the HEROES Act, which was passed by Congress in 2003, giving the Secretary of Education authority to forgive student loans selectively in wartime. Though the Supreme Court ultimately thwarted this broad-based effort, the Biden Administration still managed to forgive approximately $189 billion in student debt for 5.3 million borrowers, an average of $35,660 per individual, a little over 10% of all total outstanding, and more than any previous administration.

This massive undertaking was accomplished under multiple auspices, the largest being Public Service Loan Forgiveness, where, through a more expansive interpretation of the George W. Bush era statute, the administration forgave $78.5 billion at an average of $78,000 (!) per borrower. Other categories included $57.1 billion in a similarly expansive interpretation of the Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) program ($39,380 per borrower), $18.7 billion for individuals with total and permanent disabilities ($29,540 per borrower), and $5.5 billion through its own IDR program update, titled SAVE, before it too was blocked in court ($13,285 per borrower).

However, the final, less-publicized category is the $34.5 billion in borrower defense and school closure forgiveness ($17,250 per borrower). This resulted from a massive, coordinated, and pointed effort to leverage existing rules to claw back or otherwise forgive student loans at proprietary schools. Borrower defense is a provision in the Higher Education Act (HEA) that gives the Secretary of Education wide latitude to categorize student complaints as evidence of systemic issues, rather than isolated incidents, and invalidate large categories of loans. On the other hand, school closure forgiveness results from a school shutting down precipitously, often from financial distress caused by regulatory penalties imposed unilaterally by the Executive branch.

While these efforts are framed as consumer protection, their exercise has been largely political. For those suspicious of investor-backed institutions leveraging Federal Financial Aid dollars for financial returns on private investments, aggressive, skeptical oversight of one particular category of institution over all others feels justified and appropriate. But for those earnestly engaged in the effort to serve students positioned to benefit from vocational education, who are often poorly or inadequately served by public or non-profit institutions, the aggressive enforcement actions taken by an administration trying hard to rack up large totals of student loan forgiveness as an explicit political objective, feels like arbitrary and unfair harassment. One man’s oversight is another man’s persecution. Or, as the saying goes, if a cop tails you long enough, he’ll always find a reason to pull you over.

Today, many are understandably alarmed to see the Trump Administration exercising its power over universities through grant funding to further a political agenda. It is jarring to see institutions that many feel connected to battling a presidential administration, particularly if it is one whose political agenda they don’t support. However, for those who have spent years working at higher education institutions disliked by the government, there is an understandable sense of turnabout being fair play. It’s tempting to echo the refrain critics of the proprietary schools voiced in 2009 when President Obama undertook a significant re-regulation of the sector: “If you accept Federal dollars, you have to live with the political oversight of those dollars.”

The last reauthorization of the Higher Education Act was in 2008, the last time federal education policy felt bipartisan. Like so many other aspects of life in 2025, it feels impossible to return to a time when both sides of the political divide agreed that tax dollars were well spent on education and that educators could be trusted to decide the best way to spend those dollars. However the current tensions over grant funding and considerations of race in university admissions and operations are resolved, traditional institutions seem now subject to the same pendulum with which proprietary schools have been living for the past 15 years: from this moment, traditional schools’ financial fortunes will likely depend in considerable measure on which political party controls the White House and whether they are in or out of favor.

The proprietary school sector is small, enrolling only 5% of students engaged in higher education. And while the political roller-coaster with which it has had to live for 15 years has stunted its growth and resulted in unfortunate (and many feel unnecessary) school closures, it has not impacted most Americans. However, imposing this kind of political volatility onto the rest of higher education more broadly, where one party imposes harsh conditions and the other temporarily reverses those conditions, creates instability with broader and more profound implications, given its larger scale.

There are three possible solutions to this dilemma, none of which seems easy or likely. The first is that the courts will find ways to limit the latitude granted by Congress to the executive branch in such a way as to restrict the effect of the pendulum. However, any such solution will likely be temporary, as it was in protecting for-profit colleges, if it fails to erase the underlying animus. The second possible solution is for Congress to remove some of the executive branch’s authority to bully higher education by making its funding and oversight conditions more explicit. However, this too seems impossible in an era where both sides see bipartisanship as traitorous. The third solution would be for the sector to wean itself entirely from federal funds. This seems the most fantastical somehow, for while it is not impossible to imagine grant funding replaced by private sources, the real ability of the government to exercise its will comes from the application of Federal financial aid, on which most institutions and students rely. Without this system of government support, an extensive restructuring of the cost system of the entire higher education system would be required. And while colleges and universities are adept at adding administrative infrastructure (and raising prices), they have few comparable skills at slimming down.

So, despite the alarm felt by many to see a hostile executive branch impact the operations of colleges and universities, this is not a new concept introduced by the Trump administration. It is rather the application of attitudes and techniques first applied by prior administrations against the proprietary college sector. And unfortunately, as we have seen from that example, once those adversarial politics are introduced, it is challenging to remove them definitively.