WASHINGTON, D.C.—Hundreds of higher ed leaders packed into the Kennedy Center for the annual American Council on Education conference this week, snapping photos of the large bust of the cultural center’s namesake, President John F. Kennedy, in the foyer. Some joked that it would soon be replaced by Donald Trump’s likeness, given the current president’s takeover of the Kennedy Center board, a move announced Wednesday.
But it was Trump’s attempted takeover of higher education that was foremost on the minds of attendees.
The Republican president, now in his second nonconsecutive term, dominated conference discussions as speakers grappled with how to interpret and respond to a vision for higher education that has been marked by cuts to research funding and personnel; the decimation of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; and efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.
“We’re under attack,” ACE president Ted Mitchell said in his opening remarks.
He pointed to a flurry of executive orders and other recent actions that have caused “confusion and dismay” across the sector, as the Trump administration attempted to freeze federal funding and change research reimbursements, creating financial uncertainty for colleges.
“These executive orders are an assault on American opportunity and leadership,” Mitchell said.
He warned that such changes could destabilize higher education by undermining research, innovation, intellectual independence and autonomy.
“The flurry of these threats [is] designed to cower us into silence,” he said.
Mitchell also noted that ACE, along with other associations and several research universities, filed a lawsuit Monday against the National Institutes of Health for attempting to cap reimbursements for indirect research costs. While that lawsuit is pending, a federal judge has already prevented the cap, at least temporarily, in response to other litigation.
In the face of such chaos and instability, Mitchell emphasized the importance of unity, urging conference goers to beware of attempts to sow discord among institutions. “We will only succeed if we stick together,” he said.
He also pushed back on Trump’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which have already led some colleges and universities to scrub DEI language from websites, shutter offices and cancel events.
“We can’t be apologetic of diversity. We just can’t,” Mitchell said.
But even as he blasted some of Trump’s recent actions, he noted that ACE is also seeking common ground with the administration.
“I continue to believe that there are important areas of policy where we can and must work with this administration. We will work to find those openings wherever we can,” Mitchell said.
His remarks came a day after dozens of college presidents attended ACE’s inaugural Hill Day, where they met with congressional staff to learn and advocate for policy priorities.
The Policy Outlook
The notion of higher education being under siege was prevalent across numerous sessions, including in a Thursday policy update from Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations and national engagement at ACE, who broke down recent actions and Republican priorities.
Fansmith noted that Trump has sought to reshape higher education through a series of executive orders, investigations and attempts to defund and destabilize the sector.
“We are not used to the wheels of government moving this quickly and impactfully,” he said.
Despite the sense of alarm roiling the sector, Fansmith said “growing opposition” has emerged. In some cases, it’s been bipartisan, with congressional Republicans joining Democrats in expressing concern over how changes to federal funding or research dollars may harm their local institutions and employers.
Additionally, Fansmith pointed out that the Trump administration has been sued repeatedly—at least 58 times, by his count—and that successful lawsuits have slowed the president’s rapid-fire attacks.
Fansmith also noted that Trump’s nominees to lead the Department of Education, Linda McMahon as secretary and Nicholas Kent as under secretary, are more seasoned operators than other Trump World figures. McMahon’s Senate confirmation hearing took place Thursday.
“She is not a firebrand; she is not the person who is going to blow things up,” Fansmith said, noting McMahon’s background as a longtime professional wrestling executive and prior head of the Small Business Association during Trump’s first term. But given Trump’s desire to dismantle or diminish the Education Department, McMahon “may be ordered to blow things up,” he said.
Of Kent, a former for-profit college advocate and past staffer for Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, Fansmith said he was “very passionate, deeply informed and highly intelligent.”
Hope Amid the Challenges
The conference also touched on a range of challenges beyond the turbulence of the Trump administration, including free speech, campus antisemitism, demographic changes and more.
In a discussion Wednesday, Wesleyan University president Michael Roth weighed in on the state of free speech in higher education and questioned recent efforts by Trump to go after universities for alleged antisemitism, including threats of investigations and financial penalties.
Roth, who is Jewish, acknowledged the existence of some antisemitism on college campuses, but argued that Trump’s efforts to address it were “disingenuous”—more of a cover for going after pro-Palestinian protesters who expressed concern about the bloodshed in Gaza.
While he noted that college leaders need to be cautious, he advised them not to cower.
“Not standing up for your mission in the long run won’t help your institution,” Roth said.
In a panel Thursday on the challenge that shrinking demographics pose to higher education, experts noted enrollment pressures will continue as the number of high school graduates continues to decline. But rather than a demographic cliff, higher education will likely see a gentler slide, they said.
Nathan Grawe, an economics professor at Carleton College, argued that the enrollment decline “won’t hit us all at once” but rather “little by little,” with incremental challenges year over year.
Other panelists noted that workforce challenges won’t diminish along with the number of high school graduates, meaning that colleges will need to focus on enrolling and retaining more adult learners.
For all the doom and gloom surrounding the policy discussions, the conference concluded on a high note. In his closing remarks, Freeman Hrabowski, an ACE Fellow and president emeritus of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, emphasized the importance of hope.
