The assault on higher ed goes deeper than you think
The regime is quietly working to create a permanent underclass.
PN is supported by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
President Donald Trump went after Ivy League schools with a vengeance straight out the gate during his second term, demanding hundreds of millions to settle sham investigations and restore federal funding.
Those attacks, however, are about hurting schools that Trump and his supporters views as bastions of wokeism. But in a much quieter but more widespread way, the administration and Congress have engaged in an assault on the attainability of higher education for everyone but the rich.
This is much bigger than budget cuts. It’s not merely a continuation of things like longtime GOP efforts to cut Pell Grants. It’s a far more wide-ranging assault designed to drastically limit access to higher education for lower-income and middle-class students.
Pricing out all but the rich and well-connected
One of the biggest obstacles that the administration has put in the way of prospective students is ensuring that student loan relief is essentially nonexistent and making repayment plans much more expensive. We’ve been dealing with this since before Trump retook office in 2025, as conservatives were incandescent with rage that people might see the tiniest shred of loan forgiveness.
Republicans in all three branches could not contain their enthusiasm at the prospect of foreclosing student loan relief.
The judiciary? The right-wingers on the Supreme Court struck down former President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt. Congress? North Carolina GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the Education and the Workforce Committee, was so excited by this development that she literally titled her press release “Foxx Celebrates as SCOTUS Puts Final Nail in Biden’s Student Loan Bailout Coffin.” Executive branch? Trump’s Department of Education might have broken an arm patting itself on the back for killing the SAVE repayment plan, a move that will increase monthly student loan payments for millions.
Of course, eliminating student loan relief and most repayment options has the most direct effect on people who already have loans. However, it also serves as a deterrent to future students considering taking out loans, as they know the repayment landscape awaiting them is grim, especially if they don’t land a job in their field. But for many future students, taking out loans is a necessity, and without those loans, college isn’t in the cards.
You can easily guess which groups rely the most on student loans and will be hurt by this going forward. Roughly half of all undergraduates take out some federal loans, but that spikes to 82.9 percent of Black students seeking a bachelor’s degree. Women are significantly more likely than men to take federal loans for both bachelor’s and associate’s degrees. Four years out from graduation, Black borrowers owe, on average, $25,000 more than their white counterparts.
Now, a non-evil administration might look at this disparity and conclude it’s time to figure out how to close the racial gap so that Black borrowers aren’t disproportionately affected and can still access higher education. But this is the Trump administration. As far as Trump is concerned, it’s a feature, not a bug, if this move results in fewer women and fewer Black people going to college.
In a real sort of up-is-down, 2+2=5 kind of press release, the Department of Education says that capping student loans and making repayment plans suck is actually totally a way to lower the cost of college. How? The department is a little fuzzy on that point. Somehow, eliminating an entire class of student loans and lowering loan caps will magically “help curb tuition growth by ending unlimited borrowing.”
The department reaches this conclusion by arguing that past “failed policies” have “lined the pockets of colleges and universities.” Thank god the Trump administration is here to rescue us from those rapacious schools, right?
There are actually colleges and universities that line their pockets with federal money while giving students nothing in return but a lifetime of loan payments. There are any number of scuzzy for-profit schools that use fraudulent marketing tactics while not actually helping students graduate. Previous administrations tried to rein that in, but not the Trump administration. Instead, during Trump’s first term, Robert Eitel came aboard as a senior adviser to then-Secretary Betty DeVos, despite having previously worked for one of those fraud-friendly for-profits.
Greater regulation of for-profit schools could help alleviate this problem, but the Trump administration has a different idea: How about far less oversight? The administration killed a Biden-era rule that sought to deter private colleges from gobbling up federal student loans and misusing federal funds by making the institution’s owner liable for unpaid debts. It also disappeared a $37.7 million fine on Grand Canyon University, a private Christian school that had misled students about the costs of getting a doctorate and played a little game of calling itself a nonprofit when it never fully separated from a for-profit partner.
The Education Department has targeted accreditors because it is mad that those scuzzy for-profit schools don’t meet the mark. Of course, the goal isn’t to make those schools better. The Trump administration’s solution is to loosen accreditation rules.
