Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-LA, advocated for his own legislation, the College Transparency Act, as potential solution to the issue.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images
After passing a sweeping higher ed overhaul in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress now has its sights set on reforming college cost transparency. In a hearing Thursday, members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions questioned experts on how to make college pricing—and how costs compare to student outcomes—more understandable to families.
“You don’t buy a car without comparing prices, quality and finance options. The same is true for buying a home. Why can we not do this for higher ed?” asked Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the committee and recently issued a request for information about the cost of higher education.
The hearing follows a House hearing in September on the same topic—and including one repeat witness, Justin Draeger, senior vice president of affordability for Strada Education Foundation.
Cost transparency has long been a pain point for both students and institutions, who have attempted to clarify via marketing campaigns, improved price calculator tools and tuition resets that their costs of attendance are often lower than their sticker price would indicate. Students, meanwhile, struggle to find reliable information about the costs of their prospective institutions, leaving them without the financial information they need to decide what institution to attend.
Now, Congressional Republicans are taking notice—and are tying efforts to improve affordability and cost transparency in with their existing focus on the return on investment for students and taxpayers.
At Thursday’s hearing, lawmakers and witnesses alike stressed how little information is available to students about the price of college, with research showing that most students overestimate the price of a public college education. Witnesses also brought up parents’ and families’ confusion about aid offer letters, which the Government Accountability Office has found often understate or fail to include the net price students will actually be paying.
Cassidy stressed the need for transparency as it relates to outcomes and return on investment. Students should be able to compare graduation rates and projected incomes of earning a degree at two different institutions, he said, to give families an accurate picture of what they’re paying for when they pay tuition.
The two Democratic witnesses, meanwhile, argued that college cost transparency is ineffective without also focusing on college affordability—something that is being worsened not only by increasing tuition costs but also by the larger cost-of-living crisis. Nontuition costs, said Mark Huelsman, Director of Policy and Advocacy at The Hope Center for Student Basic Needs, make up the bulk of the cost of attendance. He added that if student aren’t able to afford food or housing, that can severely impact their ability to succeed in college.
“I urge this committee not just to find ways to increase clarity, but to do everything in its power to lower the price that students pay,” he said.
Bipartisan Solutions?
Legislators pointed toward several potential legislative solutions that they said had support on both sides of the aisle. That list included Cassidy’s College Transparency Act, a bill that would provide more detailed information on costs, academic outcomes and career outcomes of specific programs and majors. Cassidy has championed the bill for years, alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren, CTA’s other lead author, but Rep. Virginia Foxx opposed the measure when she led the House education committee. Foxx, who ultimately proposed her own effort to track students’ outcomes, resisted CTA due to privacy concerns. Cassidy noted during the hearing that the bill includes strict data security standards.
Meanwhile, Sen. Jon Husted, an Ohio Republican, also touted his bill with fellow Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama—the Debt, Earnings, and Cost Information Disclosure for Education Act—which would make changes to the Department of Education’s College Scorecard. It would require the resource to include information on average loan amounts in a given academic program, as well as default rates, how long it takes graduates to pay off their loans and how that debt compares to their earnings.
That information would help prospective students “know exactly what they’re getting themselves into before they make a decision to make a huge, huge investment,” Husted said.
Witnesses enumerated their own cost transparency wish lists.
Draeger said, among other things, that the federal government should regulate financial aid offers to use straightforward and standardized language. Huelsman, on the other hand, argued that the “simplest way, and the most powerful way” to make college costs transparent is to make college tuition- or debt-free. He also said that the Trump administration appears to be working against, not toward, cost transparency in higher ed.
“Many of the bipartisan reforms being discussed today require staffing capacity at the Department of Education that frankly, at this moment, do not exist, including at the Institute for Education Sciences,” he said. “Meanwhile, the Trump administration has worked to dismantle the CFPB, which provides oversight and essential information to borrowers, and conducts essential research on the student loan market. Sadly, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act takes us in the wrong direction on both affordability and transparency.”
Approximately 65 percent of the 1.2 million active-duty service members in the U.S. armed forces have less than an associate degree level of education, according to 2023 data; many of them hold some college credits but no degree. Federal aid programs make enrolling in college and earning a degree more accessible for military-affiliated students, but not every student is aware of academic interventions that can help them complete a credential sooner, including credit for prior learning.
A 2024 research article found that prospective students with military experience were most likely to prioritize academic programming when selecting a college, followed by financial assistance and affordability. CPL is one way colleges and universities seek to expedite student veterans’ ability to enroll in and graduate from college, recognizing the learning already accomplished while in the armed forces.
