Op-Ed
By Frederick M. Hess
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal
March 28, 2025
The higher-education landscape has been radically transformed in recent months. Yet, for all the excited headlines and frenetic chatter, I’m not sure that college presidents, trustees, and alumni groups fully appreciate the implications. They know the Overton window has shifted, but not by how much or what this could mean for efforts to repair campus priorities, routines, and culture.
For good or ill, what’s unfolding truly is something new. We’ve never before seen a Republican presidential administration seek to aggressively drive change in higher education. In 2017, the first Trump administration didn’t have the personnel, playbook, or mindset. This time around? There are remarkable opportunities, resources, and backstops for reform-minded college leaders.
A Little Historical Context
The federal higher-education apparatus that’s so familiar today was far more modest under Reagan or George H.W. Bush. While the federal role expanded significantly during the 1990s, with new lending programs, tax credits, and Clintonite initiatives, the George W. Bush administration focused its education efforts on K-12. (Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’ second-term Commission on the Future of Higher Education was laudable but didn’t ultimately amount to much.)
The modern era of turbocharged federal involvement in higher education really commenced during the Obama years. The Obama team ran wild: weaponizing Title IX, devising onerous new “gainful employment” regulations for for-profit (and only for-profit) colleges, making Washington the nation’s sole source of college lending, and unilaterally rewriting the terms of the brand-new Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
During Trump’s first term, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos chose not to respond in kind. Instead, she mostly sought to restore the traditional order. A principled Reagan conservative focused on expanding K-12 school choice, DeVos didn’t have much of a playbook or mandate for higher education, other than trying to undo some of the Obama-era excesses.
Well, the Biden administration revived that Obama adventurism, and then some. It pursued flagrantly illegal loan-“forgiveness” schemes, conducted witch hunts against for-profit colleges, ordered colleges to embrace transgender orthodoxy, and endorsed race-conscious practices—all while turning a blind eye to the ugly spectacle of campus antisemitism, bungling congressionally mandated FAFSA simplification, and allowing the federal student-aid operation to fall into disrepair.
A New Federal Landscape
Forget what happened during Trump 1.0. Things are very different this time around. Those calling the shots have concluded that Democrats are going to keep running the Obama-Biden playbook, so the only recourse is to respond in kind—that anything else is akin to unilateral disarmament. Coupled with the emergence of new advocacy organizations; a raft of red-state model legislation; and a deep bench of battle-hardened vets from fights over DEI, gender identity, campus speech, antisemitism, and student lending, this has meant that Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has inherited a deep roster and an aggressive game plan.
Meanwhile, the higher-education community is on its heels. It has precious few relationships with the White House, congressional Republicans, or senior department officials. Thus, it’s been on the outside looking in as Trump has slashed overhead rates for NIH grants, sanctioned Columbia University for failing to address antisemitism, and eyeballed further action against dozens of institutions. The administration has made clear that it’ll interpret Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard as a license to investigate and discipline institutions for a range of race-based practices. A push to overhaul accreditation is coming. And the Hill is poised to supersize the endowment tax and impose key elements of the House’s College Cost Reduction Act (such as risk-sharing and institutional accountability) via reconciliation.
The bottom line? Colleges are in the crosshairs. And whether they’re “public” or “private,” colleges have vast sums of public dollars on the line. From 2018 to 2022, Ivy League institutions alone collected $33 billion in federal grants and contracts. Stand Columbia calculated late last year that Columbia is at risk of losing up to $3.5 billion a year between federal grants, student aid, visas, Medicare, Medicaid, and the endowment tax. These are the sums potentially in play at “private” institutions.
That all said, much is still unclear as litigation unfolds and political dynamics evolve. While the administration has laid down big markers, what’ll ultimately matter is how its policies get translated into practice, how skillfully they’re executed, and how the legal challenges play out. That means we won’t really have clarity on Trump 2.0’s higher-education legacy for a long while yet.
