dotEDU Live: Campuses, Congress, and the Campaign Trail This Fall

 

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Aired September 16, 2024

In the latest episode, Jon Fansmith and Sarah Spreitzer kick off the sixth season with a deep dive into the key issues shaping higher education this fall. With Congress in a monthlong sprint, they explore a flurry of messaging bills along with the legislation lawmakers actually need to pass before heading out for full-time campaigning. They also discuss the Biden administration's push to cement its higher education legacy. Finally, the conversation shifts to the 2024 presidential race, examining Kamala Harris and Donald Trump's higher education agendas.



Here are some of the links and references from this week’s show:

Speaker Mike Johnson Yanks Government Funding Bill Amid Growing GOP Defections
NBC News | Sept. 11, 2024

H.R.8281 - SAVE Act
Congress.gov 

Republicans Seek to Revive China Initiative
Inside Higher Ed | Sept. 11, 2024

Letter to House Leadership on China Legislation
ACE | Sept. 9, 2024

Statement of Administration Policy: H.R. 1398 – Protect America’s Innovation and Economic Security from CCP Act of 2024
Executive Office of the President | Sept. 10, 2024

H.R.7683 - Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act
Congress.gov

Federal Anti-Hazing Bill Moves One Step Closer to Becoming Law
Inside Higher Ed | Sept. 12, 2024

Letter on the Stop Campus Hazing Act
ACE | Sept. 10, 2024

College Cost Reduction Act: By the Numbers
ACE 

SAVE Repayment Plan
Federal Student Aid

20 Senators Ask Cardona to Delay Gainful Employment, Financial Value Transparency Deadline
Higher Ed Dive | Sept. 11, 2024

ACE Policy Recommendations to 2024 Presidential Candidates
ACE | Sept. 11, 2024

Transcript

 Read this episode's transcript

Jon Fansmith: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to our new season. This is the sixth season, Sarah, of dotEDU, and the third, possibly fourth season of dotEDU Live.

Sarah Spreitzer: Yes, supposedly. We’re either at the 20th year or at the first year. I can never remember.

Jon Fansmith: And all of them feel like five years by themselves. No, we love doing this. We’re very happy to be back. I’d say I think probably, Sarah, we could both agree that our summer vacations were not necessarily all that we’d hoped for. You lost the car, and I lost my health, so.

Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. Yeah. I’d much rather deal with Congress than trying to figure out insurance and getting a new car after having been hit three times, Jon, by trees in Washington, DC. So for all of our listeners, watch out for those trees.

Jon Fansmith: They seem to have something in for you personally, Sarah. It’s not a universal experience here in DC.

Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, I guess so. I guess so.

Jon Fansmith: And our producers are helpfully reminding me that we haven’t introduced ourselves. So for those of you who are-

Sarah Spreitzer: Oh, man.

Jon Fansmith: I know. Exactly. How could we do that? For those of you who are new to dotEDU Live, I’m Jon Fansmith. I am the government relation... Sorry, the senior vice president for Government Relations and National Engagement here at the American Council on Education. And Sarah, introduce yourself.

Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, it’s been so long. Do we remember our titles? I am Sarah Spreitzer. I’m vice president and chief of staff of Government Relations here at the American Council on Education.

Jon Fansmith: And as I mentioned, we are starting a new season. We had a survey that many, many, many of you filled out. You had very nice things to say about Sarah.

Sarah Spreitzer: Yay.

Jon Fansmith: End that sentence right there. But some of the things... We took your feedback. We’re making a few changes for the new season. One of the things we’ll be doing that is new is that the chat’s now open for everyone to participate in, so you can talk amongst yourselves in the chat. But Sarah, lots happening, right?

Sarah Spreitzer: Lots happening. And I will say we are going to answer questions that folks did submit when they were registering for this. So don’t worry; if you did submit a question, we will try and answer it. But we do have quite a bit to talk about. Congress has only been back for a week, but it feels like a really long time already.

So Jon, I think we’re going to start out by talking about what Congress is doing and what they have to get done over the next two and a half weeks period before they leave to really start campaigning. Then we’re going to talk a bit about the Biden administration’s legacy, especially what they have still outstanding that they want to get done before a new administration comes into town. And then finally, Harris and Trump just had their first televised debate, and we’re going to talk a bit about what we would expect from either of them coming in in a new administration.

A lot to talk about, but I think the biggest thing Congress is supposed to be getting done right now is appropriations, which is something that we talk about every time we do one of these podcasts. What’s going on with appropriations, Jon?

Jon Fansmith: Yeah, it’s not just the thing they are supposed to get done; it’s really the thing they have to get done. The-

Sarah Spreitzer: It’s like the only thing.