He encouraged attendees to “use our heads and our hearts” to meet the moment, reflecting on his experience in 1963, when at the age of 12 he was jailed for participating in a civil rights march in Birmingham, Ala. Looking back more than 60 years later, Hrabowski said it was his faith and determination that helped him know then that “we would be OK.”
He encouraged others to channel their own optimism amid turbulent times.
“Don’t you dare allow the toxicity of some people to leave you hopeless,” Hrabowski said.
The U.S. Department of Education laid off some civil servants on Wednesday, Politico reported, citing multiple people familiar with the matter.
It’s not yet clear how many employees were affected, but they worked for a range of offices within the department, from civil rights to federal student aid. Earlier that day, a federal judge approved the Trump administration’s plan to offer buyouts to vast swaths of the federal workforce.
The move is the latest personnel disruption at the agency. Earlier this month, dozens of employees were put on administrative leave after attending a diversity, equity and inclusion training during the first Trump administration.
Many of the terminated department employees were still in their probationary period, according to Politico, meaning they’d been on the job for less than a year and lacked full civil service protections, though nonprobationary employees were also affected. On Thursday, the Associated Press reported that the Trump administration had ordered all federal agencies to terminate their probationary employees, part of a broader effort to reduce the federal workforce.
The Education Department is considering terminating its contracts for thousands of call center employees hired to answer families’ questions about federal student aid, and may replace them with an artificial intelligence–powered chat bot, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency apparently suggested the move, the Times reported, as part of a broader effort to reduce federal spending—which has already led to dozens if not hundreds of layoffs at the Education Department and the cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts at the Institute for Education Sciences.
The call centers employ 1,625 people who answer more than 15,000 calls per day, according to an Education Department report. The department greatly increased staffing at their call centers after last year’s bungled launch of the new FAFSA led to an overwhelming influx of calls.
Last September, a Government Accountability Office investigation found that in the first five months of the rollout, three-quarters of calls went unanswered. Last summer, the department hired 700 new agents to staff the lines and had planned to add another 225 after the launch of the 2024–25 FAFSA in November.
One of the helplines DOGE is closely scrutinizing, according to the Times, is operated by the consulting firm Accenture. Accenture also operates the studentaid.gov website, which houses the online platform for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The department’s contract with the firm expires Feb. 19. According to sources in the Education Department who spoke with Inside Higher Ed, the department is considering significant reductions to its Accenture contract ahead of its renewal.
When Wee Yang Soh was considering his degree options, he felt his choices were limited. The Singaporean had been offered a place to study chemistry at the National University of Singapore (NUS), but he was wary of accepting.
In his experience, school had felt like he was simply being “trained” to pass exams. “I didn’t want my university education to be like that,” he said. Soh liked the idea of liberal arts education but couldn’t afford the hefty tuition fees charged by the U.S. colleges offering those programs.
So when, in 2011, NUS announced it would be opening a liberal arts college—the first of its kind in Singapore—in partnership with Yale University, Soh jumped at the chance to apply. He was part of the inaugural cohort of students enrolled at the college, graduating in 2017.
Four years later, NUS suddenly declared that it would no longer be continuing the partnership, with plans to close the college once all existing students had graduated.
While Yale-NUS College is not the only international partnership in Singapore that has come to an abrupt halt—having helped develop Singapore University of Technology and Design’s curriculum, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was shown the door in 2017—it is among the most talked about. This unexpected announcement drew just as much attention, if not more, as the opening of the college had, with rumors swirling about the reasons for the decision.
Today, as the college enters its final semester before shutting its doors for good, can liberal arts live on in Singapore? And are international partnerships off the table in a country increasingly embroiled in debates about national identity?
Singapore’s government first began discussing the prospect of a liberal arts college in 2008. Policymakers saw the establishment of one as having multiple benefits—reducing the number of local students going abroad, diversifying pathways within the country’s higher education system and contributing to Singapore’s ambition to become an international education hub.
So when Yale-NUS College opened in 2013, it seemed like the perfect fit. Unfortunately, this synergy didn’t last.
“The context changed,” said Jason Tan, associate professor at Nanyang Technological University’s National Institute of Education. “For one thing, there’s no longer any official talk about establishing Singapore as an international education hub.”
Although Singapore launched the Global Schoolhouse Project in 2002, an initiative that aimed to recruit 150,000 international students by 2015, by the mid-2010s, the numbers remained far below targets and talk of the scheme quieted as public debates around immigration heated up.
Writing in the academic journal Daedalus in 2024, Pericles Lewis, the founding president of the college, suggested that things had gone a step further: “Singapore has not been immune to the forces of populism and nationalism that have affected most parts of the world,” he wrote.
For a college in which international students represented about 40 percent of the student population, this was a problem.
Throughout the college’s life, the governing party “showed itself to be highly sensitive to complaints about benefits reaped by foreigners, and to concerns of middle-class Singaporeans about the accessibility of higher education,” Lewis wrote.