In the most recent episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with three experts from the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education—senior fellows Matt Bergman and Dallas Kratzer, and Tracy Teater, associate director of adult learner attainment—to discuss the state’s adult education attainment goals, challenges in CPL rollout and other models of success across the country.
An edited version of the podcast appears below.
Inside Higher Ed: Just to get us started, Matt, can you talk a little about the connection between credit for prior learning and adult learner success? What is that link and why is this an important starting point when it comes to engaging adult learners?
Matthew Bergman, senior fellow at the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education and an associate professor at the University of Louisville
Matt Bergman: Credit for prior learning has been around quite a long while, from the early 1930s to when we saw the transition of many military back into higher education. [We were] thinking about, how we could transition individuals that are work-ready but have some college-level and credit-worthy learning that would create more efficient pathways?
Credit for prior learning has been a huge benefit to so many of those folks with that experience. And this is just not experience alone; this is very thoroughly and rigorously assessed learning that we can translate and map directly to curriculum.
The University of Louisville was part of a 72-institution study by the Council on Adult and Experiential Learning, or CAEL, and the CPL Boost came out with some really hard-hitting empirical evidence that not only do people get to graduation faster, but they graduate at a higher rate, and also those that actually engage in this work take more credit hours.
That might seem a bit counterintuitive, but what it boils down to is this idea that you increase retention and persistence by percentage points that create a net-positive revenue for institutions along the way. So the myth of taking away tuition from the university is gone. We’ve got empirical evidence that not only does it benefit students and they save money, but actually the institutions are making more money in the long term because they are creating paths that are efficient, meaningful and impactful for these adult learners, military and beyond.
Inside Higher Ed: Why are students with military experience a focus area when it comes to CPL?
Dallas Kratzer, senior fellow at the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education
Dallas Kratzer: The American Council on Education has done the evaluation of a lot of military workplace learning, which can include not only the courses they’ve taken in their military careers but also the learning that they’ve had on the job.
In the military, we have a lot of different types of things that we do, and ACE has evaluated many of those. In those evaluations, the great thing is, those types of jobs and skills line up to the civilian sector. About 85 percent of what we do in the military is done in the civilian sector. So, if we can get it right and benchmark off of what ACE has done, it makes it really easy for a higher ed institution to then step across the line to the civilian sector and say, “ACE evaluated it this way. This is how it looks in the civilian sector. We can take that same credit recommendation and make some linkage there.”
As a matter of fact, O*NET has a military jobs crosswalk to civilian jobs. So linking all of that together, and the program that Matt worked on at the University of Louisville, he and I both worked with it, they use it really heavily to make that crosswalk, or that linkage between those two.
Inside Higher Ed: Part of this is from the institution side—making it clear how military experience fulfills civilian responsibilities or those job functionalities. But there’s also making that linkage for the student; if you are somebody with military experience, maybe you haven’t considered the ways that that can translate into the transition outside the civilian world.
Kratzer: You are so on the mark with that comment, because so many folks in the military just see that they’re doing their job. I did 35 years in the Air Force and worked extensively with the Army in the later years, and [military personnel] often think that what they’ve learned on the job or the things that they are doing in their career fields are just that—a job. They don’t see the experiential learning that comes along with that and how that can be translated into college credit.
I’ve had times where I’ve worked with individuals, and I’m like, “So have you gone to college?” Yes, some of them have. “Have you completed a degree?” “No, but I’ve got some college.” And then about a third of them don’t even think about it, and they would say, “No, I don’t have any college [credit] at all.” I’m like, “Actually, you do. There’s this thing called a joint service transcript, and your workplace learning, your military courses have been evaluated, and you have this pot of credits that you need to take to your higher ed institution and say, ‘How does this translate into me completing my degree?’”
Inside Higher Ed: Kentucky has a large plan at the state level to support adults and nontraditional students; how does CPL fit into this vision of student success?
Tracy Teater, associate director of adult learner attainment
Tracy Teater: The Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education is committed to supporting and improving learner pathways, both to access and then successfully complete postsecondary goals across the age continuum, whether that is a traditional or a post-traditional student. We recognize that supporting our adult learners—whether they be adults with high school equivalency diplomas, adults enrolling for the first time or adults re-enrolling to finish their degree—leads to increased economic mobility for them and their families, increased workforce for Kentucky, of course, and an increased college-going rate for the next generation.