That’s Opportunity Knocking
In the meantime, change-minded leaders have an extraordinary opportunity. Those fighting for free inquiry, merit, and heterodoxy in higher education have grown accustomed to rowing against the tide. Well, the might of the federal government has just switched sides, and it will be demanding change rather than fortifying the status quo. Here are five suggestions for making the most of this opportunity.
Institutionalize a commitment to free inquiry. It just got a lot easier to adopt institutional neutrality or to end thought-policing practices such as “Bias Response Teams” and DEI statements—because failure to do so means that federal funds could otherwise be at risk. The passion play at Columbia, for instance, changes the cost-benefit calculation for those who’ve sat on their hands as ideologues have stymied discourse and trampled academic norms. College leaders have the leeway and impetus to clarify and enforce “time and place” policies governing campus demonstrations. The threat of federal investigation is also an excuse to finally get around to scrutinizing those policies and practices—in academic departments or the campus bureaucracy—that promote dogmatic groupthink rather than inclusive inquiry.
Restore fair admissions. At selective institutions, the admissions process is an opaque web of scandalous conduct and self-serving preferences. For instance, the very colleges that warned about the devastating consequences of the Supreme Court’s striking down race-conscious admissions saw no impact on their incoming freshman classes—and the lack of transparency means no one has any visibility into why that might be. This has fueled suspicions that these colleges are secretly flouting the law. Meanwhile, litigation has shone a spotlight on the corruption that permeates selective admissions, while the widespread abandonment of the SAT and ACT created more occasion for mischief. Now, federal enforcement of the SFFA v. Harvard ruling is creating pressure for change and a chance for institutions to embrace academic merit, transparency, and race-blind policies.
Get students back to work. College students spend half as much time on their studies as their counterparts did a generation or two ago. While it’s ineffective just to tell faculty to “assign more work” or students to “study harder,” those seeking to raise expectations can appeal to the federal Higher Education Act. After all, to be eligible for aid under the HEA, colleges agree to honor the federal definition of a credit-hour: at least “one hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out-of-class student work each week.” That means a four-course load should equal a minimum of 36 hours of student work each week. Campus leaders should beat the Trump administration to the punch and seize on this as a long-overdue opportunity to elevate workload expectations, ramp up course requirements, strengthen grading policies, and boost the amount of time faculty actually devote to teaching and mentoring their charges.
Focus on outcomes. Colleges face persistent concerns about cost, completion rates, and students’ post-college employment. The pressure to act will take on added urgency if (as is likely) congressional Republicans include risk-sharing and program-accountability proposals in this year’s big reconciliation bill. This gives campus leaders good cause to examine their graduation rates and workforce outcomes. If boards and college officials don’t regularly look at those data, they should. And if they do, it’s time to make clear how colleges are using those numbers to ensure the readiness of incoming students, reduce the need for remedial coursework, address low-quality or ineffectual programs, and improve the caliber of teaching and student supports.
Streamline staffing. Campus staffing has been gradually expanding for decades, with little interruption or examination. Moves to slash “indirect” costs on NIH grants, revamp the accreditation process, and dramatically boost the endowment tax all promise a less hospitable environment. Institutions that demonstrate a commitment to paring staff and reducing operational overhead will be in a stronger position to advocate for themselves. Higher education may be complex and labor-intensive, but unpack the numbers. Nationally, growth in administrative staff has outpaced the growth of the student body and full-time faculty. Is that true at your institution? If so, why? Seek out places where prioritization or automation make it possible to do better. Leaders may finally have the leverage to explore measures that would previously have been deemed impractical or unnecessary.
Just six months ago, much of this would’ve meant that a hard-charging college leader was trying to paddle his or her way up a waterfall. Now? Suddenly, such a leader is rowing with the tide. That’s an extraordinary shift, one that’s caught many unawares. The challenge is to recognize it and take full advantage.