The institution also became central to debates about academic freedom in Singapore, with the last-minute cancellation of a course focused on protest generating backlash. To some, the college was a site of rare political activism and freedom in Singapore, which was both welcomed and feared, depending on your point of view.
However, Linda Lim, professor emerita at the University of Michigan, argued that the college had little impact on the state of academic freedom in Singapore more widely.
“From the beginning it was understood and even explicitly acknowledged that Yale-NUS College would practice and experience academic freedom only within the college walls and premises,” she said.
“Yale may have flattered itself, or argued to mollify dubious faculty in New Haven, that Yale-NUS College would help advance academic freedom in Singapore—a naïve and neo-colonialist attitude.”
Moreover, Soh believed claims of heightened student activism at the college were exaggerated, with intense media attention fueling public ire towards the institution.
“From the first year, the Singaporean public and the government were already pretty afraid that politically motivated actions on campus would pose a problem for Singapore,” he said. “And they kept a very close eye on the college activities, to the point where it felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
At times, small incidents on campus, such as disagreements over new course curricula, made national news, he said. This “reinforced the idea that the students were political or dangerous and all of that stuff, when, really, everything that happened in college felt, at least to me, incredibly mundane and incredibly small and silly.”
NUS College, a U.S.-style undergraduate honors college for NUS students, was established in 2022 in place of Yale-NUS College. While this new institution offers a residential experience, small class sizes and some shared curricula, it is a far cry from a traditional liberal arts college.
Today in Singapore, “there’s more focus on interdisciplinary learning,” said Tan. “Across all of our universities, in one form or another, there’s this concern about future economic needs.
“The future problems will require all those buzzwords—critical thinkers and flexible, adaptable people and people who possess this interdisciplinary pool of knowledge and so on.
“That trend has pretty much superseded the excitement over having a liberal arts education for our undergrads.”
For Lim, the closure of Yale-NUS College was a “cautionary tale” for international higher education institutions “who think they can be a beacon of light in authoritarian countries by collaborating with autocratic governments.”
The college’s chief legacy, she continued, “is the quality of the students it educated and graduated.”
Soh is currently undertaking a Ph.D. in the U.S. and credited the college and his professors for inspiring him to do so.
“I hope to teach in the future as a professor,” he said. “I want my students to be able to treat education as not a stepping-stone to grades or to credentials, but as a way to reformulate how we think about and relate to this crazy world that we live in today.
“I think the legacy lives on in me, but I can’t say that it lives on in Singapore or in NUS for sure. But I hope it does.”
As President Donald Trump churned out more than 80 executive orders over the past three weeks, sending the higher education community into a panic, some students were surprised to see a lack of campus protests—even at institutions traditionally rife with activism.
“I haven’t seen a whole lot, which is kind of uncharacteristic of our campus,” said Alana Parker, a student at American University in Washington, D.C. Though she’s heard of certain student political groups protesting on Capitol Hill, things have been quiet on campus.
“I don’t really know why that is, because, in my opinion, there should be more of an outcry. But from my perspective, I think people feel really disenfranchised and like there’s nothing we can do,” she said.
It’s a stark contrast from two semesters ago, when AU was one of dozens of campuses that made national news after pro-Palestinian students set up encampments in opposition to their universities’ investments in companies with ties to Israel.
Students and faculty at AU—and on campuses across the nation—also protested in 2017 after Trump prohibited individuals from seven majority-Muslim nations from entering the United States, according to a news report from the time.
Angus Johnston, a historian of student protest movements and a professor at Hostos Community College, said that he’s not entirely surprised that campuses seem relatively calm. Over the past 20 years, institutions have grown less and less permissive of student protests, culminating in a harsh crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests in spring 2024—in some cases involving police arrests. Since then, many campuses have introduced new—or enforced existing—rules restricting when, where and how students can demonstrate.
Aron Ali-McClory, a national co-chair of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, said that universities’ restrictions on free speech are “100 percent a factor” in why there aren’t many protests happening on campuses right now.
But they noted that the YDSA is mobilizing, just in different ways. Many campus chapters are currently focused on campaigning for their institutions to become “sanctuary campuses,” in the vein of sanctuary cities, municipalities that do not comply with federal immigration laws. Ali-McClory said the chapters involved in that movement are currently distributing petitions, informing their peers about the movement and handing out “know your rights” materials that aim to inform immigrants of how to handle conversations and interactions with immigration officers.
“Looking at what our YDSA chapters are doing across the country, we’re seeing people pivoting to meet the moment on their campus. A lot of that looks less like, ‘Let’s go out and do a protest’ and more, ‘How do we make material gains when the cards are stacked against us?’” they said.
Parker, the AU student, has also chosen to make her voice heard in a different way. An editor of the student newspaper, The Eagle, she and her colleagues penned a staff editorial calling on the university to speak out against Trump’s executive orders, particularly those targeting immigrants and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. She said the article seemed to be effective: A few days after its publication, the institution sent an email to the campus community, signed by President Jonathan Alger, outlining resources available for immigrant students and employees.