Jon Fansmith: It is the only thing. It’s the only thing. And as you pointed out, there’s a about two and a half weeks left to get it done, and early signs not encouraging so far. People probably know this if you’re tuned into this, but the federal government, technically its fiscal year ends on September 30th, which means without any form of funding authorization beyond September 30th, we would theoretically enter a shutdown at 12:01 A.M. on October 1st.

Realistically, nobody, not Republicans, not Democrats, not the administration... I’m not going to say nobody; a few people might want a shutdown. But realistically, leadership in both parties wants to make sure that the government operates, especially before they head out for five weeks of campaigning in the run-up to the election. Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, it’s a terrible look to go home and campaign to be given another shot to return to Congress when the government isn’t operating due in part to whatever you’ve accomplished there.

I think everyone here in DC is working under the assumption there will be some compromise to keep the government open that will look like a continuing resolution, which is basically just an extension of that September 30th deadline. What exactly that will be, that’s more up in the air this week. Sarah, I think-

Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, there was a plan, right?

Jon Fansmith: There was a plan.

Sarah Spreitzer: We came back, there was a plan.

Jon Fansmith: And it was a plan that even when it was announced, I think most people... You and I talked about this too. Nobody really thought it was going to work. Speaker Johnson put forward a clean CR essentially maintaining existing funding levels. It would extend funding until the end of March, which is a huge extension. Usually when we look at these CRs, they’re a month or six weeks or two months. Usually two months is about as far out as you’ll see. So a six-month extension, especially with the elections hanging over everything, was pretty surprising.

It’s also not something Democrats were supportive of. Democrats have been pretty clear about wanting something into December. Specifically around December 13th is the date that’s been floated.

But Speaker Johnson introduced the six-month extension, and in part because he knows he has some conservative members who are reticent to vote in favor of continuing federal funding in this climate, especially as they run for reelection, he paired it with a bill called the SAVE Act. I will not pretend to be an expert in this area, but the SAVE Act requires people to produce documentary evidence of their citizenship status when going to vote. If you are wondering why that law is necessary, the answer is it’s not. You still have to be a citizen to vote, and we generally have lots of procedures in place to verify your eligibility to vote, but that was the bill. It was intended to bring conservative support in favor of the continuing resolution.

After the bill was introduced, made it through the Rules Committee, vote on Tuesday, I believe, passed Rules.

Sarah Spreitzer: Yup.

Jon Fansmith: It was meant to be brought to the floor yesterday, Wednesday. It became abundantly clear that there simply weren’t enough votes. We’ve talked about this ad infinitum at this point. The margins in the House are razor-thin. Right now, Speaker Johnson’s working with a four-vote margin. You obviously can’t afford to lose very many members and still maintain a majority. Democrats were never going to vote for this. So it was announced that that vote was being pulled back.

In terms of next steps, Speaker Johnson has said he’s going to continue with this approach. He’s going to take it down. He’s going to try and bring it back up next week. He’s going to spend the time whipping his members to see if he can strengthen support, shore up support to get this passed and over the finish line.

Again, that is certainly the approach he’s taking. I think most people in DC, both sides of the aisle expect that what we’ll actually see is some agreement probably towards the end of the month to look more at that December date, December 13th, maybe later in December, and essentially push the deadline back. Again, nobody wants to see a shutdown. And these aspects of the deadline, the SAVE Act. SAVE Act is really only in there to get votes. And if you have Democratic votes in support, you don’t necessarily need the votes that that would bring over.

I think most expectations are we will see a CR sometime in the next couple of weeks pushing into December, and then we’ll see what happens with the elections, which changes all the political dynamics as to what funding will look like. If you see one party getting majorities in both chambers, that will very much impact how they decide to move forward with fiscal year ‘25 funding. If you see split Congress, depending on what that looks like, could have different impacts, things like that. Anyway, lots of uncertainty, but I think we’ve seen this act before again and again and again and again in preceding years. I feel relative level of comfort with we know how this will play out, at least in the short term.

Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. Do you think that it will impact their ability to leave in October? Like do you think that they might do a short-term one that kicks it a couple weeks until they can come to some sort of decision? Because it does seem like Speaker Johnson is pretty wedded to this idea of pushing a CR into next year.

Jon Fansmith: And he may very well be strongly wedded to that, but I think if he is going to tell his incumbent members, many of whom are in competitive races that will determine who has the majority, that they need to take time away from campaigning in the month leading up to the election to deal with this issue because he won’t compromise on what the deadline is, that’s a... Perhaps that is a point he’s willing to push that on, but that to me seems very unlikely.

