Tag: Trumps

  • Trump’s OCR steps up pace for dismissing complaints

    Trump’s OCR steps up pace for dismissing complaints

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    As public complaints continue to pile up at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the agency is dismissing them at a pace that is alarming former OCR employees.

    From the time of the agency’s reduction in force on March 11 until June 27, OCR dismissed 3,424 complaints, according to court documents filed by Rachel Oglesby, who has been chief of staff at the Education Department since January. By comparison, the office dismissed 2,527 cases in the three-month period between November 2024 and January 2025 under the Biden administration, according to Catherine Lhamon, who led the agency under the last presidency. 

    A similar contrast can be seen in the agency’s other benchmarks. 

    The Trump administration’s OCR opened 309 complaints for investigation in the March-June period, compared to 674 during the Biden administration’s final three months between Nov. 1, 2024, and Jan. 1, 2025. The Trump Education Department recently resolved 290 complaints with voluntary agreements, OCR-mediated settlements and technical assistance, while Lhamon said the previous administration, around the same three-month period, resolved 595 through mediation or voluntary resolution alone. 

    The contrast “reflects a shocking diminution of work output from the office,” Lhamon said by text message on Monday.  

    “A dismissal rate this high suggests a fundamental shift in how OCR is triaging and processing complaints,” said Jackie Gharapour Wernz, an education civil rights attorney who worked for the OCR under the Obama and first Trump administrations. “It raises serious concerns about whether civil rights issues are being meaningfully evaluated and whether the agency is adhering to its own case processing manual and relevant law in dismissing cases.”

    An Education Department spokesperson, however, strongly defended the agency’s work.

    In dismissing complaints, OCR is taking actions according to federal law, regulations and the OCR case processing manual, which outlines the steps the agency must take to process complaints, said Julie Hartman, an Education Department spokesperson, in an email to K-12 Dive late Monday. 

    Hartman also pointed to the agency’s work with the Department of Justice, which it partnered with to expedite climbing sex-based discrimination claims.

    “OCR has taken unprecedented steps to streamline its functions according to demand,” said Hartman. “OCR’s daily accomplishments under the Trump Administration disprove the rampant fear-mongering by the media” and makes clear that “OCR is vigorously upholding its responsibilities to protect all Americans’ civil rights.”

    The high number of case dismissals comes after the department let go of hundreds of its OCR employees and shut down seven of its 12 regional offices. The moves prompted concerns from civil rights advocates that the agency wouldn’t be able to fulfill its duties to protect students — especially those from traditionally marginalized groups. 

    Those layoffs came amid historic high OCR caseloads, which had prompted the Biden administration to advocate for increased funding to beef up the office’s investigative staff. Lhamon at the time had said investigators were juggling “untenable” caseloads of upward of 40 cases per person.

    Since the mass layoffs, existing investigative staff have been juggling nearly double that workload. And the Trump administration has proposed slashing the office’s funding for fiscal year 2026 by $49 million compared to the $140 million appropriated in 2024.

    The concerns led to a lawsuit, Victim Rights Law Center v. U.S. Department of Education, filed by Victim Rights Law Center. In a ruling last month, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun said the mass terminations and closure of multiple OCR offices meant the office had “abdicated its enforcement duties” and ordered that OCR be restored to its status quo. 

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  • Penn Gets Funding Back After Agreeing to Trump’s Demands

    Penn Gets Funding Back After Agreeing to Trump’s Demands

    Penn had $175 million in federal funding frozen in March.

    Kyle Mazza/Anadolu/Getty Images

    After the University of Pennsylvania agreed to strip a trans athlete’s awards and comply with the Trump administration’s other demands, the Education Department said Wednesday that the university will get its federal funding back, Bloomberg News and CNN reported.

    The administration had paused $175 million in funding to the university because Penn “infamously permitted a male to compete on its women’s swimming team,” an official said in March. After the funding freeze, the Education Department said in April that Penn violated Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 by allowing Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, to compete on Penn’s women’s swimming team in 2022. (That decision followed NCAA policies at the time as well as Title IX.)

    In order to resolve the civil rights investigation, Penn had to agree to three demands including “restoring” swimming awards and honors that were “misappropriated” to trans women athletes and apologizing to cisgender women who competed with Thomas. Penn officials said this week that the agreement ends “an investigation that, if unresolved, could have had significant and lasting implications for the University of Pennsylvania.”