Alger also addressed DEI, writing, “As we continue fostering an inclusive and welcoming community, we are working with teams across campus to determine the impacts on our inclusive excellence strategy and programs.”
‘A Powerful Force’
A handful of campuses have seen protests, primarily in response to their institutions taking steps to comply with Trump’s executive orders by shuttering DEI offices or removing DEI-related language and resources from webpages, for example.
At Missouri State University, students staged a protest after administrators announced they would close the Office of Inclusive Engagement and end other DEI programs “in response to changes nationwide and anticipated actions regarding DEI at the state level.”
According to the student newspaper, The Standard, 50 students gathered outside the main administrative building on Jan. 31 to call for the removal of the university’s president and to advocate for the passage of two bills that would require Missouri schools to teach about Black history and “the dehumanization of marginalized groups.”
At Stanford University, a group of about 15 students participated in a chalking event, writing messages of dissent, like “DEI makes Stanford Stanford,” on bike paths around White Plaza, a central outdoor area on campus.
“Here at Stanford, the important thing to me was that my leaders at my school knew that there would be people who would resist anything that they did to cave to Trump,” said freshman Turner Van Slyke, who organized the demonstration. “I think those leaders just knowing that there’s going to be resistance can be a powerful force for maintaining decency against Trump.”
Various other studentnewssources have reported that students at their institutions have joined outside groups in protesting at their state capitols, hoping to register their objections to Trump’s orders with governors and state representatives.
Johnston noted that more protests may erupt elsewhere as students begin to see the ways that the executive orders are impacting their campuses more directly.
“There’s a lot of stuff that is happening now that is essentially a hand grenade or a time bomb that’s going to explode in days or weeks or months,” he said. “To a large extent, I think this stuff is not having direct impact on a lot of [students] as of yet. Some stuff may be beginning to percolate down to the campus level. But a lot of this is real stuff that is happening, but the effects of it are not being felt directly by students just yet.”
The No. 1 lesson about disaster relief Ryan Cornner would give college presidents is: do scenario training.
The president of Glendale Community College said he and his team were working on emergency preparedness training with new managers when the L.A. wildfires started.
“We were actually planning a tabletop exercise for spring, and boy, did we get a tabletop exercise. It was just real,” Cornner said in the latest episode of The Key, Inside Higher Ed’s news and analysis podcast.
GCC serves 24,000 students from its campus about five miles from where the Eaton fire burned. Dozens of the college’s students and employees lost their homes, and many more were displaced for more than a week. GCC has expanded its efforts to provide access to basic needs for its students and has recognized that its part-time adjunct faculty need the most support.
While providing food and housing support or giving students laptops has been a general principle of the community college system, Cornner says a new need in this emergency is coming from employees.
“As an employer, we think that the real focus is making sure that the workplace has what it needs and making sure people feel supported in their work. But when someone has just lost their home, it brings an added element of ‘what should we do as a community?’”
Inside Higher Edreported on GCC’s immediate emergency response in January and wanted to reach out to the institution again to check in on its recovery.
Cornner said institutions can support their communities by investing in the future workforce of first responders and by providing a safe campus for secondary school students whose schools were destroyed in the fires.
Listen to this episode of The Key here, and click here to find out more about The Key.
Linda McMahon told senators Thursday that she won’t shut down the Education Department without their approval, quelling any doubt that the majority Republicans may have had about whether she deserved to be appointed to President Donald Trump’s cabinet.
But that doesn’t mean that McMahon and the Trump administration aren’t still looking to make considerable changes to the agency’s programs and potentially dismantle it from the inside out. She said at her confirmation hearing that the department has to go, or at the very least is in need of a major makeover, because it’s rife with bureaucracy that fails to serve students well.
The goal, the former wrestling CEO told the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, is to “reorient” the federal agency and ensure it “operate[s] more efficiently”—not defund education, as some critics have suggested.
“We’d like to do this right,” she said. “We’d like to make sure that we are presenting a plan that I think our senators could get on board with, and our Congress to get on board with.”
Questions about the department’s future and whether McMahon would stand up to President Trump if he tries to break the law dominated the nearly three-hour hearing. McMahon, a Trump loyalist and veteran of the first administration, weathered the hearing just fine and will likely be confirmed by the Senate. The committee will vote Feb. 20 on her nomination.
McMahon largely stuck by Trump and defended his actions so far. She also pledged to comply with and uphold the law, respecting Congress’s power over the purse strings by disbursing funds as lawmakers order. “The president will not ask me to do anything that’s against the law,” she later added.
McMahon’s comments break slightly from the president’s record so far. In the first three weeks alone, Trump and Elon Musk have entirely shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, cut countless contracts and attempted to freeze all federal grants. The president has said he wants to get rid of the Education Department entirely, suggesting he didn’t need congressional action to do so.
During and after the hearing, the majority of Republicans praised McMahon as the right person for the job.
“It is clear that our current education system isn’t working. We have the status quo and that’s actually failing our kids,” Senator Katie Britt of Alabama said in her opening remarks. “Linda McMahon is someone who knows how to reform our education system.”