All of this makes for a bleak landscape for potential undergraduates, especially because the administration also slashed the amount that parents can borrow, capping Parent PLUS loans at $20,000 year.
However, undergraduates did get the smallest of mercies when the administration left their yearly borrowing caps as-is. But if those undergraduates want to get a graduate degree? Good luck affording that, sucker.
Students in graduate programs will now be limited to $20,500 per year, with a lifetime cap of $100,000. Those in “professional” graduate programs can take out $50,000 per year, capped at $200,000.
There are two things at work here, both equally bad. First, graduate school generally costs much more per year. Yes, tuition itself might come in around $20,500, but if that graduate student is fond of things like having heat and eating food, the average cost per year is about $43,000. Well-regarded master’s programs like the University of Michigan’s School of Public Policy would run you $35,000 per year for tuition alone if you are a Michigander, but $59,000 if you are not.
Well, what if you work part-time and get your master’s part-time? That could work, right?
Of course not. Under the new student loan rules, federal loans are pro-rated based on your enrollment status. Part-time student? Only part of a loan for you.
But the administration didn’t just cap graduate loans at an amount too low to be sustainable for students who don’t have rich parents who could just write a check. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act created a two-tier system and narrowed what counts as a “professional” program.
Would you like to go to graduate school to become a teacher, a nurse, or a social worker? Maybe you want to become an accountant or an architect? Train as a dental hygienist? Too bad, so sad. Those aren’t professional programs. Only 11 fields were deemed “professional” by the administration: chiropractic, clinical psychology, dentistry, law, medicine, pharmacy, podiatry, optometry, osteopathic medicine, theology, and veterinary medicine.
The administration has a complicated, pointless, pretend rationale for all this, one which weirdly seems to revolve in part around whether your degree gets you some initials after your name. No matter the fake justification, you can see how this gets incoherent pretty quickly. A nurse isn’t a professional, but a chiropractor is? An accountant isn’t a professional, but a lawyer is? A clinical social worker isn’t a professional, but a clinical psychologist is?
This isn’t just stupid. It’s short-sighted. Excluding most healthcare programs will just exacerbate the already existing shortage of trained healthcare workers, particularly in rural areas.
In some ways, this is regrettably a distinction without a difference, because even the professional caps are deliberately designed to be too low to cover professional education. The median cost for four years of medical school runs about $286,454 for public schools and $390,848 for private. The average law school tuition these days is about $46,000 per year, so a $50,000 loan cap doesn’t even begin to cover living expenses, even if it covers tuition. Over three-quarters of dental students graduate with at least $312,000 in student loan debt.
The administration also eliminated Graduate PLUS, the loan program that let graduate students borrow up to their full tuition cost if they had already exhausted their unsubsidized federal loans.
Trump and his supporters know exactly what they’re doing here: systematically foreclosing most people from going to college.
Slamming the door
What better way to create a permanent underclass than to slam the doors to higher education?
In 2024, the median income of households headed by a person with a bachelor’s degree was $132,700, way more than the $58,410 median income for those headed by someone with a high school diploma. And as far as graduate degrees, lifetime earnings increase when people obtain higher degrees.
There is one path forward for students who don’t have deep pockets: catastrophic private loan debts, and private lenders are hyped. Navient and SoFi have already told Congress they are gearing up for more demand. But those private lenders require good credit scores, which is not a factor in getting federal student loans. If you do manage to snag a private loan, have fun with interest rates as high as 23 percent and having your loan eventually sold to a private equity firm.
None of what the administration has done here makes higher education more attainable for anyone, save possibly for ensuring that a few more C+ Augustus types like George W. Bush or, dare we say, Donald J. Trump (or his children) might land a spot that would otherwise have gone to someone actually qualified.
Rich failsons and faildaughters will always have a place in higher education as long as they or their parents can write a massive check or donate a building or something. For everyone else, the administration is doing its level best to make sure they never get ahead.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
Grateful that my daughter graduates from college this morning. IU has also eliminated/consolidated the type of degress offered.
Skull & Bones for me, not thee?