Because our adult learners are often parents, I can’t stress that point enough: By investing in our adult learners and our adult learner returners, we are investing in those generations to come.
Credit for prior learning is a key part of Kentucky’s larger vision for student success. It removes barriers and accelerates pathways for those adults to earn meaningful credentials. That supports Kentucky’s 60 by 30 goal, our North Star, if you will.
To ensure 60 percent of working-age adults hold that postsecondary credential by 2030, it requires that we recognize the learning and experiences that our adults often bring with them from military service, from work, from industry certifications and from their life experiences. This saves tuition dollars for our families and increases return on investment, as Matt shared earlier on, for both the campus and the state. I think also important and sometimes overlooked in this conversation is the fact that it sends a powerful message to the learner that you belong on campus and you’re respected and valued for the college credit–worthy experiences you bring. And so this sense of belonging, I think, impacts persistence towards learning goals. And so CPL for Kentucky is not a stand-alone effort. It’s woven into the broader student success agenda as a way to re-engage adults, and it’s been really exciting to be a part of the work, because Kentucky has a demonstrated commitment to adult learners.
The goals of the Kentucky Student Success Collaborative are we want to set the conditions for a culture of collaboration, and we want to build capacities of our campus partners to innovate and then ultimately accelerate progress.
Kratzer: I’d like to make a comment or tag on to what Tracy just said about one part of that, and that is the tuition dollars and how we can reduce the cost of going to college or returning to college through credit for prior learning. But more importantly, to the military community, the thing that we need to keep in mind is if they have already earned the training and the learning, and we don’t recognize that in higher ed, we’re not being a good steward of the taxpayers’ dollars, because we’re having them go back and take training that they’ve already accomplished. So this is such an important aspect to that military credit recommendation.
Inside Higher Ed: We’ve laid out a lot of the reasons why CPL is so beneficial to the state, to the institution, to the student, to their families, to their future families. But if CPL were easy to do, everyone would be doing it, and they’d be doing it well. So I wonder if we can talk about some of those hurdles when it comes to implementing and executing CPL effectively, and what sort of resources and time it takes to do this work and to do it well.
Bergman: There are a number of barriers, because it is labor-intense. In some ways now, as a result of the American Council on Education, we have military acknowledgment and recommendations for these credits that make it very tangible, almost as though it is transfer credit for most institutions. But the portfolio process that goes beyond that is a bit more labor-intense and faculty-driven. So that is a bit of a barrier.
But what we are seeing as a result of the people on this call here—Dallas, Tracy and so many others that are doing research in this field—we have seen barriers declining. The skepticism of this whole process is starting to wane in a way that is creating pathways for us to reach other institutions in Kentucky, but also nationally. And that’s good. A lot of thanks goes to some of the seminal authors in this work, like Nan Travers and Becky Klein-Collins. These individuals have produced scholarship that has really rooted empirical proof that this is most valuable. It creates efficiency. It helps with tax dollars, and when you boil down all of the pieces and parts, it becomes very process-oriented and very standard in approach.
Now, that has been a long road getting to this moment. So when you talk about barriers, they have been there for so many years that they are starting to diminish, and we are so grateful for that—not only in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, but beyond, because institutions and specifically faculty, which were the biggest barrier in acknowledgment of CPL, are starting to come onboard. Not only because of the demographic cliff, but also because of some of the skepticism that we have in higher education and the shortages that we have in enrollment now. [Faculty] are more likely open to this concept because we are taking this work, we are showing the process, we are showing a portfolio and we are being very transparent about how we calculate and assess learning and translate that to academic credit. In the moment that we do that, we show the robust process. We have new advocates for this work.
When we think about military personnel directly, we plug those individuals into some of those more traditional classes and disciplines, and those faculty are immediately like, “Bring every military learner into my class. They are so mission-driven. They are so committed to this goal of getting to the degree that I want every military learner in my classroom.”
When institutions become military-friendly, that’s when you see the pipeline. Because military folks are insular in their process of communicating about the programs that work well, that are very “military engaged,” to use the phrase from Dallas, but you have to be military engaged and ready for these learners if you’re going to serve them well. And more and more institutions are doing that, showing that commitment.
Kratzer: Just to add to what Matt’s talking about, this whole thing really boils down to awareness. And back in 2015, ACE and a couple of other organizations got together and produced this document called “Credit for Prior Learning: Charting Institutional Practice For Sustainability,” and they identified four major challenges: organizational structure, organizational awareness, student awareness and student engagement. When we see what the challenges are and then address those challenges, it’s really awareness. People just need to become more aware of the population and how what we do in the military can be translated to other sectors and other affinity groups and very easily done.
We’re in a spot right now in higher education. And Tracy alluded to this with the demographic cliff, that we see that adult learners have become a recognized population, and in that adult learner population are different subsets that we can engage with. I think the military one is the best one to start with, because so much of the work has been done and it’s just capitalizing on that. Additionally, the military community is a different set of learners. Military training is about learning, and in the military today, it is very technical thought processes, processing information, very much focused on that academic rigor. So that’s why they make some of the best students today, and anything that we can do to help attract them to our institutions will be incredibly beneficial for all of us.
Inside Higher Ed: We’ve mentioned CAEL and ACE and some other well-known organizations who are supporting this work, but are there other states that you’re learning from or other organizations that you think are doing this work well?
Bergman: One in particular is North Carolina, and through the Belk [Endowment], my buddy Mike Krause is making magic happen down there through InsideTrack and their connection to reconnecting learners that have some college and no degree, but also tying in CPL and then military-connected learners. They are going full force with the type of resources to really re-engage those learners and create a very clear path.
Oftentimes when trying to reconnect with people, they need to see how this might fit into a compartment of their lives. Because we know, as we serve these learners, they have No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 priorities and then education might come into the conversation [later]. So it’s really important for when we engage these types of learners, when we think about military learners, we have to understand that [education] is not likely priority No. 1.
I use this analogy of “Would you give up some streaming services or social media scrolling to the tune of four to five hours a week for a bachelor’s degree in two years?” And oftentimes people are going to say, “What do you mean? Of course I would.” And I say, “OK, let me break this down and work backwards,” and you look at the number of credits one can earn that they get from CPL, but also what they’ve accumulated thus far, and you start to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
States like North Carolina, Tennessee have done an absolutely wonderful job. California has gone all in on CPL as well, to really try and reconnect learners and show them that the light at the end of the tunnel is quite bright.
We learn from one another—these people are just colleagues in the weeds, really grinding, trying to find ways to really replicate and make it respective to our own institutions and just chop and drop these policies so that we really can scale and impact more and more learners. Now we have battled for years and years and years, and you can hear my passion in this, but we have fought the very traditional mechanisms of institutions, and we are starting to break down so many of those barriers, partially because of the demographic cliff, partially because of some of the skepticism. But as Dallas said, adult learners, military learners are on the forefront. We are at the table for traditional higher ed, and that is a huge change in such a benefit for these learners, because there are new funding models, there are scholarships, grants and then CPL, creating efficiency that we just didn’t have 15 years ago.
Kratz: A couple of organizations that I think are doing some interesting work here … the Council of College and Military Educators. They do an amazing job at bringing the senior leadership of the Department of Education, Department of Labor, Veterans Affairs, all these folks together to talk about education related to the military community.
One that I see as a rising star is NASPA Vets. They have a military-connected students conference every year. I was very excited to see what they’re doing, because it’s helping student affairs administrators to better understand the military population, and part of this is this whole awareness and how we can serve that community.
Of course, Student Veterans of America, it’s a great organization to have on your campus. The work they’re doing in getting the word out to service members is so important … “Hey, come and be in higher education, because we have space for you. This is part of your culture and you can be part of it through this student organization.”
Some states to add on to what Matt was saying about Tennessee and California: Ohio started this thing called Collegiate Purple Star, and I think we need to do that across the country. The reason for that is everybody’s military-friendly right now, but with both Ohio and Indiana’s Collegiate Purple Star, it’s about not only being military-friendly, but military-ready, meaning that you’ve gone the extra mile and you’ve created the pathways to degree completion for service members based on their experiential learning that they’ve had during their military careers.
Inside Higher Ed: How are you all tracking effectiveness and the impact of the work that you’re doing? What does it mean to apply data to CPL for military-affiliated students? What are some of those metrics that you’re tracking?
Teater: I would back up one step to say that data alignment has been a gap that we have learned firsthand about during this pilot. One of the things that we know is that across the broader CPL opportunities, our campus partners are tracking that in different ways, which means that it is a definite gap of how we can track impact as a state without having aligned ways to do that. I wouldn’t call it a challenge; I think I’d call it an opportunity. But it’s something that we definitely want to end this with state recommendations so that we can do a really, really good job of tracking all types of CPL across the state. That’s one gap we’ve seen that I think we will be able to end this with a definite solution to and again, looking at some of our neighboring states and how they’ve been able to address that.
Bergman: It’s important to note that the state work that we’re engaged in, the CPL Council on Postsecondary Education initiative, we are collecting data around metrics directly in growth of CPL, total numbers of credits earned, those programs that are offering them—so additional programs beyond just single adult-friendly programs at institutions—and then actually the number of humans that are connected in the work, so hiring individuals that are responsible for CPL and tracking data through the institutional research office.
We are seeing great growth there, but this is also a direct by-product of what we are seeing in the field, in research and scholarship. I did my dissertation roughly 15 years ago, and it was a really challenging enterprise to find empirical work and scholarship that would really drive my dissertation forward, looking at adult military persistence. What I see today, as I am looking at journals almost daily, is new articles, new empirical pieces and new national work and research that is popping up almost monthly now that is focused on these populations. It is such a boon to our work, because individuals are doing this work, not only for their dissertations, but in their research and scholarship field.
There were not a lot of folks doing this work many years ago, but now we have a new crop of young people jumping in as advocates and allies of military and adult learners, and it truly is making a direct impact, because we have data to lean on and say, “Here is empirical proof of how this directly impacts this individual program or this particular state or this region,” and using that to guide a lot of our push and our nudging that we do, both in Kentucky and beyond, to make institutions think differently about how they formalize policy to really attract these folks and know that they can get them to and through more efficiently.
Kratzer: ACE and CAEL just partnered together to do the national landscape of credit for prior learning, talking about how states are making those recommendations. And I think there’s a lot of work to be done yet to help states, particularly at the legislative position, to understand how to help systems better collect the information. Because from the state, we hear them say, “Yes, you must accept military credit recommendations.” And the schools go, “OK, we accepted, but we don’t apply it well.” We need to be better at counting how we apply it so that we can provide back better information to say, “It does. It is valued in our state. It’s not just brought in as elective credit, but it’s brought in as degree credit that will accelerate degree completion,” and we’re not tracking that as well as I think we could.
Inside Higher Ed: I think you bring up a really valuable point there about the different types of credit. Just because it’s accepted doesn’t necessarily mean it’s helpful to the student in their specific career goal. But I think making sure that all credit is recognized and supported as part of a degree pathway is definitely the next step that we need to see.
Bergman: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that we have nearly 150 institutions involved in the prior learning assessment network. So for listeners that are checking in on this particular podcast, you can say, “Hey, I’m going to connect with Dallas,” or “I’m going to reach out to Matt and join this prior learning assessment network and hear from these institutions that are doing this work on the ground.” Each month, it costs zero money—we have a featured individual from an institution talking about, whether it be marketing or military credit recommendation or policy implementation or the admissions process in CPL; we are looking at all angles of CPL through the prior learning assessment network from people on the ground.
Inside Higher Ed: That’s amazing. I love especially when we can talk about different institution sizes and types, because what works for one institution might not be easy to do at another.
Bergman: And the best part of that is it’s free. We are not charging individuals. We are just a community of committed professionals that have been working for so many years trying to make an impact, and now we see our crop of individuals growing and growing every single month.
Inside Higher Ed: I want to hear more about what’s next for the state as you all consider adult learners and that lofty goal of 60 percent attainment.
Teater: Matt laid it out beautifully from a national perspective; from a Kentucky perspective, we hope to do the exact same thing.
We are exploring ways to align data collection efforts so we can accurately gauge impact across the state, impact for the institutions and then impact, of course, for the adult learner. We also hope to explore ways to align and standardize credit mobility across our two-year and four-year campuses, so that credit earned at one institution can be recognized at another, so that our two-year graduates can seamlessly transfer to our four-year campuses, and then this will lead to state standards and policies to further support CPL efforts. We’re looking to some of our neighboring states on best practices there.
Then finally, we are, in the fall, launching our Kentucky Adult Attainment Network, from which we will convene a state working group and community of practice to continue to build champions for the work, but also share resources, best practices and be able to offer up policy recommendations that will enact to further address this key part of our adult learner action plan.
Inside Higher Ed: Do you have any advice or insight for others looking to support military-affiliated learners?
Kratzer: I think the big thing that my peers need to know and to understand about the military community is that there’s a significant amount of learning that they gain from their military experience. However, the service member doesn’t always appreciate it the way that we as academics can understand it. They just say, “Hey, I was just doing my job.”
Well, that job has worth and value beyond what you did when you were in the service. There’s so much more we can do. The leadership training that they get—business and industry are just dying for that kind of professional development, so let’s recognize it. Let’s help them to see how they can transition to the civilian sector and bring those great learning skills into the workplace and into higher education.
Bergman: CPL for military and beyond is being done very effectively. If your institution is not doing it perfect or is not even involved, it is being done and there are so many people that are ready to provide open-source information, policy practice, forms, strategies, techniques and nuanced information to your institution directly for free, so that you can engage in this work without having to start from scratch. So to boil it down, you don’t have to start from scratch. So many institutions are doing so well in this work, and if you want to engage, just reach out and we will plug you into the prior learning assessment network or any type of forums at the University of Louisville or share data or information that we use in the state of Kentucky’s CPL initiative. We are ready to share these things because it matters and it’s impactful.
Teater: The awareness is critical, and that’s awareness across states, across institutions and within institutions. One of the things that we have seen is sometimes just a gap in awareness on what’s possible, what’s available and then how best to pull the technical levers to make those things happen for students. So I would say every single conversation that we come out of, we learn something new, and hopefully others learn something new as well. And I just think that that awareness can’t be underestimated.
The clock is ticking for Senate Republicans as they rush to approve a sweeping bill that cuts spending and taxes and pays for some of President Donald Trump’s top agenda items by the Fourth of July.
The House passed the measure late last month, putting the ball in the Senate’s proverbial court. But key senators have since said little about the higher ed provisions in the bill, so it’s unclear what lawmakers in the upper chamber will prioritize. Higher ed experts predict risk-sharing, or the plan to require colleges to pay a penalty for unpaid loans, likely won’t survive. Other issues, like whether to change the eligibility criteria for the Pell Grant, are more uncertain. But any changes to the House bill will come at a cost, as saving one program likely will mean deeper cuts to another.
Over all, lawmakers will face a difficult balancing act to get the legislation through the Senate without endangering a second passage in the House, where bill advanced by the skin of its teeth. And Trump has called the bill the single most important piece of legislation in his second term, suggesting that failure is not an option.
“The One, Big, Beautiful Bill will implement President Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda by delivering the largest tax cut in American history, the largest border security investment in history, and the largest deficit reduction in nearly 30 years,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement last month. “The Senate should pass this critical legislation as soon as possible to usher in America’s Golden Age.”
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the bill would add $2.4 trillion to the deficit over a decade.
What’s Next
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hasn’t yet released its version of a reconciliation bill, though a draft is expected soon since congressional leaders are hoping to get a vote on the legislation by June 16, sources familiar with the Hill say. Lawmakers are using the reconciliation process, so they only need 51 votes in the Senate to pass the bill. But if the Senate version is at all different from the House’s, the House will have to vote again before the legislation can reach the president’s desk.
When a bill does drop, it will likely skip the traditional committee markup, so the legislation can reach the Senate floor for a vote faster. But that fast tracking will limit the time for college leaders and others to review and weigh in on the bill.
Policy analysts say Senate and House Republicans will likely have to make some compromises in order to move the bill forward. Some Senate Republicans may stand firm and advocate for changes on certain provisions, but the question is which ones will earn priority and which ones will fall by the wayside. For instance, can moderate Republicans save both the Pell Grant and Medicare? Or will they have to choose between the two?
In many cases, what spending cuts and program changes survive is going to depend on “how the tug-of-war between the House and Senate plays out,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
All of this, however, could be thrown for a loop if former Trump adviser Elon Musk holds any influence. The billionaire tech mogul who previously led Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency has launched an all-out feud with the president over social media, calling the bill a “disgusting abomination” and saying, “shame on those who voted for it.”
At Odds Over Accountability
If the reconciliation bill does move forward, policy experts expect the Senate to propose a very different version than the House. And Michelle Dimino, director of education at Third Way, a left-leaning think tank, said she’s looking to the Lowering Education Costs and Debt Act, a bill introduced by Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy in 2023, for an outline of what it may include. (Cassidy is the chair of the Senate education committee.)
“Senate and House Republicans have not always been aligned in their approach to higher ed reform,” she said. And “unsurprisingly, each chamber tends to favor legislation that originated internally.”
One of the most notable differences Dimino and others anticipate between the House and Senate is how each tries to hold colleges accountable for students’ financial outcomes.
House Republicans want to use risk-sharing, a strategy that would require colleges and universities to pay a fee each year based on the amount of loans their graduates (or those who left without a degree) have failed to repay. But the formula for calculating that fee is complicated, and colleges have a lot of questions about how it works and whether it’s fair. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that these risk-sharing payments would total $1.3 billion by 2034 and then continue to increase annually.
Meanwhile, the Lowering Education Costs Act calls for a plan similar to the gainful-employment rule—a metric that ties colleges’ financial aid eligibility to their students’ earnings and debt levels. The idea was first introduced by President Obama, scrapped by President Trump in his first term and then expanded by President Biden.
Under gainful employment, colleges would have to show their graduates make more than someone with a high school diploma and that their loan payments will be affordable. If a college ever falls below those thresholds, it could lose access to all federal student aid. The Senate plan would likely apply to all colleges, whereas the current gainful-employment rule only applies to for-profit colleges and nondegree programs.
Higher education lobbyists are generally more supportive of the Senate’s anticipated proposal. But they note that while it’s a much lesser evil than risk-sharing, concerns remain, especially about how it would affect institutions.
“When the data is not available … we are operating off concepts and ideas,” said Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education. “So it begs the question: What is the intended outcome and is this proposal the solution?”
Other Key Issues to Watch
What is less certain, policy experts noted, is whether the Senate will sign off on the House’s plans to consolidate student loan repayment plans, cap loans, increase endowment taxes and change who is eligible for the Pell Grant. For example, while the House proposed waiving borrowers’ interest if their monthly income-based payment isn’t enough to cover what’s owed and forgiving remaining debt after 30 years of payments, Cassidy’s legislation would create a more traditional plan where students accrue interest but all is forgiven after 20 or 25 years of payments.
And though the House plan would eliminate subsidized loans, end the Grad PLUS loan program and limit Parent PLUS, experts predict that the Senate will likely end both Grad and Parent PLUS and put more aggressive limits on how much students can borrow over all.
But other aspects like Pell Grant eligibility were not discussed in Cassidy’s 2023 bill at all. So while the House would expand the Pell Grant to short-term workforce programs and limit access for the full-time Pell program, it’s unclear what, if anything, the Senate would propose. At a recent hearing, some senators appeared reticent to make deep cuts to the Pell program, though lawmakers have generally supported the concept of workforce Pell.
Over all, it’s hard to know exactly where the Senate will fall on most issues, Guillory said, especially because unlike during most sessions, it seems the House has the upper hand.
“I think the Senate would like to propose a very different bill that would require a lot of back-and-forth compromise, but they are feeling more and more pressure from the House to make fewer changes in order to get the bill passed quicker and to meet that July 4 deadline,” he said.
During his first 10 days in office, President Trump signed a plethora of executive orders to combat so-called woke ideology, reversed a long-standing immigration policy that barred ICE officers from raiding college campuses and sought to freeze federal grants that don’t align with his agenda—a move blocked by a federal court.
So far, his actions have had few immediate consequences for higher ed, and policy experts say more guidance is necessary to understand their implications. But the president has certainly created chaos and confusion, raising concern among university administrators across the country and inciting pre-emptive responses from some.
Throughout the past two weeks, higher ed experts have told Inside Higher Ed they are trying to walk the thin line between necessary caution and undue alarm.
Many of Trump’s initial actions will take time to enforce and may face intervention from the courts. And while the president has nominated former wrestling mogul Linda McMahon as secretary of education and former University of Florida vice president Penny Schwinn as deputy, neither has a confirmation hearing scheduled. Trump has yet to nominate an under secretary—the highest-ranking official overseeing colleges and universities. So it will likely be at least a few weeks, if not more, until the department reaches full capacity.
Until then, it will be run by acting secretary Denise Carter, who was already working in the department as head of the Office of Federal Student Aid, and a collection of 10 appointees who do not require confirmation. Of the 10, four have previously worked with the America First Policy Institute, a pro-Trump think tank that McMahon formed in 2021.
Though the department is not yet fully staffed, the small landing team has leaped into action. In a Jan. 23 new release, department officials said they had removed or archived hundreds of documents, dissolved councils and canceled service contracts that go against the president’s “ongoing commitment to end illegal discrimination and wasteful spending.”
✔ Empower Parents and Students Through School Choice ✔ Put an End to Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schools ✔ Combat Antisemitism on College Campuses ✔ Make Education Great Again
The president signed a record number of executive orders on his first day in office and has added to the tally nearly every day since. But the three that hold the most weight for colleges and universities concern DEI, “gender ideology” and antisemitism. Higher ed, free speech and civil rights advocates predict all three will create a significant chilling effects on campuses.
“Gender Ideology”
Signed on Inauguration Day, the first order declares that there are only two sexes, which the White House defines as “male” and “female.” The order also mandates that federal agencies use those definitions when “interpreting or applying statutes, regulations, or guidance and in all other official agency business, documents, and communications” and bans the federal funding of any program that goes against those definitions or defends transgender and nonbinary students.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
The executive order Trump signed the following day, Jan. 21, tackled all things DEI, though unlike the first order, it never defined the term. Instead, it broadly ordered agencies—including the Education Department—to “enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.”
The document instructs the department to provide guidance for colleges and universities on how to comply with the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action. It also designates all institutions that receive federal financial aid as subcontractors and says that as such, they “shall not consider race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin” in their programs or hiring decisions. Finally, it commissions the department to conduct an investigation of up to nine colleges with endowments worth more than $1 billion to scrutinize compliance.
Antisemitism
The most recent order, signed Wednesday, piggybacks on the tensions over recent campus protests and vows “forceful” measures to combat antisemitism. Its four main components define antisemitism, direct the Office for Civil Rights to reconsider closed investigations on ethnic and religious discrimination, encourage the Department of Justice to take action, and allow immigration officers to deport international student “sympathizers” who support antisemitic groups.
“Sympathizers” — so, in practice, anyone even perceived to be pro-Palestine. I cannot overstate how chilling this is for students and faculty: sweeping orders to report and suss these speakers out, opaque investigatory reviews, tethered to overbroad definitions of anti-Semitism. https://t.co/tBSWdj0ueb
DEI, LGBTQ+ and pro-Palestinian advocates, along with free speech and academic freedom groups, are pushing back against the order, and some are even encouraging colleges and universities not to comply unless pressured to do so.
But several colleges have already taken pre-emptive actions in an attempt to avoid financial penalties. For example a conference at Rutgers University about registered apprenticeships and historically Black colleges and universities was canceled last week, and Michigan State University canceled a Lunar New Year event this week. Rutgers officials, however, say calling off the conference wasn’t a university decision. Rather, it was canceled because the organizers, a group outside the university, received a stop work order from the Department of Labor.
Immigration Actions
Although less directly targeted at institutions of higher ed, the president has also taken executive actions related to immigration. He attempted (and failed) to strip the children of undocumented immigrants of birthright citizenship; rescinded guidance that prevented immigration arrests at schools, churches and colleges; and signed the Laken Riley Act into law, potentially putting the approval of some U.S. visas into the hands of state attorneys general.
The first executive action might have impacted some students’ access to in-state tuition or financial aid but would have had no direct implication on the colleges themselves. But the latter two could force university administrators to decide whether they will assist in deportation efforts and may impact the enrollment and hiring of international students and scholars.
Funding Freeze
Perhaps the most direct cause of chaos and concern among colleges, however, was the product of an internal Office of Management and Budget memo leaked Monday, which directed all federal agencies to pause thousands of grants and loans in order to conduct a “comprehensive analysis” and ensure they align with the president’s priorities.
The unprecedented guidance specifically exempted Social Security, Medicare and other programs that provide direct financial assistance to individuals. But initially many institutions feared the mandate would strip students of access to the Pell Grant and federal loans. The White House clarified that was not the case in a press conference and in follow-up memos, but colleges, universities and higher education nonprofit groups were still concerned.
ACE President Ted Mitchell: This is bad public policy, and it will have a direct impact on the funds that support students and research. The longer this goes on, the greater the damage will be. Full statement: https://t.co/Eee0IChlJo
Policy experts warned that even if temporary, lack of access to grants could impact minority-serving institutions, college preparation programs, childcare for student parents, food banks, student retention and graduation initiatives, campus hospital systems, and more. Multiple legal challenges quickly followed, and on Tuesday afternoon a federal judge in Washington blocked the freeze, just hours before it was scheduled to take effect.
Since then, the Trump administration has rescinded the original memo, although it has criticized news organizations for saying the freeze was reversed entirely. Instead, officials argued in a news release—titled “Another Day, More Lies”—that the analysis of all programs is ongoing and Trump’s order remains “in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented as the administration works to root out waste, fraud, and abuse.”
This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.
It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo.
Why? To end any confusion created by the court’s injunction.
The President’s EO’s on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.
Pauses on research grant applications through the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation that started prior to the OMB memo remain in place. The agencies are responsible for billions of dollars in research funding at universities across the country, and faculty members are still largely concerned that the stoppage will interfere with critical STEM research projects, including those that have advanced treatments for common diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s.