But for Democrats and Senator Susan Collins, a more centrist Republican from Maine, McMahon’s comments left quite a few questions still lingering and seemed to be, at times, self-contradictory.
“The whole hearing right now feels kind of surreal to me,” said Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat from New Hampshire. “It’s almost like we’re being subjected to a very eloquent gaslighting here.”
While many of the senators’ questions focused on special education, K-12, the separation of powers and getting rid of the Education Department, colleges and universities did come up a few times, offering some insight into McMahon’s plans as secretary.
Here are five key higher ed takeaways from the hearing:
Commitments but Few Specifics
Prior to the hearing, Trump’s comments suggested his Education Department would prioritize cutting red tape, returning education to the states, cracking down on campus antisemitism and banning what he calls “gender ideology,” among other things. But speculation swirled about what McMahon would put at the top of her agenda.
On Thursday she made it clear that she’s in lockstep with the president, saying in her opening remarks that “Trump has shared his vision and I’m ready to enact it.” She failed to provide much detail beyond that.
The business mogul, who has limited experience in education, indicated she’ll have some studying to do if she gets confirmed. When asked about topics like diversity, equity and inclusion programs or accreditation, she said, “I’ll have to learn more” or “I’d like to look into it further and get back to you on that.”
For example, when it came to addressing civil rights complaints filed by Jewish students, McMahon was quick to assure Republican lawmakers that colleges will “face defunding” if they don’t comply with the law. She also said that international students who participate in protests Trump deems antisemitic should have their visas revoked. But she didn’t provide further detail on how exactly either repercussion would be enforced.
Additionally, when asked about how she would address a backlog of cases at the Office for Civil Rights, which investigates complaints of discrimination, she said, “I would like to be confirmed and get into the department and understand that backlog.”
‘Pretty Chilling’ Approach to DEI
McMahon declined to say what specific programs or classes might violate Trump’s recent executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion during a tense exchange with Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut.
Policy experts said Trump’s executive order should have had little immediate impact on higher ed, as most of its provisions require agency action, but several colleges and universities moved quickly to comply after the order was signed Jan. 21, canceling events and scrubbing websites of DEI mentions.
Murphy highlighted one of those examples, telling McMahon that the United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., had shut down a number of its student affinity groups and clubs like the Society of Black Engineers.
He then went on to ask her, “Would public schools be in violation of this order, would they risk funding if they had clubs that students could belong to based on their racial or ethnic identity?” To which McMahon responded, “Well, I certainly today don’t want to address hypothetical situations.”
Murphy said that should be “a pretty easy question,” adding that her lack of response was “pretty chilling.”
“I think you’re going to have a lot of teachers and administrators scrambling right now,” he said.
McMahon did note, however, that all schools can and should celebrate Black History Month and Martin Luther King Jr. Day. She suggested that in saying individuals should be judged by “content of their character,” King was supporting a colorblind approach to policy and looking at all populations as the same, rather than addressing systemic inequities.
Dems Take Issue With DOGE
Several lawmakers had questions for McMahon about Trump’s efforts to cut spending via the Elon Musk–led Department of Government Efficiency, but she didn’t have many answers.
Democrats, in particular, took issue with recent reports that DOGE staffers have access to sensitive student data and recently canceled $881 million in contracts at the Institute of Education Sciences. The Education Department is just one of several agencies under DOGE’s microscope. The Trump administration is also laying off employees at the agency or putting them on administrative leave as part of a broader plan to shrink the federal workforce.
McMahon said she didn’t know “about all the administrative people who have been put on leave,” adding she would look into that. She also didn’t have more information about the IES cuts. But she defended DOGE’s work as an audit.
“I do think it’s worthwhile to take a look at the programs before money goes out the door,” she said.
But Democrats countered that Congress, not the executive branch, has the authority to direct where federal funds should go.
“When Congress appropriates money, it is the administration’s responsibility to put that out as directed by Congress, who has the power of the purse,” said Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat. “If you have input, if you have programs you have looked at that you believe are not effective, then it is your job to come to us, explain why and get the support for that.”
Brief Mention of Accreditation
Despite Trump’s promise to fire accreditors, the accreditation system and the federal policies that govern it received little attention during the hearing—aside from one round of questions.
Senator Ashley Moody, a Florida Republican, said she thinks the current system is unconstitutional, echoing claims that she made as Florida attorney general. The state argued in a 2023 lawsuit that Congress ceded power to private accrediting agencies, violating the U.S. Constitution. A federal judge rejected those claims and threw out the lawsuit in October.
Currently, federal law requires that colleges and universities be accredited by an Education Department–recognized accreditor in order to receive federal student aid such as Pell Grants. But in recent years, Republican-led states—most notably Florida—have bristled at what they see as undue interference from the accreditors and their power to potentially take away federal aid. State lawmakers in Florida now require public colleges to change accreditors regularly. But that process has been sluggish, and officials blame the Education Department.