I think members on both sides who are running for reelection will want to get back to their districts, will want to spend as much time as possible in the run-up to the election. That’s important time. And they’re not going to want to deal with being in DC, having to take a vote, physically being here in DC to do that unless they absolutely have to. Even more than the holiday deadlines we usually see around appropriations to try and compel members to come to agreement, an impending election cycle I think will really get them in and to at least the baseline of an extension.

Sarah Spreitzer: Well, during the Rules Committee markup, they did talk about the fact that the House has actually passed a handful of the appropriations bills. And in the Senate, they’ve at least I think marked up in committee a lot of the bills. We have numbers from the House and Senate on the Labor-HHS-Education funding bill, which has a lot of the programs we care about. Where do you think that they might end up after a CR? Are they actually going to come together and conference those? Because the House obviously had deeper cuts than, say, the Senate bill.

Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And I saw we had a question that was will we see major cuts to the federal aid programs? And just as a refresher, I know we’ve talked about this before, but the House has significantly less overall funding on the non-defense side, on the domestic discretionary side, than the Senate put forward. A couple reasons for that. There was an agreement last year of about $69 billion that was not carried forward this year in the House and the Senate. They put about half of that money back in, about $34 billion, which gave some flexibility to avert cuts and maintain funding in a lot of areas.

What we saw in the Labor-HHS-Education bill, as you point out, Sarah, really reflected that. In the Senate, we had a $100 increase in the maximum Pell award, level funding for programs like Work-Study and SEOG, some increases for TRIO and GEAR UP. The House side, very much different. No increase to the Pell Grants. 50% cuts to Work-Study and SEOG. Substantial cuts, about over $1 billion in overall funding cuts. Not the same levels of increases. Cuts in many more programs.

Will we ultimately see those cuts? Probably not. Last year is a great way of looking at this. There just isn’t the leverage in the House, where, as we’ve already seen this week, it’s very hard for Speaker Johnson to keep his caucus united around funding. Ultimately what needs to happen is Democratic votes are generally needed in the House to pass a funding measure. That being the case, really conservative Republicans don’t have a lot of leverage to enact spending cuts. And we saw this played out last year. All of those big cuts, last year Republicans in the House proposed eliminating Work-Study and SEOG. And ultimately, those programs were level-funded.

We are very likely to see the same sort of dynamic play out this year. The one wild card, of course, being if we come out of the November elections, and say Republicans have large majorities in both chambers. I don’t think most people are predicting veto-proof majorities in any way. In fact, most people are predicting tight margins in both chambers. But were you to see something like that or even simple majorities in both chambers, it changes the leverage calculation. And so if that were to play out, especially if you saw Republican control of Congress and the administration, then you might start to see cuts as being more viable. It’s not impossible. It’s not what people are predicting at this moment, but it’s certainly a possibility.

Sarah Spreitzer: Well, Jon, you missed the big headline about this week because besides the continuing resolution, the House Rules Committee was also taking up a flurry of legislation related to China.

Jon Fansmith: That’s right. It was China Week.

Sarah Spreitzer: That’s right. The House leadership was calling it China Week. And they took up about, I think over 20 bills related to China, a lot regarding economic security, national security issues. And for our institutions, there were a few that touched on especially research security and those types of issues at our colleges and universities. We sent up a letter, which I’m sure our producers are going to put into the chat, this week, actually, opposing two of the bills, one which we had seen before, which they had tried to attach in some of the appropriations bills, efforts to bring back the so-called China Initiative at the Department of Justice.

This had been started under the Trump administration. It was very, very focused, I think, on people of Chinese ethnicity. The Department of Justice did not have a lot of wins in the indictment area. They had a lot of cases that got thrown out or a lot of cases where the person was found not guilty.

The Department of Justice has continued to address research security concerns. And what we’ve seen a lot more is that it has been pushed down to compliance issues and that the IGs at the individual research agencies are looking at transparency, compliance, and things like that. And they’re still finding researchers; they’re still finding institutions.

But we are concerned if they were to bring back the so-called China Initiative, that it would be solely focused on researchers or students of Chinese descent, and so we are opposed to that bill. The White House also issued a statement of administration policy saying that they oppose it and that they would veto it, and so that was helpful. But it did pass the House yesterday.

There was also a bill taken up which was related to the Department of Homeland Security and funding from the Department of Homeland Security to colleges and universities. And it would basically ban any DHS funding. We’re not just talking about research funds; we’re talking about funds that might come from FEMA or funds to, say, related to terrorism-related events. It would ban any of that funding if the institution had a relationship with an entity of concern. And the way that they were defining an entity of concern, it would really cover almost 80% of the institutions of higher education in China. And so we did oppose that bill. It passed. It did, I think, get 36 votes from Democrats, but pretty much along party lines.