    After announcing the agreement, Penn quickly began complying. CNN reported that Thomas is no longer included on a list of women’s swimming records. The document now notes, according to CNN, that “competing under eligibility rules in effect at the time, Lia Thomas set program records in the 100, 200 and 500 freestyle during the 2021–22 season.”

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  • Trump’s $16M win over ’60 Minutes’ edit sends chilling message to journalists everywhere

    Trump’s $16M win over ’60 Minutes’ edit sends chilling message to journalists everywhere

    On Tuesday, Paramount announced an agreement to pay $16 million to settle President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris.

    The following can be attributed to FIRE attorney Bob Corn-Revere, who filed a comment to the FCC calling its investigation into the Harris interview a “political stunt”:

    A cold wind just blew through every newsroom this morning. Paramount may have closed this case, but it opened the door to the idea that the government should be the media’s editor-in-chief.

    Trump has a long history of filing frivolous lawsuits to intimidate critics, and his targets have a long history of capitulating to avoid legal headaches. And here, he had the added tactic of using the FCC and its review of the multi-billion dollar Paramount-Skydance merger to bring added pressure to bear.

    Behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated. This settlement will only embolden the president to continue his flurry of baseless lawsuits against the press — and against the American people’s ability to hear the news free from government intrusion.

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  • Penn Agrees to Trump’s Demands, Will Strip Trans Athlete’s Awards

    Penn Agrees to Trump’s Demands, Will Strip Trans Athlete’s Awards

    The university plans to “apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.”

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Kyle Mazza/Anadolu/Getty Images | Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

    The University of Pennsylvania will concede to the Trump administration’s demands that the university “restore” swimming awards—and send apology notes—to female competitors who lost to a trans athlete, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced Tuesday.

    The department previously found that Penn violated Title IX for allowing a trans woman to compete on a women’s sports team—presumably referring to Lia Thomas, who rose to national attention while competing on Penn’s women’s swim team three years ago.

    To end the investigation, the administration demanded in part that Penn apologize to cisgender women whose swimming awards and honors were “misappropriated” to trans women athletes. Multiple Title IX advocates lambasted the department’s demands, arguing the agency was misusing the landmark gender-equity law to punish trans students and their institutions.

    Penn is one of multiple higher education institutions and K–12 schools that the administration has targeted for allowing trans women to play on women’s sports teams, in accordance with NCAA policy at the time. But it appears to be the first institution of higher education to reach a resolution agreement over the issue since Trump took office.

    “Penn remains committed to fostering a community that is welcoming, inclusive, and open to all students, faculty, and staff,” Penn president J. Larry Jameson said in a statement Tuesday. “I share this commitment, just as I remain dedicated to preserving and advancing the University’s vital and enduring mission. We have now brought to a close an investigation that, if unresolved, could have had significant and lasting implications for the University of Pennsylvania.”

    Separate from the department’s investigation, the White House paused $175 million in funding to the university because Penn “infamously permitted a male to compete on its women’s swimming team,” an official said in March. It’s not clear if the funding will be restored or when.

    Jameson stressed in the statement that the university was in compliance with Title IX and all NCAA guidelines at the time that Thomas swam for Penn’s women’s team from 2021 to 2022. But, he said, “we acknowledge that some student-athletes were disadvantaged by these rules. We recognize this and will apologize to those who experienced a competitive disadvantage or experienced anxiety because of the policies in effect at the time.”

    Title IX advocates have emphasized that trans athletes are not, in fact, explicitly forbidden from playing on women’s sports teams under the current Title IX regulations, which were finalized under the previous Trump administration and are the same ones that were in effect when Thomas was competing.

    In addition to stripping Thomas’s awards, Penn agreed to ED’s demands to make a public statement that people assigned male at birth are not allowed in Penn’s women’s athletic programs or its bathrooms and locker rooms, according to the department’s news release. The institution must also promise to adopt “biology-based definitions for the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ pursuant to Title IX” and Trump’s February executive order banning trans athletes from playing on the team that aligns with their gender.

    That statement also went up Tuesday. In it, the university promised to follow Trump’s trans athlete ban, as well as the executive order he signed that withdraws federal recognition of transgender people, with regard to women’s athletics.

    In the department’s announcement, Paula Scanlan, one of Thomas’s former teammates who has since led the crusade against trans women athletes, said she was “deeply grateful to the Trump Administration for refusing to back down on protecting women and girls and restoring our rightful accolades. I am also pleased that my alma mater has finally agreed to take not only the lawful path, but the honorable one.”

    Shiwali Patel, senior director of safe and inclusive schools at the National Women’s Law Center, criticized the agreement in a statement Tuesday as a “devastating and shameful outcome.” She blamed Penn’s “utter failure” as well as the department’s “continued manipulation of Title IX.”

    “The Trump administration’s attacks on civil rights protections, including Title IX, and obsession with undermining bodily autonomy is the real harm to women and girls, unlike transgender athletes who want to compete in sports alongside their peers and pose no threat to women’s sports, contrary to Trump’s lies,” Patel said in the statement. “In fact, their inclusion benefits all women and girls. We will continue to support Lia Thomas and her peers and their right to compete.”

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  • Higher Education Inquirer : Trump’s Neg Reg to Weaponize Debt Is Here

    Higher Education Inquirer : Trump’s Neg Reg to Weaponize Debt Is Here

    Back in March, President Trump announced an executive order to revoke Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) eligibility from public service workers employed at organizations engaged in work opposed by his administration—a blatantly illegal attempt to use public service workers as pawns in his right-wing political project to destroy civil society.

    Shortly after, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) announced its plans for a Negotiated Rulemaking (Neg Reg) process to put these dangerous policies into the PSLF regulations. Today marked Day 1 of the only 3-day committee session for this Neg Reg—and ED has already doubled down on this campaign to weaponize debt to silence speech that does not align with President Trump’s MAGA playbook:

    • ED’s first draft of regulatory language, to put it bluntly, serves Trump’s fascist agenda. It empowers Secretary McMahon to block all government workers with student debt, including first responders, social workers, and teachers, from receiving PSLF in retaliation if she decides that a local or state government policy conflicts with her extreme, right-wing views on immigration, civil rights, or free speech. More on that here.
    • ED excluded borrowers and key experts from the rulemaking committee.
    • Despite overwhelming public demand for stronger borrower protections, discussions focused on weaponizing and restricting critical relief programs like PSLF.

    Session Summary:

    • The day started off on a bad foot. Abby Shafroth, alternate negotiator for the Consumers, Legal Aid, and Civil Rights seat, requested to add a seat dedicated to civil rights because the proposed changes to PSLF directly affect the ability of marginalized communities to access higher education. Civil rights advocates Chavis Jones and Jaylon Herbin were present and ready to join the table—but ED denied the request.
    • After this inaugural miscarriage of justice, most of the day was spent running through definitions outlined in ED’s proposed language. Does ED actually have the authority to exclude certain groups from PSLF when Congress has already specially outlined some but not others? Hint: they don’t. Who would be excluded from PSLF based on “illegal activities”? Would military members be excluded if the military were found in violation of state tort laws? If a city’s Health Department were specifically found guilty of substantial illegal activity, would all workers employed by that entire city be disqualified?
    • Put plainly: ED did not have sufficient answers for these questions. At times, ED chastised negotiators for asking questions at “inappropriate times.” Other times, ED assured folks that everything would become clear once the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking language was issued. ED also refused to provide any examples of application of, or answer any “hypothetical” questions about their proposal. In our opinion, if you’re going to put forth a prospective rulemaking to decide the fate of millions of people, you should at the very least be able to explain how it would work.

    Missing From the Table:

    ED refused to seat Satra D. Taylor, a student loan borrower, Black woman, and SBPC fellow, who wants to know:

    “Why didn’t ED include anyone who would be most affected by these policy changes to negotiate—not a single public service worker, civil rights advocate, first responder, social worker, or teacher? Also, what is ED’s legal authority to propose these regulations in the first place? Congress defined in law that government and 501(c)(3) non-profit employers are categorically eligible for PSLF, and yet ED’s current proposal would exclude government and non-profit employers that it determines no longer engage in public service. This is a foundational issue for the Neg Reg, and ED refused to provide a clear answer.”

    Public Comment Mic  Drops:

    Our legal director, Winston Berkman-Breen (also excluded from the committee), called out ED during the public comment period:

    “Although this is not a serious proposal, it is a dangerous one. If the Administration has true concerns about whether employers across the country are engaged in unlawful activity, its law enforcement offices could conduct thorough investigations and then allow courts to determine the merits of those allegations. Instead, it has proposed letting the Secretary of Education police American society.”

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  • Trump’s giant budget-busting, Medicaid-shattering, shafting-the-poor-and-working-class, making-the-rich-even richer bill is a travesty. (Robert Reich)

    Trump’s giant budget-busting, Medicaid-shattering, shafting-the-poor-and-working-class, making-the-rich-even richer bill is a travesty. (Robert Reich)

    Friends,

    One of my objectives in this daily letter is to equip you with the facts you need. As the Senate approaches a vote on Trump’s giant “big beautiful” tax and budget bill, I want to be as clear as possible about it.

    First, it will cost a budget-busting $3.3 trillion. According to new estimates by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the Senate bill would add at least $3.3 trillion to the already out-of-control national debt over a decade. That’s nearly $1 trillion more than the House-passed version.

    Second, it will cause 11.8 million Americans to lose their health coverage. The Senate version would result in even deeper cuts in federal support for health insurance, and more Americans losing coverage, than the House version. Federal spending on Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare would be reduced by more than $1.1 trillion over that period — with more than $1 trillion of those cuts coming from Medicaid alone.

    All told, this will leave 11.8 million more Americans uninsured by 2034.

    Third, it will cut food stamps and other nutrition assistance for lower-income Americans. According to the CBO, the legislation will not only cut Medicaid by about 18 percent, it will cut Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) by roughly 20 percent. These cuts will constitute the most dramatic reductions in safety net spending in modern U.S. history.

    Fourth, it will overwhelmingly benefit the rich and big corporations. The CBO projects that those in the bottom tenth of the income distribution will end up poorer, while the top tenth will be substantially richer.

    The bill also makes permanent the business tax cuts from the 2017 legislation, further benefiting the largest corporations.

    Finally, it will not help the economy. Trickle-down economics has proven to be a cruel hoax. Over the last 50 years, Congress has passed four major bills that cut taxes: the 1981 Reagan tax cuts; the 2001 and 2003 George W. Bush tax cuts; and the 2017 Trump tax cuts. Each time, the same three arguments were made in favor of the tax cuts: (1) They’d pay for themselves. (2) They’d supercharge economic growth. (3) They’d benefit everyone.

    All have been proven wrong. Here’s what in fact happened:

    (1) Did the tax cuts pay for themselves?

    No. Rather than paying for themselves, the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts each significantly increased the federal deficit. In total, those tax cuts have added over $10.4 trillion to the federal deficit since 1981 compared to the Congressional Budget Office’s baseline projections.

    (2) Did the tax cuts supercharge economic growth, create millions of jobs, and raise wages?

    Absolutely not. Rather than growing, the economy shrank after passage of the Reagan tax cuts. And unemployment surged to over 10 percent. Following the enactment of the Bush and Trump tax cuts, the economy did grow a bit, but at rates much lower than their supporters predicted.

    (3) Did the tax cuts benefit everyone?

    Heavens, no. Rather than benefiting everyone, the savings from the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts flowed mainly to the richest Americans. The average tax cut for households in the top 1 percent under the Reagan tax cut ($47,147) was 68 times larger than the average tax cut for middle-class households ($695). The Bush tax cut for households in the top 1 percent was 16 times larger than the average tax cut for the middle class. The 2017 Trump tax cut for households in the top 1 percent was 36 times larger than for middle-class households.

    Summary: If the bill now being considered by the Senate is enacted, 11.8 million Americans will lose their health insurance, millions will fall into poverty, and the national debt will increase by $3.3 trillion, all to provide a major tax cut mainly to the rich and big corporations. There is no justification for this.

    Never before in the history of this nation has such a large redistribution of income been directed upward, for no reason at all. It comes at a time of near-record inequalities of income and wealth.

    What you can do: Call your senators and tell them to vote “no” on this calamitous tax and budget bill. Congressional switchboard: (202) 224-3121.

    Beyond this, help ensure that senators who vote in favor of this monstrosity are booted out of the Senate as soon as they’re up for reelection.

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  • Trump’s Department of Education Continues to Drag Feet on Borrower Defense

    Trump’s Department of Education Continues to Drag Feet on Borrower Defense

    On June 26th, the US Department of Education was brought to the Ninth District Court (and Judge Alsup) to show how many the Borrower Defense to Repayment cases that have been resolved per court order.  While we wait for a transcript of the latest episode of Sweet v McMahon, what we can tell you is that the Trump government continues to drag its feet in paying back debtors who have been defrauded.  

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  • University of Virginia President Resigns After Trump’s Demands

    University of Virginia President Resigns After Trump’s Demands

    This is a developing story and will be updated.

    The University of Virginia president James Ryan said Friday he was resigning after the Justice Department demanded he step down.

    “To make a long story short, I am inclined to fight for what I believe in, and I believe deeply in this university,” Ryan wrote in a letter to the campus community. “But I cannot make a unilateral decision to fight the federal government in order to save my own job. To do so would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.”

    The Justice Department has for months been quietly investigating whether the Virginia flagship complied with President Donald Trump’s order banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The university’s Board of Visitors voted to dissolve its DEI office in March, but multiple conservative alumni groups and legal entities complained that Ryan failed to eliminate DEI from all corners of campus. In many cases, critics argue that the university simply changed the names of programs but maintained their core function. 

    The New York Times first reported on the resignation and the Justice Department’s demand Thursday evening.

    Ryan wrote that he had planned to step down next spring for reasons separate from the investigation; he didn’t say when his resignation would take effect.

    “While there are very important principles at play here, I would at a very practical level be fighting to keep my job for one more year while knowingly and willingly sacrificing others in this community,” he wrote.

    Ryan took over at UVA in August 2018, steering the institution through the aftermath of the deadly white supremacist rally in August 2017, the pandemic and the racial reckoning in 2020. He also cracked down on pro-Palestinian protesters last spring—a move that Republicans in the state backed but students and faculty condemned. Ryan also embraced institutional neutrality and sought to make UVA a leader in the study of democracy.

    Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement Friday that the Justice Department welcomes “leadership changes in higher education that signal institutional commitment to our nation’s venerable federal civil rights laws.”

    DOJ hasn’t said publicly what laws UVA allegedly violated, though Dhillon’s statement noted that the agency “has a zero-tolerance policy toward illegal discrimination in publicly-funded universities.”

    From the early days of his second term, Trump has made a point of dragging elite, largely Ivy League institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities into the national spotlight and berating them for their supposed liberal ideologies and alleged antisemitism. But this investigation of UVA, a public institution in a state led by a Republican, represents a new front in the administration’s  war against higher education—and so far Trump is succeeding.

    Brendan Cantwell, a higher education professor at Michigan State University, said Ryan’s resignation is a “major blow” to the independence of American institutions. 

    “It is a sign that major public research universities are substantially controlled by a political party whose primary goal is to further its partisan agenda and will stop at nothing to bring the independence of higher education to heel,” he told Inside Higher Ed. “It undercuts both the integrity of academic communities as self-governing based on the judgment of expert professionals and the traditional accountability that public universities have to their states via formal and established governance mechanisms.”

    Legal experts who spoke with the Times struggled to recall other instances when the federal government has demanded a university board fire the chief official, saying it has only been done in the past when concerning corporate criminal cases.

    Robert Kelchen, an education policy professor at the University of Tennessee, noted that Ryan’s resignation portends a future in which all public university presidents must conform to the political views of their state’s leadership or be kicked out of office.

    “Trump pushing James Ryan to resign at UVA is important, but it happened in part because VA’s governor is also Republican,” Kelchen wrote on BlueSky. 

    Virginia’s two senators, who are both Democrats, said in a joint statement that the demand for Ryan to resign “is a mistake that hurts Virginia’s future.”

    “It is outrageous that officials in the Trump Department of Justice demanded the Commonwealth’s globally recognized university remove President Ryan—a strong leader who has served UVA honorably and moved the university forward—over ridiculous ‘culture war’ traps,” said Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner. “Decisions about UVA’s leadership belong solely to its Board of Visitors, in keeping with Virginia’s well-established and respected system of higher education governance.”

    Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin thanked Ryan for his service to UVA in a statement Friday afternoon. Youngkin, a Republican, has appointed a majority of the university’s board members.

    “The Board of Visitors has my complete confidence as they swiftly appoint a strong interim steward, and undertake the national search for a transformational leader that can take Mr. Jefferson’s university into the next decade and beyond,” he said in the statement.

    A Quiet Inquiry

    While the administration’s campaign against Harvard and Columbia mostly played out in public, the UVA investigation was more quiet. The DOJ didn’t send press releases about UVA or make public hay about its demands. Instead it sent letters to the university about its inquiry and findings.

    On April 28, DOJ cited complaints about how the university was handling its DEI programs, according to the Times and the Charlottesville Daily Progress. Initially the letter set a compliance deadline of May 2. That was then extended to May 30.

    After that, the DOJ received multiple complaint letters from groups like American First Legal, a legal advocacy group founded by Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, suggesting the university had yet to comply.

    In a final letter, dated June 17, the department laid out its demands yet again, this time noting the complaints it had received from groups like AFL and saying that the university needed to make swift changes or pay the price, the Times reported. The government’s lawyers, which include several UVA alumni, found that UVA considered race in its admissions and in deciding other student benefits, according to the Times.

    “Time is running short, and the department’s patience is wearing thin,” the letter said. 

    Neither the White House nor the DOJ have released a public statement about their demands of UVA or Ryan’s resignation. 

    The university said in a statement Friday morning that it is “committed to complying with all federal laws and has been cooperating with the Department of Justice in the ongoing inquiries.” But it has not said anything further since Ryan announced his departure.

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  • Federal Judge Won’t Block Trump’s Cuts to IES

    Federal Judge Won’t Block Trump’s Cuts to IES

    A federal district judge declined to issue an injunction that would block the Trump administration’s recent cuts to staff and contracts at the Institute of Education Sciences—an agency charged with collecting and analyzing data about both K–12 and higher education.

    In an opinion released last week, Maryland judge Stephanie A. Gallagher acknowledged that the new administration has terminated 90 percent of the agency’s staff and therefore IES “is not doing a number of tasks Congress requires of it.” Gallagher, a Trump appointee, also empathized with the two education research associations that filed the lawsuit—the American Educational Research Association and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness—saying she trusts that not receiving the data they expected from IES “will harm them.” 

    But that does not mean the plaintiffs have a strong enough case to stop the Trump administration from continuing to dismantle the agency. Gallagher said that the associations’ arguments are at times too broad or too narrow, that they lump together numerous cuts—some of which may be justified—and that they include “factual discrepancies” and improper interpretations of “no fewer than a dozen statutes.” 

    Over all, she said, “They have not shown they are entitled to this sort of extraordinary relief.”

    “These Plaintiffs have alleged, and have provided some evidence to support, a troubling pattern of conduct at IES,” Gallagher wrote. “But because they cannot make the requisite showings on the preliminary injunction factors, and in particular have not shown they have standing to seek the relief they are asking for, their motion for a preliminary injunction must be denied.”

    This ruling is not final, however, and “should not be taken as predictive of this Court’s ultimate decision,” Gallagher added.

    But the Education Department is already walking back some of the IES cuts, according to court filings in the lawsuit that The Hechinger Report first reported on. Department officials disclosed earlier this month that they are reinstating at least 20 out of the 101 contracts that were terminated. The restored contracts include one that requires the National Center for Education Statistics to participate in the Program for International Student Assessment. (According to Hechinger, Congress mandates that the department take part in international assessments.)

    SREE president Elizabeth Tipton told Hechinger that the limited reversal was “upsetting” and not enough to fix the problem.

    “They’re trying to make IES as small as they possibly can,” she said.

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  • Risk-Sharing: Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — Implications for UK Higher Education

    Risk-Sharing: Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — Implications for UK Higher Education

    • By Peter Ainsworth, a consultant and writer on higher education finance, known for advocating structural reform that aligns university incentives with real-world graduate outcomes.

    Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” may sound absurd to British ears, but beneath the “very stable genius’s” promotional gloss lies a legislative change designed to reset the relationship between the US Higher Education sector and the state. The bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on 22 May 2025, includes the Student Success and Taxpayer Savings Act (SSTSA) – which, if passed by the Senate, would be the world’s first statutory implementation of institutional risk-sharing in student loans.

    Historically, in both the US and UK, universities have been financially rewarded for their enrollment of students rather than for the practical benefits delivered to their customers. Success arises out of customer acquisition rather than service value-add. Students take out government-backed loans to pay tuition; institutions receive the money upfront regardless of whether or not their degrees lead to economic success. The result is a moral hazard: an incentive (payment) structure for universities that is not aligned with the employability gain that students want and taxpayers need. Systematically falling graduate premiums on both sides of the Atlantic reflect the impact of insulating universities from the employment risk their students face in a rapidly changing economy.

    The American reform seeks to realign incentives to better align risks and objectives. It introduces an Earnings-to-Price Ratio (EPR):

    EPR = (Median Value-Added Earnings) / (Median Total Price)

    Institutions with low EPRs – indicating poor graduate earnings relative to costs – will face a financial penalty in the form of an invoice from the US Treasury to cover the estimated student loan losses for the relevant cohort. If the Senate passes the reform, US universities will have a powerful incentive to transform their offer to ensure meaningful real-world earnings gains for their students.

    The SSTSA is an advance on the existing Cohort Default Rate (CDR) system, which merely threatened to deny access to federal loans to students of institutions with very high default rates. But there was no direct financial risk. Congress deemed it ineffective and so now proposes something more market-oriented.

    Meanwhile, the UK is two steps behind, only now looking to implement a version of the CDR model which the US is already moving away from. A recent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) paper proposes regulating universities based on early-career graduate earnings proxies – like the CDR it is recognising the importance of career earnings outcomes but measuring them indirectly and using regulatory sanction rather than financial cost as the stick. The IFS proposes to use earnings in a three- to five-year window post-graduation to drive regulatory response. Like the CDR’s reliance on a technical definition of default, this short, near-term window will create heavily biased statistics, diminishing the value of professions with delayed earnings trajectories such as medicine and academia.

    Further, the IFS proposes to exclude from consideration graduates with very low earnings. This favours institutions whose graduates earn just below an arbitrary threshold level. They also rely on UK tax data which omits emigrants, undervaluing universities that succeed in preparing graduates for global careers.

    As Friedrich Hayek argued, complex systems cannot be centrally managed through proxies and aggregated metrics. Graduate career trajectories are dynamic, diverse, and unpredictable — precisely the kind of outcomes that defy simple measurement. Accepting that lifetime earnings are the relevant metric leads inevitably to the conclusion that no bureaucratic proxy will suffice.

    There is a cleaner alternative. Universities could be required to issue the loans themselves, something that Buckingham, for example, already does on a small scale. Where needed, to support cash flow, the government could lend to institutions rather than students. This would internalise the financial risk: institutions would have a direct, long-term stake in the earnings success of their graduates. Universities could be freed to set fees and loan terms based on the economic value they expect to deliver and would be incentivised to provide ongoing support — career services, retraining, alumni engagement — to minimise loan defaults over the full life of the loan.

    Such a model also addresses bigger challenges facing the higher education sector. Edward Peck, the new Chair of the Office for Students, recently argued that AI is making traditional assessment ineffective and universities must move from testing what students know to what they can do. Meanwhile, Diana Beech and André Spicer, writing for HEPI, have highlighted that universities now employ an average of 17.6 staff solely to handle regulatory compliance and warned that regulation is “multiplying and becoming less predictable.” In this context, risk-sharing offers a route back to institutional autonomy: tying funding to real-world success rather than the IFS’s proposal for even more bureaucratic box-ticking.

    Finally, political and fiscal realities support this innovation. A shift to institutionally issued loans would remove the student loan portfolio from the government’s balance sheet, reducing annual write-downs by around £15bn per annum – a present value of around £300bn. That would go a long way to address the various fiscal challenges faced by the Labour government. With less bureaucratic interference, more strategic freedom, and appropriate incentives, the sector should be able to make student loans pay, ensuring a sustainable and prosperous future, and letting British universities blow past their American rivals like nobody’s seen before.

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