Moody asked McMahon to commit to review regulations and guidance related to colleges changing accreditors.
“I look forward to working with you on that,” McMahon said. “And there’s been a lot of issues raised about these five to seven accreditors … I think that needs to have a broad overview and review.” (McMahon didn’t specify, but she seemed to refer to the seven institutional accreditors.)
Support for Short-Term Pell
Throughout the hearing, McMahon also reiterated her support for expanding the Pell Grant to short-term workforce training programs that run between eight and 15 weeks, and bolstering other nontraditional means of higher education like apprenticeships.
The nominee noted multiple times that though “college isn’t for everyone,” there should be opportunities for socioeconomic mobility and career development for all. She believes promoting programs like short-term Pell “could stimulate our economy” by providing new routes to pursue skills-based learning and promote trade careers. This mindset could likely lead to less restriction on for-profit technical institutions like cosmetology schools.
One thing neither McMahon nor the Senate panel spent much time on, however, was the Office of Federal Student Aid, its botched rollout of a new application portal or how she would manage the government’s $1.7 trillion student loan portfolio. One of the few mentions of the student debt crisis came up in committee chair Dr. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana’s opening remarks.
“Too many students leave college woefully unprepared for the workforce while being saddled with overwhelming debt that they cannot pay off,” he said. “Your previous experience overseeing [Small Business Administration] loans will be a great asset as the department looks to reform its student loan program.”
Indirect cost recovery (ICR) seems like a boring, technical budget subject. In reality, it is a major source of the long-running budget crises at public research universities. Misinformation about ICR has also confused everyone about the university’s public benefits.
These paired problems—concealed budget shortfalls and misinformation—didn’t cause the ICR cuts being implemented by the NIH acting director, one Matthew J. Memoli, M.D. But they are the basis of Memoli’s rationale.
Trump’s people will sustain these cuts unless academics can create an honest counternarrative that inspires wider opposition. I’ll sketch a counternarrative below.
The sudden policy change is that the NIH is to cap indirect cost recovery at 15 percent of the direct costs of a grant, regardless of the existing negotiated rate. Multiple lawsuits have been filed challenging the legality of the change, and courts have temporarily blocked it from going into effect.
Memoli’s notice of the cap, issued Friday, has a narrative that is wrong but internally coherent and plausible.
It starts with three claims about the $9 billion of the overall $35 billion research funding budget that goes to indirect costs:
Indirect cost allocations are in zero-sum competition with direct costs, therefore reducing the total amount of research.
Indirect costs are “difficult for NIH to oversee” because they aren’t entirely entailed by a specific grant.
“Private foundations” cap overhead charges at 10 to 15 percent of direct costs and all but a handful of universities accept those grants.
Memoli offers a solution: Define a “market rate” for indirect costs as that allowed by private foundations (Gates, Chan Zuckerberg, some others). The implication is the foundations’ rate captures real indirect costs rather than inflated or wishful costs that universities skim to pad out bloated administrations. On this analytical basis, currently wasted indirect costs will be reallocated to useful direct costs, thus increasing rather than decreasing scientific research.
There’s a false logic here that needs to be confronted.
The strategy so far to resist these cuts seems to focus on outcomes rather than on the actual claims or the underlying budgetary reality of STEM research in the United States. Scientific groups have called the ICR rate cap an attack on U.S. scientific leadership and on public benefits to U.S. taxpayers (childhood cancer treatments that will save lives, etc.). This is all important to talk about. And yet these claims don’t refute the NIH logic. Nor do they get at the hidden budget reality of academic science.
On the logic: Indirect costs aren’t in competition with direct costs because direct and indirect costs pay for different categories of research ingredients.
Direct costs apply to the individual grant: costs for chemicals, graduate student labor, equipment, etc., that are only consumed by that particular grant.
Indirect costs, also called facilities and administrative (F&A) costs, support infrastructure used by everybody in a department, discipline, division, school or university. Infrastructure is the library that spends tens of thousands of dollars a year to subscribe to just one important journal that is consulted by hundreds or thousands of members of that campus community annually. Infrastructure is the accounting staff that writes budgets for dozens and dozens of grant applications across departments or schools. Infrastructure is the building, new or old, that houses multiple laboratories: If it’s new, the campus is still paying it off; if it’s old, the campus is spending lots of money keeping it running. These things are the tip of the iceberg of the indirect costs of contemporary STEM research.
In response to the NIH’s social media announcement of its indirect costs rate cut, Bertha Madras had a good starter list of what indirects involve.
Screenshot via Christopher Newfield
And there are also people who track all these materials, reorder them, run the daily accounting, etc.—honestly, people who aren’t directly involved in STEM research have a very hard time grasping its size and complexity, and therefore its cost.
As part of refuting the claim that NIH can just not pay for all this and therefore pay for more research, the black box of research needs to be opened up, Bertha Madras–style, and properly narrated as a collaborative (and exciting) activity.
This matter of human activity gets us to the second NIH-Memoli claim, which involves toting up the processes, structures, systems and people that make up research infrastructure and adding up their costs. The alleged problem is that it is “difficult to oversee.”