I don’t think the Senate is going to take up any of these bills. And we were talking earlier today that, for as much as Speaker Johnson talked about China Week and the fact that they were going to pass all of these bills, they didn’t get as much bipartisan support, I think, as he thought.
And everything that’s happening this week and the next few weeks is in the lead-up to the election. They’re trying to get members to take a stance on these bills. And what the Democrats have been saying as these bills have been brought forward is that they’ve passed bipartisan bills out of committee to address a lot of these concerns, but the GOP leadership really focused on very partisan bills that didn’t have as much bipartisan support.

I think China Week is wrapping up. They passed a lot of bills, but I highly doubt they’re going to move in the Senate.

Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I saw, I think it was Representative Krishnamoorthi said something like, “China Week,” W-E-E-K, “has become China Weak,” W-E-A-K. On that point of they had stronger bipartisan bills that would’ve been more impactful that weren’t considered. And I just always appreciate a good pun, so that was nice.

I did notice we had a question come in, Sarah, from Allison Gunn, who’s asking, “To what extent would the China Initiative affect college and university employees who are of Chinese descent? As you said, it could potentially affect students.”

Sarah Spreitzer: I think the concern is that under the previous China Initiative, they really focused on researchers of Chinese descent who had relationships with researchers or research organizations in China. And they were looking closely at whether or not they were in compliance with reporting requirements, whether they had a conflict of interest in the work that they were performing, say, for the federally funded research that they had here, and then the work they might’ve been doing back in China. And so there were a lot of examples of Chinese or Chinese American researchers who were targeted in this way. And again, the court cases fell apart.

Now, the biggest case that the Department of Justice always points to is Charles Lieber, who was a researcher at Harvard, not of Chinese descent, who they had a successful case against and was found guilty for misreporting money both to the IRS and to his funding agencies.
Jon Fansmith: And thank you for that. China Week is wrapping up. It’s not the only messaging activity we see in the Congress.

Sarah Spreitzer: Well, I’m taking next week off so... I’m kidding.

Jon Fansmith: I did not approve that.

Sarah Spreitzer: No, next week-

Jon Fansmith: I cannot approve that, Sarah.

Sarah Spreitzer: Well, next week we have Woke Week. And is Woke Week more than just... I know that we have a bill that’s right now sitting at the Rules Committee, or it’s going to be considered by the Rules Committee. We obviously have a lot still swirling around campus protests and things like that, DEI efforts. What are we expecting for Woke Week in the House?

Jon Fansmith: Well, first, we need to clarify, is it Woke Week or Anti-Woke Week? Anti-Woke Week would make more sense, but I keep seeing it referred to as Woke Week. I don’t know. Are we-

Sarah Spreitzer: Maybe they haven’t actually decided. It’s only Thursday.

Jon Fansmith: Sorry, we need to wait for the banners, I guess, to-

Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, yeah. Well, Anti-Woke or Woke Week, what are we expecting?

Jon Fansmith: Well on the higher ed... I think you’re right; there’s a lot of messaging bills that have nothing to do with higher education. And some will be related to K-12 and some to other things.

But in the higher ed space, there are what will be considered as one bill but is a package of two bills previously passed through the House Education and Workforce Committee. The combined bill that will be considered as part of Woke Week is called the Stop Woke Higher Education Act. And it’s, as I mentioned, comprised of two other bills, those two bills the Protecting the First Amendment on Campus Act, which is H.R. 7683, and the Accreditation for College Excellence Act, which is H.R. 3724, if you’re keeping score at home.

ACE and a large number of our colleague associations wrote a letter in opposition to the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act earlier this year. I want to talk more about that in a little bit more detail in just a second. But the Accreditation for College Excellence Act, it’s a little bit trickier to come at. What the bill does is essentially precludes accreditors from requiring institutions to have policies that require disparate treatment of individuals, particularly protected classes under the law, and essentially saying you cannot discriminate. That, and also that accreditors can’t impose requirements on religious institutions that violate their religious mission.

There’s a lot to unpack there. There’s a lot of backstory there. The main focus, though, and the reason it’s being part of Woke Week is it’s really intended to address what a number of Congressional Republicans think are requirements by accreditors that institutions have DEI policies. That’s obviously in conflict with state law now in some states, but also contrary to what a lot of those members of Congress think are appropriate oversight roles of accreditors when looking at the status of an institution.

