No matter which party wins the White House and control of Congress this week, colleges and universities are likely in store for more scrutiny and upheaval.
As higher education finds itself in the political crosshairs and faces greater skepticism from lawmakers and the public, this election could reshape the landscape over the next four years and beyond. Will students taking out loans have to repay them completely? How will sexual assault cases be adjudicated? Will nonprofit colleges be investigated or accredited? That will become clear on Tuesday night—or sometime between now and Jan. 6.
Neither political party is interested in a hands-off approach to higher education, and recent elections have meant the undoing or rewriting of significant federal regulations that dictate how colleges should be run, leading to regulatory whiplash. Unless Vice President Kamala Harris or former president Donald Trump has a united Congress with sizable majorities, which is unlikely, they’ll have to make policy changes that aren’t law and will be subject to reversal by their successor in four (or eight) years. And they’ll likely be locked up in court on those policies after challenges from the other side, which is what happened (and is still happening) to President Biden’s efforts to provide mass debt relief and expand Title IX protections to transgender students.
Trump has called for abolishing the Education Department, promised to fire accreditors and said he would reclaim colleges from the “radical left.” His running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, has called professors the “enemy.” (The president of the American Association of University Professors has since deemed Vance a “fascist.”)
Trump is widely expected to roll back the Title IX changes and other changes put in place by the Biden administration—including policies that measure whether career education programs are preparing their students for gainful employment and others that make debt relief easier to access.
“We spend more money on higher education than any other country, and yet they’re turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions,” Trump said last November.
Student loan forgiveness, a signature policy of the Biden administration, will not move forward under a potential Trump administration. That would leave millions of Americans with debt in limbo. Several experts expect Harris to continue to push for debt relief as president, since she’s advocated for it in the past.
Trump has sharply criticized the Biden administration’s debt-relief plans, pledged to fire accreditors and proposed creating a free national university funded by taxes on wealthy colleges. He has said that colleges are “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.” Higher education could face more aggressive policies if Trump wins a second term.
Harris’s higher ed agenda is less clear. Aside from touting in her stump speeches her efforts to shut down a predatory for-profit chain while she was attorney general in California, she’s said little about higher ed during her abbreviated campaign. As vice president, however, she pushed for student loan forgiveness and is expected to build on the Biden administration’s ambitious agenda for higher education, which sought to enact changes to protect students’ rights and their investments in their education.
As a senator, Harris backed plans for debt-free college, an issue her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, has also supported. Walz signed into law a free college program known as North Star Promise that covered the cost of tuition to any public college in the state for students from families making less than $80,000 a year.
Since becoming the Democratic nominee for president in August, Harris has largely avoided mentioning debt relief. But she’s called for increasing apprenticeships and nixing college degree requirements for some federal jobs. (Trump also made a similar pledge and took some action to eliminate degree requirements in his first term, making this a rare point of agreement between them.)
“For far too long, our nation has encouraged only one path to success: a four-year college degree,” Harris said at a rally. “Our nation needs to recognize the value of other paths.”
Colleges have a worry beyond the outcome and the policies that will ensue: How will the election results affect undocumented students, and might it exacerbate tensions on campuses that flared last fall and spring? Some are planning to host events to support students’ mental well-being and help them process the results.
During Trump’s first term, colleges spoke out about efforts to ban some students from getting visas and defended their diversity, equity and inclusion policies, which the former president targeted. But over the past year, more colleges have pledged to refrain from speaking on political and social issues, so this election will test those policies.