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Louis Freedberg: 0:04
Welcome to Education on the Line, a podcast series focused on the latest threats to public education and strategies for confronting them.
Louis Freedberg: 0:14
I'm Louis Freedberg.
Louis Freedberg: 0:14
uh One of the defining features of the second term of the Trump presidency has been the amount of activity, often frenetic activity, initiated by a torrent of executive orders, Dear Colleague letters, Department of Justice referrals, and investigations. But how much has actually been accomplished? What permanent changes are in place, if any? And most importantly, what can decision makers in the education trenches expect during the coming year?
Louis Freedberg: 0:44
In December 2024, just a few weeks before Donald Trump took office, we invited two guests to give us their thoughts about what we might expect from a second Trump presidency. And they were amazingly prescient in their analyses, and so we decided to invite them back to get their thoughts.
Louis Freedberg: 1:04
First, I'm pleased to welcome Rick Hess, Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He has a weekly column in Education Week and also a Substack column titled Rick Hess on Education, which I highly commend you check out. He also co-authored A Search for Common Ground with Pedro Neguera, my host on this podcast who couldn't join us today.
Louis Freedberg: 1:31
I also wanted to welcome Stephen Print. He is a distinguished professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California at Riverside. Steve has focused on higher education for many years. In 2019, he wrote a book titled Two Cheers for Higher Education: Why American Universities Are Stronger Than Ever and How to Meet the Challenges They Face. Maybe we can get in a word about whether he thinks they are stronger than ever now in the current climate. He also wrote a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, We Haven's Seen a Fight Like Harvard versus Trump in Centuries. And we're going to talk about that as well. Rick Hess and Stephen Brent come from, I don't quite know how to characterize it, but a little different places on the political spectrum, which I think makes their perspectives even more worthwhile paying attention to. So let me start with you, Rick. I've been reading your weekly, sometimes more often than weekly, analyses and perspectives. Was there anything about the past year that surprised you that you didn't really expect on the education front?
Rick Hess: 2:46
Yeah, I think there's a few things. One, I think people had underestimated how aggressive Trump II was going to be. But even as someone who was warning people, you don't really appreciate what it's going to be like. I underestimated how aggressive this was going to be. How much it was going to be driven by a variety of attacks through the whole of government, and how much of it was going to rely on executive action.
Louis Freedberg: 3:14
And can I just ask you, was that on the K-12 front and higher ed or more on the higher ed front?
Rick Hess: 3:21
Both, but more on higher ed, partly because for really 40 years in Washington, the bulk of education activity had focused on K-12. Uh, the degree to which you saw a shift during the Biden years, and then especially last year, to higher ed really being front and center was striking. Um, the second thing that surprised me was Doge, how big a role Doge played in those first four months, how unplanned and chaotic uh it was, and how little thought was given to what was going to come next. And I think the the third thing that surprised me is how little of a game plan uh there has been, especially in the effort to push higher ed, that that early assault just did not feature the kind of careful attention uh to process, to investigation, uh that would have really set the Trump administration up to really push uh for big wins. Instead, by moving early and fast, but pretty sporadically, um, what happened is they are now in a lot of ways, I think, on their back foot and some of the back and forth of colleges. And given the thoughtfulness and the talent of a lot of the folks at the Department of Education who came into this administration, I had thought that they were going to be more strategic about the approach.
Louis Freedberg: 4:50
Well, we could pick apart any one of those things you said, but let me uh go to Stephen Brint. Anything that surprised you?
Steven Brint: 4:56
I think my biggest surprise is how fast uh the reaction in the world has been. The Leiden rankings, which uh look at highly cited research in the United States and elsewhere in the world, came out recently. The U.S. has just one institution in the top ten. In 2022, there were seven U.S. institutions in the top ten. That's a tremendous fall in a very short period of time. New international students have fallen by about 20 percent, as a reaction in part, in large part, uh to what's going on in higher ed in the United States and the sense that international students are not as welcome anymore. Nature did a study of scientists early on in the in the uh administration, 75 percent of them that they surveyed said they were looking for jobs outside of the United States. Uh that's now not as high. They did another survey, but still high. 40 percent are claiming that they're looking for jobs outside the U.S. So the number of executive orders and dear colleague letters and uh that you mentioned at the beginning, they've had an immediate impact. And uh it hasn't been a good impact for higher education. It bodes poorly.