Maybe more impactful and certainly higher profile is that first bill I talked about, the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act. And this bill comes out of last year. The Education and Workforce Committee had spent a fair amount of time looking into the idea of free speech on campus. This was the majority; this was not a bipartisan effort. And the majority was approaching it really from the idea that colleges and universities were suppressing free speech on campus, in particular conservative speech.

And so they issued a report at the end of September that was very critical of how colleges and universities handled free speech, essentially saying things like free speech zones or time-place-manner restrictions on students’ abilities to express themselves, political viewpoints, other viewpoints was leading to the suppression of speech on colleges and universities.

That report came out in late September. Obviously the October 7th Hamas terror attack on Israel happened shortly thereafter, and as we saw, the committee increasingly put a lot of time and attention and focus on where they thought institutions were not doing enough to suppress hateful or harassing or intimidating speech, especially directed towards students of Jewish descent.

Having seen all that, I think the report seemed like it might just hang out there because the committee’s focus moved so quickly to this idea of condemning institutions for not more rigorously policing speech and regulating speech on their campuses, and then the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act was introduced. It is, as I mentioned, an outgrowth of that report. It is a difficult bill to understand why it was brought forward at this time, in part because it would really very aggressively dictate what institutional policies are around speech in ways that functionally tie institutions’ hands behind their back in terms of their ability to police speech on their campuses.

We don’t need to go into all the details of free speech law. We have lots of resources available on ACE’s website. We’ve talked about this before, but just a few examples that illustrate what I’m talking about. One of the things campuses have been hammered for is when protests were blocking entrance to academic buildings, libraries, classrooms, things like that, that that was impeding students’ ability to access their education. This bill would actually say that you cannot bar protest anywhere on a campus that is publicly accessible, so long as that expression is not commercial. It really would undercut schools’ ability to put in place a lot of the policies and procedures they have for this fall semester that, and I’m knocking wood here, so far have seemed to have cooled the campus climate down, limited some of the most troubling incidents we saw in the spring of last year.

So understand the drivers behind bringing this bill forward, but realistically it’s not going to help. It’s going to make a situation that’s already a difficult one to manage impossible to manage, and really contrary, frankly, to a lot of the criticisms the committee itself has been putting towards campuses. An odd choice. This is a very partisan bill. It will not get any Democratic support. Whether it moves forward I think is still unclear. Probably they’ll feel confident they can get a majority of Republicans to vote for it, but we’ll see. Even if it does, this is not something the Senate will take up. It’s certainly not something the president will sign.

Sarah Spreitzer: And I’m assuming, we opposed the bill during the markup, so we’ll likely oppose it again depending on what comes out of Rules.

Jon Fansmith: Yes.

Sarah Spreitzer: Anything else on Anti-Woke Week we should be watching? I know the committee on Ed and Workforce has already been very busy with a campus hazing bill, but is there anything else you think that they might throw in there?

Jon Fansmith: Not that we’ve heard. Never say never, but the amendments went to Rules... Or the deadline for amendments going to Rules is today, so I’ll have a better sense of what’s on the agenda. The Rules meeting is Monday. I think probably at this point, they know what they want to put forward. Never say never, but I think from the higher ed side, this is what we have to focus on.

Sarah Spreitzer: Great. How about campus hazing? Because I think that bill just passed out of the committee this week.

Jon Fansmith: Yeah, and this is very different. This is a very bipartisan bill. This is one that has been under consideration in both chambers of Congress for a while. It’s one ACE staff and I know staff at other associations and a lot of institutions have weighed in on with staff. Actually, just worth citing, this is a good example of the process working well. Congressional staff have been very receptive. They’ve been working to improve the bill based on the feedback they’ve gotten.

This is a bill that would require institutions to do a couple different things. One is to have programs to prevent hazing on their campuses. The other is to report on incidents of hazing on their campuses. We are generally supportive of the bill and its goals. We think there is a version of this bill yet to be finalized that would be something that could be very helpful to campuses.

We sent a letter in advance of the markup yesterday essentially saying that we appreciate the fact that the committee’s been working with us. We want to continue to work with you. There are some concerns we have about definitions. There are some concerns we have about the overlay with state laws. Almost every state has a hazing law on the books. Some problems around things like it requires reporting under the Clery Act, but the Clery Act uses definitions that don’t include most standard definitions of hazing, so there’s not a clear crosswalk as to crime reporting because in many cases hazing isn’t necessarily a crime the way the specific acts occur.

It’s a tricky thing, but this is not an area where there’s partisan disagreement or, I think from the institution’s perspective, our perspective, a disagreement on the goals here. It’s really a matter of getting into a shape that actually accomplishes everybody’s desired outcome.