Very true, but difficult things can and often must be done, and that is what happens with indirect costs. Every university compiles indirect costs as a condition of receiving research grants. Specialized staff (more indirect costs!) use a large amount of accounting data to sum up these costs, and they use expensive information technology to do this to the correct standard. University staff then negotiate with federal agencies for a rate that addresses their particular university’s actual indirect costs. These rates are set for a time, then renegotiated at regular intervals to reflect changing costs or infrastructural needs.
The fact that this process is “difficult” doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with it. This claim shouldn’t stand—unless and until NIH convincingly identifies specific flaws.
As stated, the NIH-Memoli claim that decreasing funding for overhead cuts will increase science is easily falsifiable. (And we can say this while still advocating for reducing overhead costs, including ever-rising compliance costs imposed by federal research agencies. But we would do this by reducing the mandated costs, not the cap.)
The third statement—that private foundations allow only 10 to 15 percent rates of indirect cost recovery—doesn’t mean anything in itself. Perhaps Gates et al. have the definitive analysis of true indirect costs that they have yet to share with humanity. Perhaps Gates et al. believe that the federal taxpayer should fund the university infrastructure that they are entitled to use at a massive discount. Perhaps Gates et al. use their wealth and prestige to leverage a better deal for themselves at the expense of the university just because they can. Which of these interpretations is correct? NIH-Memoli assume the first but don’t actually show that the private foundation rate is the true rate. (In reality, the second explanation is the best.)
This kind of critique is worth doing, and it can be expanded. The NIH view reflects right-wing public-choice economics that treat teachers, scientists et al. as simple gain maximizers producing private, not public goods. This means that their negotiations with federal agencies will reflect their self-interest, while in contrast the “market rate” is objectively valid. We do need to address these false premises and bad conclusions again and again, whenever they arise.
However, this critique is only half the story. The other half is the budget reality of large losses on sponsored research, all incurred as a public service to knowledge and society.
Take that NIH image above. It makes no logical sense to put the endowments of three very untypical universities next to their ICR rates: They aren’t connected. It makes political narrative sense, however: The narrative is that fat-cat universities are making a profit on research at regular taxpayers’ expense, and getting even fatter.
The only way to deal with this very effective, very entrenched Republican story is to come clean on the losses that universities incur. The reality is that existing rates of indirect cost recovery do not cover actual indirect costs, but require subsidy from the university that performs the research. ICR is not icing on the budget cake that universities can do without. ICR buys only a portion of the indirect costs cake, and the rest is purchased by each university’s own institutional funds.
For example, here are the top 16 university recipients of federal research funds. One of the largest in terms of NIH funding (through the Department of Health and Human Services) is the University of California, San Francisco, winning $795.6 million in grants in fiscal year 2023. (The National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey tables for fiscal year 2023 are here.)
UCSF’s negotiated indirect cost recovery rate is 64 percent. This means that it has shown HHS and other agencies detailed evidence that it has real indirect costs in something like this amount (more on “something like” in a minute). It means that HHS et al. have accepted UCSF’s evidence of their real indirect costs as valid.
If the total of UCSF’s HHS $795.6 million is received with a 64 percent ICR rate, this means that every $1.64 of grant funds has $0.64 in indirect funds and one dollar in direct. The math estimates that UCSF receives about $310 million of its HHS funds in the form of ICR.
Now, the new NIH directive cuts UCSF from 64 percent to 15 percent. That’s a reduction of about 77 percent. Reduce $310 million by that proportion and you have UCSF losing about $238 million in one fell swoop. There’s no mechanism in the directive for shifting that into the direct costs of UCSF grants, so let’s assume a full loss of $238 million.
In Memoli’s narrative, this $238 million is the Reaganite’s “waste, fraud and abuse.” The remaining approximately $71 million is legitimate overhead as measured (wrongly) by what Gates et al. have managed to force universities to accept in exchange for the funding of their researchers’ direct costs.
But the actual situation is even worse than this. It’s not that UCSF now will lose $238 million on their NIH research. In reality, even at (allegedly fat-cat) 64 percent ICR rates, they were already losing tons of money. Here’s another table from the HERD survey.
There’s UCSF in the No. 2 national position, a major research powerhouse. It spends more than $2 billion a year on research. However, moving across the columns from left to right, you see federal government, state and local government, and then this category, “Institution Funds.” As with most of these big research universities, this is a huge number. UCSF reports to the NSF that it spends more than $500 million a year of its own internal funds on research.
The reason? Extramurally sponsored research, almost all in science and engineering, loses massive amounts of money even at current recovery rates, day after day, year in, year out. This is not because anyone is doing anything wrong. It is because the infrastructure of contemporary science is very expensive.
Here’s where we need to build a full counternarrative to the existing one. The existing one, shared by university administrators and Trumpers alike, posits the fiction that universities break even on research. UCSF states, “The University requires full F&A cost recovery.” This is actually a regulative ideal that has never been achieved.