Louis Freedberg: 6:25
End of last year, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said, this is what she said, 2025 will go down as a banner year for education. The year we restored merit in education in higher education, rooted out waste, fraud, and abuse, and began in earnest returning education to the states. Rick, your your quick thoughts on that. I I was a little surprised about restoring merit in higher education. I don't just don't know what she was referring to. I know there's been a push to end affirmative action in all levels, presumably that was the reference, but I don't know whether they actually have succeeded in that.
Rick Hess: 7:03
Yeah, you know, um I I'm somebody who thinks that higher ed uh had been begging for a come-uppance. Over the past decade, I'd had extraordinary concerns about campus groupthink, about uh politicization and ideological um dominance on campus, about, you know, the refusal to take seriously concerns about indirect costs and overhead, about great inflation and lack standards. So, in a lot of ways, for someone like me, um, last year was a long time coming. And I know that I spoke to a number of presidents of prestigious universities who, you know, on the on the quiet would say, yeah, you know what, in some ways this is helpful because we had some things we needed to address. And while I don't necessarily agree with how they're going about it, it's created useful maneuvering room. Uh, but I think for me, what's frustrating was that rather than seize this opportunity to drive a coherent course correction founded on attention to due process, attention to using Congress where Republicans had the majority in both houses, um, coming up with a coherent effort to course correct the sector. Instead, what we saw was a number of you know extraordinary initiatives uh to move against specific universities. We saw a lot of bombast from the president. And what did it add up to at the end of the year? I think you've certainly reshuffled uh the landscape in terms of issues around DEI, around the conversation around, you know, certainly student lending because of the reconciliation bill. Have we rooted out waste, fraud, and abuse? I don't see how that's come into play. Um, the conversation about returning control of higher ed to the states doesn't really mean much of anything. That's more a K-12 conversation. So I think look, oh what one the important way to think about what the administration did last year was I think uh they broke a lot of furniture. And that I think higher ed was a place, I don't agree with how the administration has gone about much of its work, but I do think higher ed was a place where some furniture needed to be broken. The question will be whether governors, whether uh campus leadership, or whether the federal government is gonna play a constructive role or not in cleaning up after 2025. And I think that's gonna be what 2026 is gonna be about.
Louis Freedberg: 9:48
Stephen Brint, uh restoring merit to higher education. What's your response to that assertion?
Steven Brint: 9:55
I don't see exactly that they're restoring merit. I think they're imposing a kind of idea about uh what should be in higher education curricula, which is it's as bad in its own way as what came before. If you have this expirgated view of American civilization that doesn't include uh discussions of uh, let's say slavery, women's rights, and so on, you know, you've got something that is as much at variance with the truth as anything that the campus left proposed.
Louis Freedberg: 10:37
Rick Hess, what are some of the things you think we should be looking at or perhaps preparing for?
Rick Hess: 10:45
We're now watching the pendulum start to swing back on some of the administration's uh efforts around foreign students. Um we've seen the pendulum swinging back on the administration's efforts to cap indirect rates on federal grants. It's kind of given up its chase on that, um, but also to restrict awards to colleges out of NIH and NSF and the rest. Um, we're seeing uh the aftermath of some of the legal pushback play out on its efforts on anti-Semitism. Um, and we're seeing some of this play out in terms of gender ideology and DEI more broadly. So, in a lot of ways, if 2025 was kind of act one, where the administration came in, uh, in many ways, colleges both um, I think many, many college leaders were aware, they were kind of caught with their hand in the cookie jar that they had been irresponsible, um, and where they were not prepared for the onslaught. Um, now you've seen the administration slow down, you've seen it get caught up by a number of uh legal challenges, you've seen uh public opinion start to swing back, you've seen concerns about overreach. Uh, and now we're in the second act. And I think in a lot of ways, that's gonna be the story of 2026.
Louis Freedberg: 11:58
And what about just on the K-12 front? The administration has been very focused on the gender ideology issue, the bathroom issue, the trans girls paying girls' sports. Are we gonna see more of that? Is that gonna be the main focus, in fact?
Rick Hess: 12:16
More significant than what Washington's doing on gender is going to be the Supreme Court is currently waiting, uh we're waiting for the Supreme Court uh to rule sometime this spring on whether or not states are allowed to pass laws uh which restrict the participation of biological males on women's sports teams. Are states permitted to do that, or is that a violation uh of constitutional rights? Um, that's going to be a huge determinant of what kinds of laws states put on their books. The biggest federal impact on K-12 uh is probably actually being driven out of the Treasury Department rather than Department of Education. And that's last summer in the reconciliation bills, Congress created a wholly new program, the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit, in which individual taxpayers are allowed to contribute up to $1,700 towards essentially a voucher program that states can opt into. And this is going to probably, depending on how many taxpayers make the fully refundable contribution, which means they can write a check for up to $1,700 and then get all their money back if they owe $1,700 in federal taxes. This is going to create more funding for voucher programs in the US than probably all existing voucher programs and education savings accounts currently. And so how that plays out, how those scholarship programs actually operate, um, how many taxpayers opt to contribute, how many families actually opt in. That program will turn on on January 1st, 2027. But 2026 is going to be very much a story of school choice advocates in K-12 trying to stand up the infrastructure to take advantage of that.
Louis Freedberg: 14:02
And it's up to the governors in those states, right, to decide if they want it in their state. So that's going to be a battle in different states.
Rick Hess: 14:09
And Treasury is still exactly what's it mean to participate in this program is still something that's being worked out. So right now you've seen most Republican governors say, Yeah, we're in. You've seen uh Jared Polis in Colorado, maybe the only Democratic governor who said, I'm definitely in. Others are waiting to see what the program specifics look like. So that's right.
Steven Brint: 14:31
Do you mind if I I chime in on that uh the previous question? I actually don't want to minimize the effect of the Trump administration and the likelihood that it'll have ramifying effects. So I mean, we've seen seven billion dollars or more of grants that have been either paused or eliminated, and some of those are on cancer research, climate change, misinformation, disinformation. We've seen, you know, dozens of investigations of universities. We've seen some of the programs from the Department of Education, teacher training programs, for example, uh, funds from minority serving institutions cut. We've seen uh deregulation and reframing efforts of accreditation to try to, I think the administration hopes fit with its priorities. Uh we've seen the endowment tax go up on universities, we've seen graduate student borrowing limited, we've seen uh student loan forgiveness limited, we've seen a lot of the states, the conservative states passing legislation to restrict what can be taught in curricula. But the other side, uh which Rick mentioned, is that the courts and Congress to some degree uh have put on the brakes, at least for some of these uh initiatives. So the um the effort to cap indirect costs, for example, that was stopped by the courts and then subsequently by Congress. So that 15 percent cap not happening. Department of Education hasn't been abandoned or lost, the courts stopped that. In fact, about uh I guess there are 75 cases that have been just on higher ed uh taken to the courts, and about two-thirds of them are being decided against the administration. It's not a one-sided story, but I also don't think we can minimize the impact of the administration. It's been huge.
Louis Freedberg: 16:49
Well, uh, and not to minimize it at all, I mean Education Week did a summary of how many grants were actually terminated and it they came up with a f you know close to $2 billion. Again, you know, there's no one list anywhere. And so it's getting a handle on all of this is very challenging. Let me ask you about the Department of Education. Do we have a Department of Education now or don't we? I think when we talked a little over a year ago, I think both of you are dubious that he could actually get away with this. They seem to have done a pretty good job at, if not doing away with it in in name, uh in terms of what its uh functions are. Uh are we gonna be seeing more of that, do you think, during the coming year?
Steven Brint: 17:37
The last data that I saw, Louis, there's been uh about 16% of the budget is gone. A number of programs are gone, but the courts, as far as I know, maybe Rick knows differently. As far as I know, the the courts have stopped the abolition of the Department of Education as such. But they have not stopped the closing of a number of programs. And so um I think we still have a Department of Education, but it's been stripped of some of the things that it previously did.
Rick Hess: 18:13
So the department at full staffing, when it wasn't at full staffing when the Trump uh two began, um it would be about 4,000 people. Currently, um, what happened was after Doge made those extraordinary cuts last spring, it was down to about 1,300 people, give or take. And what's happened is it has been uh shrunk since then. Again, getting an exact headcount uh is a little tricky, but it's it's it's down in size dramatically. The other thing that's been that's really happened is there were a series of work agreements that have been negotiated by cabinet secretaries. The first was for career and technical education, where Linda were Secretary of Education Linda McMahon basically assigned several of her folks who did the work and the work to the Department of Labor to work on career and technical issues. This worked reasonably smoothly. They've used it as a model. They've now moved uh education uh on reservations over to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, they've moved various K-12 programs over to the Department of Labor uh alongside those CTE programs. Uh, this doesn't abolish the department. This is legal. There's hundreds or thousands of these agreements that have been used by Republicans and Democrats over the decades. Um, but this is absolutely a more aggressive and targeted use of these interagency agreements than has been the norm. There was no effort to abolish the department. It's created by law. You need Congress to abolish it by statute, but it's absolutely the case that the administration has gone much further in terms of the doge cuts and the uh shrinking of programs and the reassigning of programs and staff than I certainly uh thought they were going to be able to get uh 14 months ago. But that agents, but but the department is still there, the building is still there, the website is still there. And despite kind of signing an executive order saying, I want Linda McMahon to try to abolish it with all deliberate speed, uh, the President Trump has not claimed
Speaker 1: 20:30
to have abolished it.
Louis Freedberg: 20:31
And do you think in a year from now there'll still be a Department of Education? Because obviously he could get Congress. I mean, as a Republican uh control Congress, but seems unlikely.
Rick Hess: 20:43
You need 60 votes in the Senate. Uh they're never going to get seven Democrats. Uh the, you know, Speaker Johnson's margin in the House is now basically the the breadth of a nail file. And I think um all of the betting markets expect the Democrats are going to have a good night in November, which also means that all of the stuff we're talking about is going to be on a different background nine months from now.
Louis Freedberg: 21:08
And there are some lawsuits still in play. I know we had Randy Weingarten on the podcast a few weeks ago. They have filed suit to get some of these transference of programs back into the department. So we shall see what happens on that front. I do have to say one of the things that didn't happen was that the big ticket items at K-12, Title I, Special Ed, those funds have not been cut, right? Which I think would be reassuring to a lot of school educators out there. I mean, school administrators out there.
Rick Hess: 21:44
Republican governors like money. Um, Republican members of Congress don't like having the parents of children with special needs show up and yell at them. Uh, they don't like getting yelled at by their superintendents. And that's one of the reasons why when you ask, you know. What's really happened in K-12? You know, it's one thing for the administration to use executive orders to really uh take the fight to campuses or school districts or states when it comes to anti-Semitism or DEI. There's a lot of popular frustration with something like what you see on campus around these issues. Well, when the fight is around money for schools serving low-income children or for children with special needs, you are working very much against the 70, 80% of the public, and there's just not an appetite for that kind of cutting.
Louis Freedberg: 22:38
Let me ask you one final question. What gives you hope for the coming year?
Rick Hess: 22:43
Rick Hess. For me, um, it really felt, especially in higher ed, I was somebody who used to teach at Harvard and UPenn and Hopkins, and I got pushed out of those roles in various ways um in 2019, 2020, 2021. It really felt like higher ed was uh going down a path which I thought was hugely concerning, and I didn't see any obvious evidence that we were that we were looking to a snapback or a pendulum correction.
Louis Freedberg: 23:18
You mean not open to more conservative viewpoints and so on? Is that what you're suggesting?
Rick Hess: 23:23
So, yeah, just the sense that higher ed was a rapidly collapsing funnel of what was permissible thought. And again, I think for me, the last year and a half um has marked a dramatic turn in that. Um, again, I use the broken furniture analogy. I don't think what we have done is executed any kind of careful course correction. I think there are, as you guys have noted, real concerns about some of the illiberalism of the right that we have seen cropping up over the last year and a half. I do think what was a really extraordinarily worrisome trend has been arrested. And that gives us potentially an opportunity to move in a healthier direction. And I think that's you know, whether we do or don't is an open question, but I think that's an opportunity that gives me some hope. Stephen Bri nt?
Steven Brint: 24:16
I do feel like there's uh more opening now for discussing uh issues of viewpoint diversity, educational quality. I think the equity agenda is, you know, it has to be in balance uh somehow with the with issues of educational quality. And uh somehow we need to provide equality of opportunity and also high standards. Uh I think there's more opening for discussion. So in that respect, it's potentially a good time for that. However, what I worry about is that uh some of the folks on the on the campus left see in the actions of the Trump administration confirmation of their view of the social biases that exist in American society. And should another democratic administration come in, they may redouble their efforts and vow to extend the kind of programs that uh uh maybe got higher education in trouble with many segments of the population. We need to be thinking a lot more about how do we allow students to learn both sides of contentious issues, when is viewpoint diversity uh important in college, and maybe when it's not as important. Those kinds of issues, it's a it's a fruitful time to do something about those.
Louis Freedberg: 25:50
Something I'm going to be looking at over the next year, and it's a question you asked in your uh Chronicle of Higher Education story when you were talking about the fight between Trump and Harvard, which is going on as we speak, uh, in a very, very conflictual state and I'd say chaotic state at this point, in terms of whatever negotiations are going on. But you said, uh, Stephen, that you were witnessing the most important showdown between state power and college autonomy since 1816, when the New Hampshire legislature attempted to convert Dartmouth College into a public entity. A piece of American history I was not familiar with. But you said the underlying issue is the same. Can the government take control of an institution of higher education? And one of the things we are seeing it applies to K-12 is the most assertive federal government efforts to dictate really what's going on in K-12 schools, even though the Trump administration says they're going to try to do just the opposite. So be interested to see how assertive the federal government is and whether they will back off in the next 12 months. So look forward to having you back in a year and uh to continue this discussion. Let me thank our two guests, Rick Hess from the American Enterprise Institute. Check out his column on Substack and Education Week, and also Stephen Brint, who is a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California at Riverside. Look for his articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education, no doubt in other places. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Rick Hess: 27:42
T hank you. Good to be with you.
Steven Brint: 27:43
Thank you, Louis .
Louis Freedberg: 27:53
On that note, we have to bring this episode of Education on the Line to a close. Our producer Coby McDonald, and our advisor is Pedro Noguera, Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education. Also, thanks to our sponsors, the Hewlett Foundation. Please share with us your advice on effective strategies for traversing the kinds of threats from the right we discussed in this podcast. You can reach us by going to our website at educationon.com. That's educationon.com. And please subscribe to Education On the Line wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Louis Freedberg
Louis Freedberg: 28:28
Thanks for joining us.

What happens when frenetic policymaking by the Trump Administration collides with the guardrails of courts, campuses, and public opinion? We sit down with leading conservative commentator Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, and long-time higher education expert Stephen Brint, professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California at Riverside, to unpack a year in which the federal government asserted unprecedented power over both private and public education institutions at all levels. From executive orders and DOJ referrals to high-stakes investigations, we discuss what changed, what stalled, and, most importantly, what to expect in 2026.

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