Sarah Spreitzer: Well, and there’s only really two weeks left, and we don’t know whether it will go to the House floor, but this is... Congresswoman Foxx, who’s the current chair of Ed and Workforce has announced that she will not be chairing next year. She’ll be stepping down even if the Republicans control. And so a lot is being said about what does she want to see passed by the House before they wrap up this session of Congress? And obviously we still have the lame duck, so there’s still time, but obviously the next two weeks are very active too. What are you hearing about Congresswoman Foxx’s big priorities, like the College Cost Reduction Act?

Jon Fansmith: That’s exactly the one to ask about, Sarah. The College Cost Reduction Act. We have talked about it. This is the big piece of legislation Chair Foxx has introduced that would make substantial changes to the lending system, the federal student lending system, would impose risk-sharing payment requirements on institutions. We’ve covered this a lot. We have a lot of concerns about this bill.

After it was marked up, after it passed out of the committee, we know that Dr. Foxx has been working hard to try to get this to the floor for a vote. We continue to hear rumors that that is growing in likelihood. And in fact, recently we’ve been hearing that during this September session, it may be brought to the floor for a vote. Part of that is tribute to her and her role as the outgoing chair of the committee, her long service leading House Republicans on these issues. Part of it is there’s a lot of things in there that I think are broadly supported by some Republicans.

That said, we are very concerned about the bill. It would be incredibly expensive for institutions, impose a number of really punitive costs on institutions and penalize institutions, and particularly that serve the largest numbers of low-income students.

I would urge people, if you have not already, to reach out to your congressional delegation and let them know about the concerns that you have with this bill. We did a pretty extensive analysis institution by institution, which you can find on ACE’s website. You can see what the bill would mean for your campus in particular. Again, I would urge you to look at that, reach out, let your members of Congress know that you have concerns, because knowing earlier in the process before it goes to the floor may help keep it from going to the floor in the first place. Hearing that members have concerns may keep it from ever getting to a vote.

Sarah Spreitzer: And our producers just put that link into the chat so folks can see it. But Jon, we’re running out of time and we wanted to talk also about what the administration is doing now that they’re back from the August break. And it’s a lot, right?

Jon Fansmith: It’s a lot. Yeah, there’s a lot going on.

Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, do you want to start with what’s going on with FAFSA? Obviously a big topic in the spring. What’s happening with the fall?

Jon Fansmith: Yeah, and I’m trying to go back and remember where things stood with the FAFSA before we did this, before we took our break and came back. Since then, a whole bunch of things have happened. The most important is the department announced that they would not be meeting the October 1st deadline again this cycle. They have committed to being fully functional and operational FAFSA starting December 1st.

They’ve recently, as recently as this week, announced that they are going to start having the FAFSA available in certain formats to certain applicants beginning October 1st. They’re going to do what they’re calling a series of phased beta exercises where for the first two weeks they’re going to do sessions with financial aid counselors, and FSA staff will be present with applicants and work through in a controlled environment the initial batches of applicants. They’ll subsequently, in different beta phases, bring in institutions and other organizations that have a role in the process as a way of trying to manage people coming on board and identify where there might be errors.

It’s certainly a smart approach. The problem with it, of course, is that it also is further delaying when all students can apply. It seems better than last year. Even those early initial beta applicants, once they’re through, their ISIRs, their records will go out to the institutions. Things should be moving more smoothly earlier in the cycle than we saw last year. Certainly not a high bar to clear, but it does seem better. And then the idea is hopefully we will start seeing the full return of the FAFSA, full application ISIR processing as of December 1st. I saw, sorry, a couple questions-

Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. We actually got a question about why certain applicants and is that part of the beta testing?

Jon Fansmith: What they’re doing is they are doing different groupings of, because it’s beta testing. They want to control the environment in which the tests occur. So what they’ll be doing is the first couple weeks, these FAFSA application events that we’ve seen with different groups that do outreach to applicants, so there’ll be large group sessions with applicants in a room with counselors to assist them and FSA staff to help supervise and provide guidance, the idea being to find the big errors. Think about the things we saw last time where applicants who have mixed-status parents, the things that would pop with a large group, and then starting to get to more specific populations, and as they broaden it out, broaden it out and fine-tune it before that December 1st launch. That is the goal.

And I see our producers put up some of the information with more clarification on the process and the different beta test periods as well as the ability to apply to participate that the department has put out.

Sarah Spreitzer: We also had a question about an update on student loan forgiveness, because I think a lot of that was happening right when we were going into August recess.

Jon Fansmith: Yeah. A couple different things happening on student loan forgiveness. The first is that the final effort, the regulatory effort the Department of Education was putting forward to provide forgiveness to different categories of borrowers. Pretty amazingly, a number of state’s attorneys general went to court and got a court injunction blocking the Department of Education from implementing those regulations prior to the regulations even being finalized. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen regulations that haven’t been published being blocked. But that is the situation in that regard. The other thing related to that, the Department of Education under the Biden administration launched the SAVE program. I forget exactly what the acronym stands for.

Sarah Spreitzer: Not related to voting.

Jon Fansmith: Different SAVE. Let’s be clear. Sorry. Different SAVE.

Sarah Spreitzer: Different SAVE program.

Jon Fansmith: The SAVE program is an income-based repayment program. It’s the most generous income-based repayment program available, including a much accelerated timeframe for forgiveness for borrowers. That was also challenged in court. Injunctions were offered by, I believe, the Eighth Circuit court of Appeals. The Supreme Court upheld that injunction and blocked the program in its entirety on appeal from the Department of Education.

As we stand both the pending regulations that would provide forgiveness to large categories of borrowers as well as the SAVE income-based repayment program, which allows the possibility of forgiveness after repayment, both blocked by the court. So the Biden administration really stymied in a lot of their efforts to expand access to loan forgiveness to borrowers.

Sarah Spreitzer: The other one I think we had a lot of questions on, Jon, was the gainful employment reporting deadline, which is coming up soon here, October 1st, and in some ways seems to be going the way of the FAFSA rollout. Is the department ready? Are they going to delay that reporting deadline? Which they’ve already done once. What do you think is going to happen?

Jon Fansmith: We are certainly hoping they will offer another delay. And you mentioned FAFSA. FAFSA is a big part of this. A lot of the people who are responsible for compiling the data, reporting the data that is required under the gainful employment-financial value transparency regulations are people who work in financial aid offices who have been dealing with all the challenges the problems with FAFSA have imposed.

There’s also been challenges with this regulation. The guidance has been shifting and unclear. There’s been issues with the definitions of different terms and the forms you’re supposed to use to report, as well as these completers lists, which are critical for determining which programs you need to report from. Kind of problem after problem just specific to the GE-FVT regs on top of all the other problems we’ve seen with getting FAFSA working. And especially things like the announcement that you can’t do batch corrections, which, especially for larger institutions, is huge for the burden and the complexity of managing FAFSA applications.

All of that together, we have this October 1st reporting deadline. We have asked for a delay. Numerous organizations have asked for a delay. There are, regardless of your views on the gainful employment-financial value transparency regs’ goals and the value of those regulations, just as an operational issue it is increasingly clear schools cannot get ready to do this by October 1st.

We are very hopeful, you keep hearing these rumors, especially in the last week, that the department will announce an extension. Whether those are true, what that would be, who’s to say? But I think you saw a letter this week from 20 senators, a bipartisan group asking for an extension. The noise is getting louder. The political pressure is getting bigger. I think the department certainly has to be very aware of the problems maintaining this deadline would pose. And probably at a minimum, what we hear is that they’re at least considering a delay. Fingers crossed they’ll do the right thing and hopefully announce that relatively soon.

Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. And I think, Jon, that brings us to the end of what the Biden administration is doing.

And obviously we talked about the debate happening this week. We’re going to have a new administration next year no matter what.

Jon Fansmith: Yeah, regardless.

Sarah Spreitzer: Right?

Jon Fansmith: Yeah.

Sarah Spreitzer: It’s going to be Biden... Or sorry, it’s going to be Harris or Trump. We’ve gotten a lot of questions on this. We don’t have a lot of time to talk about it, but I think the biggest question we get, the Trump policy platform in the Project 2025 talks about the longstanding Republican talking point about dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. Do you think that that is a policy goal if Trump becomes president? Do you think that that’s what would actually happen?

Jon Fansmith: I’m surprised how much I talk to people about this. And the other thing is, and I know we’re running up against time. Maybe we’ll run a little bit long. We have so much going on. But this was something that President Reagan campaigned on. This is not a new request. This is not a new policy goal. This has been in the political atmosphere for a long, long time at this point.

I think there’s two things about that. One, you would need an act of Congress. And it’s not clear. Congress certainly has struggled to do big, substantive things. This would be a big, substantive thing. It seems unlikely as we stand now that you would have the kinds of majorities in both chambers for Republicans that would be necessary to enact something like that.

But even beyond that, this is one of those things where I think there’s a great rhetorical argument for it. It says very simply, “We don’t want federal control of education. We want to keep the federal government out of education. I want to abolish the Department of Education.”

But I think more realistically, both parties use education. And not just higher ed, K-12 certainly too, increasingly as political issues and increasingly as a ways to identify the differences between them and their opponents. And taking over a Department of Education, one, that has a $1.7 trillion bank in the Federal Student Aid office and the loans they, the portfolio they administer, which has huge implications of abolishing that to begin with. But beyond that, all the different programs and policy arms that it allows you to do, if these are increasingly important political issues to Americans, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to abolish the agency that allows you to share your influence, to project your influence on those issues.

Certainly a lot of the things that Republicans have been very critical the Biden administration on in terms of whether that’s loan forgiveness or the participation of trans students in athletics or other things, really, the full spectrum, you could easily see a Trump administration doing their own approach on those issues, enforcing their own approach on those issues using the same tools and levers that the Biden administration did. It’s a lot of power and authority to give up in an area that’s increasingly important politically. It makes a good messaging point. It’s certainly a rallying cry for people who worry about a federal role in education. But I think practically it just doesn’t make a lot of sense, regardless of your political viewpoint.

Sarah Spreitzer: I also tell people we’ve already had Trump as president. Look back at what was done during that administration. We didn’t see a lot of loan forgiveness. What was it, like 99.9% of the applications for Public Service Loan Forgiveness were rejected?

Jon Fansmith: Right.

Sarah Spreitzer: I think that there could be a move to try to move some of the student loan stuff into the private sector because going into the direct loan system has only been around for about a decade, and so I could see them trying to figure out how to do that. There’s also been talk if they would move the Office of Civil Rights from the Department of Ed over to the Department of Justice.

And so I’m with you; I don’t think that they can just dismantle the Department of Education, but I think that they could reduce the federal footprint of a lot of what the department might be doing. But it’s not going to be like on day one, the Department of Education goes away.
And I know we’re running up against time, but do you want to say anything about Harris and what we’ve seen in her policy priorities? She’s a new candidate. I think the last time we talked, we still had Biden-

Jon Fansmith: I think so.

Sarah Spreitzer: ... as the candidate. I don’t know if her team has actually put pen to paper on what her policy priorities would be in the area of higher education.

Jon Fansmith: Yeah, we’ve seen the Democratic platform, right?

Sarah Spreitzer: Mm-hmm.

Jon Fansmith: But I think that was very clearly a platform that was developed when President Biden was still the Democrats’ candidate. President Harris’ party platform looks an awful lot like what we saw from the Biden administration and what we’ve seen in terms of their policy priorities. I think there’s not a lot of reason to suppose that there would be a big, core shift between the Biden administration and a prospective Harris administration.

In fact, one of the things when she was early in her role as the head of the ticket, she talked about protecting veterans and going after predatory online institutions when she was attorney general of the state of California. A lot of the same through lines in terms of stronger government oversight, more protective regulations, greater consumer transparency in the higher ed space; things that the Biden administration has been working on in various ways. Clearly those are priorities that she chose to emphasize in introducing herself to the American people as a candidate.

I think you can expect a lot more of the same. Maybe different areas of emphasis. I think the one that gets brought up a lot is loan forgiveness. That has been certainly a subject that, regardless of your views about whether it was purely politically driven or whether it was purely policy driven, there was a lot of speculation that the reason the Biden administration was so committed to it was electorally driven, that it was about getting out younger voters who broadly support it. Would Harris feel the same way if she was president? It’s not necessarily clear. So it’s hard to say, but certainly a strong contrast with what President Trump has talked about as his education priorities.

Sarah Spreitzer: And in preparation for the election, Jon, just yesterday we sent a list of higher education policy priorities to both campaigns, and I think the producers will put that in the chat, just informing them of high-level, what does higher education care about? Obviously funding for the Pell Grant, support for our students, support for our institutions. But folks can see that in the link that the producers just posted.

Jon Fansmith: Obviously a lot to cover. And I don’t know if we even did it justice, Sarah, but-

Sarah Spreitzer: Probably not. We were just so excited to be back.

Jon Fansmith: We were. And-

Sarah Spreitzer: That’s why it took a long time. We’re just so happy to talk to everybody, to share our views. I know my family members are really tired of hearing me talk higher education policy.

Jon Fansmith: Well, we thank everyone for joining us. Look forward to seeing you next time. Take care. Enjoy the rest of your day.

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​Each episode of dotEDU presents a deep dive into a major public policy issue impacting college campuses and students across the country. Hosts from ACE are joined by guest experts to lead you through thought-provoking conversations on topics such as campus free speech, diversity in admissions, college costs and affordability, and more. Find all episodes of the podcast at the dotEDU page.

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