The reality is this:
UCSF spends half a billion dollars of its own funding to support its $2 billion total in research. That money comes from the state, from tuition, from clinical revenues and some—less than you’d think—from private donors and corporate sponsors. If NIH’s cuts go through, UCSF’s internal losses on research—the money it has to make up—suddenly jump from an already-high $505 million to $743 million in the current year. This is a complete disaster for the UCSF budget. It will massively hit research, students, the campuses’ state employees, everything.
The current strategy of chronicling the damage from cuts is good. But it isn’t enough. I’m pleased to see the Association of American Universities, a group of high-end research universities, stating plainly that “colleges and universities pay for 25 percent of total academic R&D expenditures from their own funds. This university contribution amounted to $27.7 billion in FY23, including $6.8 billion in unreimbursed F&A costs.” All university administrations need to shift to this kind of candor.
Unless the new NIH cuts are put in the context of continuous and severe losses on university research, the public, politicians, journalists, et al. cannot possibly understand the severity of the new crisis. And it will get lost in the blizzard of a thousand Trump-created crises, one of which is affecting pretty much every single person in the country.
Finally, our full counternarrative needs a third element: showing that systemic fiscal losses on research are in fact good, marvelous, a true public service. A loss on a public good is not a bad and embarrassing fact. Research is supposed to lose money: The university loses money on science so that society gets long-term gains from it. Science has a negative return on investment for the university that conducts it so that there is a massively positive ROI for society, of both the monetary and nonmonetary kind. Add up the education, the discoveries, the health, social, political and cultural benefits: The university courts its own endless fiscal precarity so that society benefits.
We should also remind everyone that the only people who make money on science are in business. And even there, ROI can take years or decades. Commercial R&D, with a focus on product development and sales, also runs losses. Think of “AI”: Microsoft alone is spending $80 billion on it in 2025, on top of $50 billion in 2024, with no obviously strong revenues yet in sight. This is a huge amount of risky investment—it compares to $60 billion for federal 2023 R&D expenditures on all topics in all disciplines. I’m an AI skeptic but appreciate Microsoft’s reminder that new knowledge means taking losses and plenty of them.
These up-front losses generate much greater future value of nonmonetary as well as monetary kinds. Look at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Harvard University, et al. in Table 22 above. The sector spent nearly $28 billion of its own money generously subsidizing sponsors’ research, including by subsidizing the federal government itself.
There’s much more to say about the long-term social compact behind this—how the actual “private sector” gets 100 percent ICR or significantly more, how state cuts factor into this, how student tuition now subsidizes more of STEM research than is fair, how research losses have been a denied driver of tuition increases. There’s more to say about the long-term decline of public universities as research centers that, when properly funded, allow knowledge creation to be distributed widely in the society.
But my point here is that opening the books on large everyday research losses, especially biomedical research losses of the kind NIH creates, is the only way that journalists, politicians and the wider public will see through the Trumpian lie about these ICR “efficiencies.” It’s also the only way to move toward the full cost recovery that universities deserve and that research needs.
The Trump administration announced Wednesday it is rolling back guidance issued in the final days of the Biden administration that said payments to college athletes through revenue-sharing agreements or from name, image and likeness deals “must be made proportionately available to male and female athletes.”
Republicans quickly criticized the guidance and called for its rescission, arguing that mandating equal pay between men and women’s sports could cause some colleges to cut athletics programs.
Under Title IX, colleges must provide “substantially proportionate” financial assistance to male and female athletes, though it wasn’t clear until the Biden guidance whether that requirement applied to NIL deals or revenue-sharing agreements. A settlement reached in the House v. NCAA case would require colleges to share revenue with athletes starting in the 2025–26 academic year and provide back pay.
The Trump administration said the guidance was “overly burdensome” and “profoundly unfair.”
“Enacted over 50 years ago, Title IX says nothing about how revenue-generating athletics programs should allocate compensation among student athletes,” acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor said in a statement. “The claim that Title IX forces schools and colleges to distribute student-athlete revenues proportionately based on gender equity considerations is sweeping and would require clear legal authority to support it.”
A federal judge is set to sign off on the House settlement later this spring. Several athletes have objected to the plan, including some groups of women athletes who argue the revenue won’t be shared equitably and will primarily benefit men who play football and basketball.
President Trump’s pick to lead the Education Department, Linda McMahon, will appear today before a key Senate committee to kick off the confirmation process.
The hearing comes at a tumultuous time for the Education Department and higher education, and questions about the agency’s future will likely dominate the proceedings, which kick off at 10 a.m. The Inside Higher Ed team will have live updates throughout the morning and afternoon, so follow along.
McMahon has been through the wringer of a confirmation hearing before, as she was appointed to lead the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term. But this time around the former wrestling CEO can expect tougher questions, particularly from Democrats, as the Trump administration has already taken a number of unprecedented, controversial and, at times, seemingly unconstitutional actions in just three short weeks.
Our live coverage of the hearing will kick off at 9:15 a.m. In the meantime, you can read more about McMahon, the latest at the department and what to expect below:
