Jon Fansmith: Hello, and welcome to dotEDU live. I'm Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of Government Relations and National Engagement at the American Council on Education, and I'm joined as always by my co-host and colleague, Sarah Spreitzer. Hey, Sarah.
Sarah Spreitzer: Hey, Jon. Happy New Year and happy Presidential Election Certification Day.
Jon Fansmith: Thank you. It's the holiday everyone looks forward to every four years. I could make a joke about that too, considering, but no, we'll move right on from that.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yes, let's just move on from that.
Jon Fansmith: This is, so we are recording today, Sarah, and this is an unusual one, even by our standards. We were supposed to be in-person. This was supposed to be the first day I would see you in about two weeks in-person, but that has not happened.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, even though I was really looking forward to going back to the office and being away from my family within the last two weeks, having some working in the office, unfortunately nature worked against us and D.C. got, I don't know, is it a historic snowstorm? I think we're supposed to get about a foot, which means that we'll probably be closed for, I don't know, two, three weeks. We'll see. I have not seen any plows or any salt on my street, so we are hunkered in for the long term.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I noticed that. I live on Capitol Hill and I live right near the Library of Congress' daycare, and their sidewalks were plowed as, or shoveled as of about 7:00 a.m. this morning, which was impressive. And then should say, we will get to this in a second, but we're here with an amazing group of people, and before we came, ACE's president, Ted Mitchell, was talking with them and mentioned that he'd already been out shoveling. Sarah, have you been out shoveling yet so far?
Sarah Spreitzer: I will tell you, I woke up my children this morning, because I had to work, and I'm in my son's bedroom, so I had to kick him out and told him that I would give him some money if he shoveled the walk. So, he has actually already shoveled the walk. It may already be covered in snow, but I at least got that done.
Jon Fansmith: Well, that's high-level executive functioning. You're delegating, you're hiring.
Sarah Spreitzer: That's right, that's right. Really multitasking. How about you? Did you get your walk shoveled?
Jon Fansmith: No, no. I walked my dog and that was the accomplishment of my day so far before I started working. I was going to say, that's why Ted's the boss, right? He can somehow do all of these things simultaneously.
Sarah Spreitzer: You're going to have a lot of snow after this podcast, that's all I'm going to say.
Jon Fansmith: That's right. Well, Sarah, the other big and really much more important reason that this is an unusual podcast for us and the reason we're hoping to do it in person was we are on with the ACE Fellows cohort. And this is truly a remarkable group of people. You as an audience will be hearing from them. We're going to turn it over and allow them to ask questions so there'll be a chance to engage.
But for those of you who do not know about ACE's Fellows Program, first of all, shame on you, you should definitely know about this if you're listening this podcast. Two, shame on you if you haven't considered this as an option for your own self and your career, it's really worth looking into. But here's a little background on the program itself. It was founded in 1965. It's at the forefront of strengthening higher education leadership. And over those years this very distinctive cohort-based mentorship program has prepared more than 2,500 faculty staff and administrators for senior leadership roles at colleges and universities.
Sarah Spreitzer: And Jon, I would just note that more than 80 percent of past fellows have gone on to serve as chief executive officers, chief academic officers, cabinet level leaders, and deans at colleges and universities. And as all of our listeners know, we need those leaders now more than ever. And so, this is a really great group to be with.
Jon Fansmith: It's an amazing group to be with. And we're very excited about the conversation coming. I think we'll start a little bit by doing some table setting as to the environment we're looking at here in Washington D.C., what we know, what we're expecting, what we might expect not to know, all of the parameters as we look at this from the public policy higher ed perspective looking forward. But Sarah, top of mind, what are the things right now that sets the scene for the moment we're in?
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, we were talking about the fact that the Congress is in session, the 119th Congress was sworn in on Friday, January 3. Today they are certifying the election results for President Trump. And then obviously, inauguration is set for January 20, and compared to President Trump's first term, it has gone at least a lot more, I don't know if I want to say smoothly, but he has been naming cabinet leaders and leaders in his administration much more quickly than he did in his first term.
We also saw on Friday the election of Speaker Johnson, which was kind of a bit touchy. I don't know if you were watching that, Jon, while you were on vacation, but it looked like the first vote was going to fail. It did not. Part of the reason it was so close is that the Republicans have such a small majority in the House of Representatives, and President Trump was working the phones and talking about his support for Speaker Johnson. And I think in this second term we'll be much more involved with Congress than we saw at the start of his first term.
There's a lot of other things we can talk about. They had a retreat this weekend where they talked a lot about the upcoming reconciliation bills, the planning for the next Congress, how they're going to hit the ground running. So, there's just been a lot going on, even though D.C. has been relatively quiet with the holidays and of course with the snow day.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I will say, Sarah, I was tracking Speaker Johnson's election. It was a very nerdy D.C. wonk moments. We went to Florida at the end of last week with a couple other families that are friends, and most of the parents in that group have some connection or work in the government or they work in public relations or government affairs. And there were six of us in a row on beach chairs looking out at the water, looking at our phones and calling out like, "Ooh, ooh, ooh, somebody voted present," like that [inaudible 00:06:37] his vote. But no, they're holding the vote open. And I just thought to myself, we're surrounded by people on all sides, what they must have thought of this conversation and certainly our ability to detach from work. I mean, I will say, joking aside about that, it was kind of a remarkably tense moment, because they went in with, and to your point, highlights what a challenge Speaker Johnson's going to have.
With Matt Gaetz having resigned the House margins are 219 Republicans to 215 Democrats, that gave him two votes of opposition before he loses. And with one member coming in, having said they were going to vote to oppose him, he had a one-vote margin to sustain himself as the speaker. And given what we saw last year with Kevin McCarthy's election for speaker and then his being kicked out of that role, it's a real warning sign going forward about how narrow those margins are and how hard it's going to be to get any sort of action accomplished in the House. And they weren't very effective in the last Congress. It's an even harder road going forward this year, which when you think about unified Republican control, sort of assumption that there will be just whatever goals Republicans have, especially whatever goals President Trump has be enacted. It's not going to be that simple. And I certainly think that's going to, like it has for the last two years, that's going to be a big part of the story is, where can Republicans effectively unite to move legislation forward? But Sarah, Sarah, you were going to say something?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, if you were in Florida, you were obviously close to the seat of power where a lot of these conversations were taking place at Mar-a-Lago. It was interesting, because a lot of it was being done remotely, so Congress was being sworn in, but folks were watching who was actually in Florida with President Trump working the phones and pushing the buttons. But I was going to say, we also have a new Senate majority leader, Senator Thune, who's coming in who I think the quote I saw from him is that he has a relationship with President Trump. It's very different from Speaker Johnson where they're communicating constantly and talking about strategy. And I think one of the first things that we've seen where there might be some issues between the House and Senate going into the 119th Congress is reconciliation. And so Jon, do you want to kind of talk about what reconciliation is and why we're watching it so closely going into the 119th Congress?
Jon Fansmith: And really reconciliation will be the word of 2025 in terms of what the government's doing. So, if you haven't been hearing about it, just sort of a brief overview of what reconciliation is and why it's really important this year. Reconciliation is a special congressional procedure that is meant to help Congress write bills that will cut spending, save the government money. So it has special rules essentially that all related to how much money do you spend and how much money do you save, with the main litmus test being it has to save some sort of money. Which then allows it to move under these expedited procedures. And the big thing about reconciliation, the one thing you have to know about it is it lets you pass a bill in the Senate without the threat of filibusters. So you can pass a bill with a simple majority, 51 votes or 50 votes if you have the vice president voting as the tiebreaker.
Republicans in the Senate will have 53 votes, and the vice president, so they have a pretty decent margin. What they don't have is 60 votes, which is what you need to get past the filibuster for legislation. So, if Republicans want to move especially big, impactful, controversial, likely to be highly partisan bills where they're unlikely to get democratic support, reconciliation is the way they'll do that. And both parties have used reconciliation a lot. The two examples I always mention that people are most familiar with, the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, that passed under reconciliation in 2010. Pretty dramatic votes actually on that one down to the wire. And then the Trump tax cuts in his first term in 2017, those also moved under reconciliation. And those are good examples to bring up in part, because what we are hearing and really what the discussions in DC have been for the last six weeks have been what will the reconciliation process look like?
And I think there's a lot of discussion, but what seems to be the understanding, the broad understanding is we'll have two different bills, two different reconciliation bills. And one will go relatively early in the next few months and it will focus on a grab bag of seemingly unrelated items. It would be things like border security, it'll be things like education, which we'll come back to in a second. It'll be things like tariffs and trade provisions, a lot of things that are essentially seen as either top Republican priorities or things that were campaign promises of the Trump campaign. And they'll try to move those relatively quickly and deal with those out of the gate. The second package of reconciliation would be a tax focused one and would look an awful lot like what we saw in 2017. It would look at doing things like lowering different types of tax breaks for corporations, expanding, especially extending a number of those 2017 tax breaks that are set to expire this year, as well as new provisions, including a bunch that are specific to higher education that we're concerned about that have been getting even some attention to today.
That one will probably go later in the fall into the winter. There's still a lot to be determined, the size of these bills, what's included. And it's a really difficult calculation, because you have some total of money both spending and savings that has to be reconciled. They have to come from different committees under the jurisdiction and the individual committees have to approve them. They have to be pulled together into one mass bill. It's a complicated process, and since it moves under special roles, there are also very specific things that have to be paid attention to. It's not easy, but it is probably the easiest path forward for major substantive legislation to change. So that's why for these big policy areas, that's what it's being talked about.
Sarah Spreitzer: So Jon, this weekend we learned that the leaders were talking about the fact that rather than two reconciliation bills, which is what the Senate would prefer, they are going to try and push through one reconciliation bill. And one of the notable things about that, and I think why the Senate is concerned about it is that it'll almost be so big that it could fail on the fact that it is such a large bill. And we also have in D.C. we talk a lot about the first hundred days of an administration. That's usually the runway that a president has to get things done when he has the most kind of buy-in from Congress for his agenda. And this would take longer than 100 days, right? We're talking about a reconciliation process that would probably play out until the fall. And when that happens, you have a lot of different groups, trade associations such as ACE that are going to start picking apart and pointing out the problems with what's in the package to the members of Congress.
Jon Fansmith: I mean, in some ways given the kinds of things we're hearing proposed for reconciliation at one packed higher ed, great, I would hope they go with one bill. One bill is going to be a much more difficult lift and it's going to start seeing things stripped away to try to get it to passage. But I think cooler heads will prevail and we'll probably pursue the two-tier approach.
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, should we talk about what will be in those one or two bills that will impact higher education, since that's basically going to be what we're going to be working on for the most part of this year? Should we start with education?
Jon Fansmith: I think that's a perfect one.
Sarah Spreitzer: Great.
Jon Fansmith: And I think we'll try just at least for the purposes of this conversation to split them up along those two lines. Talk about tax provisions first and then where it's a little bit more speculative about some of the education provisions. But the tax provisions are very clear. Jason Smith, who's the returning chair of the Ways and Means committee, which deals with tax policy in the House. Today the reports are out that he has proposed expanding the endowment tax on colleges and universities, both in terms of the size, the percentage of that tax, raising that level, as well as expanding the eligibility requirements so that more institutions would be subject to it.
Currently, the number of, and this was a tax provision that's passed in 2017. It was part of that first Trump tax reconciliation bill. It affects about 40 or 50 institutions. All private, does not apply to public institutions, and it's a tax on their size of their endowment holdings based on a calculation of the size of the endowment relative to the number of students on the campus. That is one that we've known for a while the committee would be looking at doing, expanding that tax. It doesn't generate a lot of revenue. I think this is important. So, it's not really being done so they can offset spending in other areas. It's being done in a lot of ways because especially what are seen as elite institutions are really unpopular among congressional Republicans right now.
So, this will raise revenue, but it's raising revenue in the tens of millions of dollars in packages that are being talked about in the trillions of dollars. Raising tens of millions of dollars isn't a funding necessity, it's a political statement. They are doing it because they want to penalize those institutions and they think it is politically popular to do so.
It's also a small piece of a broader concern that we've seen among congressional republicans recently, with the nonprofit sector as a whole. There have been other proposals, again, not clear that they would be included, to look at expanding the endowment tax to other types of nonprofits. Think about museums or foundations or performing arts organizations that may have large endowments attached to them for charitable purposes. And then other things like new kinds of taxes on nonprofit organizations. Looking at different revenue streams that come to nonprofits, putting a tax in place on some of those, looking at other ways to tax the nonprofit sector that we've never really seen before. But there's a lot of suspicion of the nonprofit sector by congressional Republicans. A lot of belief that that sector harbors democratic sympathies or tends to be an unfair playing field relative to the private sector. So we've seen proposals in those areas to start using the nonprofit sector as a revenue base.
That's a tough one to advance for a lot of reasons. You look at religious organizations, you look at conservative organizations, there would be a lot of impact on groups that congressional Republicans have close relationships with and care very much about if you start expanding the field of the nonprofit subject to taxes. But it's certainly something they are considering and thinking about, and I think it reflects more a general mindset in that area.
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, and Jon, this was something that Vice President Vance had also advanced when he was in the Senate, so it obviously has support within the administration, and I didn't see what Jason Smith, if there were details on his proposal, but currently the tax is less than 2 percent and there had been talk about increasing it up to 35 percent. So yeah, that is going to be really a major issue for not just our privates, right, because the publics are also very concerned about the precedent that this sets.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, and it's 1.4 percent currently, but JD Vance's bill proposed moving it to 35 percent. If you don't keep track of… tax rates, 35 percent is actually higher than the corporate tax rate, so that would be a pretty massive expansion of a tax.
Where we have a little bit less clarity, but we have some hint of what will be coming as on the education pieces in that sort of second grouping of issues for reconciliation. And really what we've seen the most is discussion about including elements of a bill that was introduced in the House in the last Congress, it passed the House Education and the Workforce Committee called the College Cost Reduction Act. ACE, and our colleague associations have been working very hard on this bill. We are very opposed to this bill. It does a number of different things, but the big ones are it makes significant changes to the accreditation process, essentially allowing states and entities that partner with states to become accreditors for the purposes of federal aid, rather than keeping it at the national and regional creditor level. It would make significant changes to loan programs. For instance, getting rid of the Graduate PLUS and Parent PLUS loan programs entirely. Putting new caps on the ability to borrow for students throughout the lifetime of their education.
And then it also, I think what probably is our top concern would create a risk sharing program that essentially says schools would have to repay on an annual basis to the federal government a percentage of the unrepaid loans of their former students based on different categories of students. It is, when we ran the numbers, and I'll say the committee ran the numbers themselves, you can look on the committee's website and see what individual institutions did. We ran them, we've released it by state levels and by categories, but the committee's numbers line up with ours. To be clear, I don't think they're hiding anything. They have about 80 percent of institutions would have to pay a risk sharing penalty under their model.
About 30 percent of institutions will qualify for some money under something called PROMISE grants. But overall, over two thirds of institutions would wind up paying money to the federal government every year if this were to go forward, it generates about $8 billion annually in revenue for the federal government, so that's $8 billion coming back from colleges and universities to the federal government on an annual basis. For some schools that might just be several hundred thousand dollars. I think the average share, correct me if I'm wrong, was about $1.5 million. Each school would have to pay, but some schools would be paying tens of millions of dollars if they're larger institutions. So, it's problematic for a lot of reasons, and I've been talking about the money, but honestly, the bigger thing is when we look at risk sharing, and we've seen this all the time, risk sharing is not a new concept here in Washington DC, we've seen numerous other proposals.
What you see is the schools that enroll the largest numbers of students who are least likely to be financially successful after leaving their campuses -- and that is low-income students, first-generation students, students of color, whether using Pell as the determinant for what that might be or other characteristics -- those are the schools that disproportionately pay the most, because it is a measure that's based on students' financial outcomes after leaving your campus. So, if you have a larger percentage of your students less likely to have high financial outcomes, you are much more likely to pay a risk-sharing payment. It sets a lot of bad precedents in place. It certainly sets a lot of bad incentives for institutions, especially the institutions that can least afford to make annual payments back to the federal government of millions of dollars. So, it's a very problematic approach.
Unfortunately, many of those things I just talked about in the College Cost Reduction Act save a lot of money to the federal government. They reduce the amount of aid that's going out to students. That includes things like rolling back expansions of Public Service Loan Forgiveness and the administration's loan repayment programs that are seen as very generous to borrowers. Last year when that bill passed the committee, the accounting arm of Congress, the Congressional Budget Office, said that the bill as a whole would save $185.5 billion. That's a lot of money, even by federal standards. And the reason we're talking about it in reconciliation is, if you put those provisions into a reconciliation bill, that allows you to spend $185.49 billion on other things. Whether those are tax cuts or border security or other things that might be higher priorities.
So, we know for a fact that at least elements of the College Cost Reduction Act are being discussed among leadership for being included in the reconciliation package. We have spent a lot of time leading into this year and certainly encourage you if you haven't been having these conversations on your campuses to have them about letting your congressional delegation know what this might mean to your institution.
This is the time, right, Sarah? I mean, we know this while the discussions about what's being included, we know things will be added because members of Congress don't hear about them, don't hear any concerns. We know things will be taken away because they're hearing noise from constituents, and we do have an opportunity with margins as tight as they are, if we have two or three members simply saying, "This would crush my institutions, I can't afford this. That's jobs in my district." Then these are the kinds of things that might get taken off the table. So, this is my little proselytizing advocacy moments. I promise I won't do too many of these during this podcast, but for all of you, not in the room, but in the discussion with us now and certainly those of you listening at home, again, I encourage you to look at our website, see the materials we have up and engage as much as possible. Because this is the moment to do that.
Sarah Spreitzer: So Jon, beyond education, the other thing I think that we'll see in the reconciliation bill that our institutions are concerned about is on immigration. And we know that there's likely a border package that will be included. President Trump has talked about how he wants to do deportations on day one. Much of that can be done through executive order, but the money to pay for that process, which it is very expensive, you're going to have to house people before you deport them. You're going to have to pay for transportation to return them to their home countries. That money will likely be included in the reconciliation bill. And as a result, because of reconciliation, and as Jon said, you can pass it with only 50 votes in the Senate, we expect to see some policy issues included in there. And there was a question about the reconciliation process the last time and the Senate parliamentarian, because there was an attempt to pass a law that would have put Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA into statute.
And the parliamentarian said that it wasn't germane to the bill, because it didn't have a budgetary aspect, and so therefore it couldn't be included in the reconciliation process. I think the Senate parliamentarian is a wild card. I mean they're someone that they're not supposed to be tied to any political party. They're supposed to read the law and decide whether or not something can be included in a reconciliation bill. I don't know if they'll make any decisions. I think one of the things we're thinking about on the immigration side is that if you do a border control bill, money for a wall, money for deportations, if you try to sweeten the pot by including the Dream Act or something to provide further protections for those that are under DACA or even perhaps temporary protected status. And that is a possibility, I'm not really sure, but we do know that immigration and something regarding the border will be included in that reconciliation bill.
But Jon, I touched on executive orders, and I think in January that's something that we're really watching closely, because President Trump has said that even before he gets to reconciliation, before he gets to Congress and laws that he can pass, there's things that he can do under executive authority. And so, what are we thinking is going to happen on January 20? The president's inaugurated, he goes into the White House. What's going to happen on day one?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, and I'll hit a few, but Sarah, I think especially immigration as a lead-in, there's a lot in that space where I think we're expecting immediate action that I'll kick back to you to ask about. But I think the one, certainly the executive order we're expecting to see that I think is raising the most concern is, and people may be familiar, at the end of the Trump administration they put in place an executive order that was titled, Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping-
Sarah Spreitzer: Correct.
Jon Fansmith: ... I believe was the title of it. What it functionally was, was to say that for all federal agencies and all contractors to federal agencies, they would be prohibited from doing a number of things. But functionally what it was would be a bar on using the inclusion of diversity in your hiring practices, using the inclusion of DEI materials or policies in terms of employee training or retention efforts or promotion efforts. Essentially an attempt by the Trump administration to block federal agencies and for our purposes, especially contractors from using DEI within their organizations. Now, that executive order in 2020 was never finalized, never implemented. It was written in such a way that there was a reasonable belief that colleges and universities say, "Well, we're not necessarily contractors," or at least some institutions might be considered contractors under specific criteria, but not broadly.
What we think is most likely is that those same flaws that we found in the previous order have been addressed in what will be offered early in the new term, possibly as soon as January 20, and that they will look to have as broad and expansive a definition of a contractor as possible. Every one of your institutions signs the program participation agreement with the Department of Education to be eligible to receive Title IV. That is functionally a contract, you agree to do a number of things in order to be eligible to participate in the Title IV programs. We fully expect that that will be at least part of the criteria used to identify colleges and universities as contractors. If that is the case, and if courts uphold that, which is an important if, then this executive order would apply to intuitions. It would be the broadest attempt by the Trump administration to bar the use of DEI practices on college and university campuses.
Again, it would very likely be subject to legal challenge, the enforceability of that. I think it's a very broad order. The language use will be very important, but it is something that I think for understandable reasons we have grave concerns about. It's also goes without saying that for many institutions, if you are not eligible to participate in Title IV, you will lose the ability of a large number of students to be able to afford to attend your institutions. That's Pell grants, that's student loans. That's the tools that two thirds of all students use, to attend higher education in this country. So simply saying we won't sign the program participation agreement isn't really a viable option for almost all institutions. But having laid out that very bleak scenario, which we can talk a little bit about more in questions. I know there's some interest around DEI and the federal role there, Sarah, immigration, what else are we expecting to see early days?
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, in the first Trump administration we saw the travel ban. I think that was seven days after the inauguration. It happened on a Friday. I remember it very clearly. And then they tried to immediately implement it, which caused a lot of chaos at the airports, I think we're likely going to see another travel ban. The first one was quickly struck down by the courts. The second one was also struck down by the courts as being too broad. The president is not able to restrict immigration based on religious beliefs, which is what travel ban 1.0 and 2.0 the courts had decided were really focused on. And so, what we ended up having was a travel ban 3.0, which was stood up in the courts, which did not restrict it on the basis of religion. It was not the so-called Muslim travel ban, but instead included countries like North Korea, Venezuela, but only applied to those that had ties to the political party within Venezuela.
It also included Iran, but had an exemption for students coming from Iran on non-immigrant visas. And then travel ban 4.0 was expanded to add other countries such as Chad, but again, exempted non-immigrant visas like student visas. And so, it caused a lot of chaos. I think many of our international students were caught up in those first travel bans, but they were not actually directed towards our international students. And in the end, non-immigrant visas such as the F-1s and the J-1s were ultimately exempted. And so, we're watching very closely what could be included in the travel ban. And as Jon said about the race and sex stereotyping EO, all of this is likely going to be tested in the courts almost immediately. So, will the Trump administration try to do a very wide ban as a way to kind of fulfill some campaign promises like stopping any and all immigration until the border, the southern border is secure? That's likely not going to be able to stand up to a court challenge.
And then, Jon, I don't know. I mean there's been a lot of talk that they're preparing. They are planning to do a whole series of these executive orders really to set out a lot of policy goals. And if they are not up to surviving a court challenge, then perhaps seeking legislation around those.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I think, and we should say, this is not something unique to the Trump administration. Any new administration comes in, they've spent part of the last three months preparing for all the executive orders from the previous administration. They're going to strike down, all the new ones are going to put in place. A lot of time executive orders, I don't want to say that they're not necessarily meaningful. I think we've touched on some that will be incredibly meaningful and impactful, but a lot of them are messaging too. And so, you'll see a flurry of things in a range of areas across the board or in the early days of them. I really want to emphasize what Sarah just said about the importance of the courts too. That was always true, and we've seen in a lot of cases, which regardless of administration, advocacy groups bringing lawsuits immediately to challenge executive actions. The Supreme Court over the last couple of years has really weakened the legal authority of the executive branch to implement things unilaterally.
So, if you certainly last two years, we saw that used pretty aggressively against the Biden administration's policies, but the precedents apply equally to people on the other side of the political aisle. You will see very determined progressive legal activists who will challenge everything the administration does in circuits that are more sympathetic to their views. Just the way we saw judicial circuit selections that were favorable to conservative cases going forward over the last four years, the reverse will happen in the new one. So, that's not to say you shouldn't be concerned. That's not to say you should be concerned. That is to say it's an even more complicated environment than simply an executive orders issued, and this is what it means. There will be a lot of interpretation and analysis and injunctions. It's a very murky environment, but a lot of activity certainly to pay attention to.
We have covered a lot of stuff here, Sarah, and I noticed that I started off talking about how we wanted this to be as much of a conversation as possible and then proceeded to just have the two of us talking to each other for about half an hour.
Sarah Spreitzer: Hey, a lot happened over the break. I mean, in our defense, a lot did happen.
Jon Fansmith: A lot did happen, that's true. But we have a really incredible group of people in this discussion with us, and I think it's probably a great time to start hearing their voices and seeing what they have to say and what their questions for us might be. So we're going to throw it open to the crowd if you have questions for us. I know a number of you also submitted questions in advance, which we can go to as well, but certainly we give priority to people here in the room. So, as I mentioned, just feel free to raise your hands and we'll call on you and be sure to introduce yourself once you're selected. And Ronald Carter, you seem to be our first hand up.
Ronald Carter: Thank you. Ronald Carter, Presidential Sage for the American Council on Education Fellows Program. Could you tell us where Title III will land in all of the discussions, particularly when it comes to the College Cost Reduction Act?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, Title III and Title V, and I'm going to put them together for the purpose of this, is in an interesting space. The first Trump administration put a lot of emphasis on trying to build relationships with HBCUs in particular. And we have seen policy proposals that we didn't talk much about, but the Heritage Foundations Project 2025 proposal talked a lot about restructuring Title III and Title V. And for people who may not be familiar, these are programs that provide direct federal support to institutions by category and predominantly Minority-Serving Institutions. So, HBCUs funding specific to their purpose as federally recognized institutions is under Title III. The same for Tribal Colleges and Universities, and then Title V deals more primarily with Hispanic-Serving Institutions. The proposals that we have seen have been to say, and they're almost all about funding. Is to say that instead of doing the formulas, that award funding from a broader pool split by certain percentages across that only HBCUs and TCUs would get direct federal support under the changes they would propose. And they would be granted out as block grant programs to those institutions.
I will say that requires a lot of change. The administration can't do that on its own. All of those programs, including the funding formulas, are set out in statute. What you will probably see is when you get into those kinds of discussions, there's lots of other constituencies that will be involved and the ability to substantially change those programs would be a hard one to move in a narrow-margin Congress. There will be lots of constituencies there, whether it's professionally Black institutions or non-native serving tribal institution or non-tribal native serving institutions that have delegations care about their interests and are unlikely to want to see them excluded from federal support. It's also worth noting a lot of those institutions really need federal support. These are institutions doing very important work with very limited resources. So, I think the likelihood of the changes of that magnitude occurring probably not very high.
That said, when we get to appropriations in the amount of funding, having those priorities in place, you might see a situation which HBCUs and TCUs are proposed for bigger funding increases, while other institutions may be cut to accommodate those increases in the tight fiscal environment. So, it's a tricky space and certainly one in which what we think at ACE at least is that all of those institutions need far more resources than have been provided, both based on the need and the populations they're serving. But also the historic inequities we've seen in funding, not just at the federal level, but at the state level to those institutions. Cuts don't help anyone, even if certain, there might be winners, it's not an area we can afford any losers either.
Sarah Spreitzer: And Jon, we didn't talk at all about the appropriations process, which is the annual funding process for many of the programs that we care about, like Title III, Title V, the Pell Grant program. Congress has extended the FY 2025 appropriations fight to March, because they didn't finish the bills before they left this year, and then they're going to have to deal with the FY 2026 funding battle. During this time when they're having these reconciliation conversations about overall saving funds, they also have to discuss or argue increasing the debt limit again, and I don't know if that would be included in the reconciliation bill, but the appropriations process often gets caught up in that. And so, I think we are going to be watching the appropriations process very closely, but I think large increases are likely not going to be possible in this environment, and level funding or small increases will likely be considered a victory.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, that's a great point, Sarah.
Sarah Spreitzer: I think our next question is Dana Matthew.
Dana Matthew: Hi, thanks so much. This is an incredible conversation and one of the things that I'm looking for is a place where someone at my level and our level could actually support and weigh into the conversation. My initial thought would be to create a conversation or contribute to a conversation around the higher long-term risks to defunding and federalizing higher education. While you guys are also amazingly in the weeds of each reconciliation bill and each procedural process, I wonder if there's room for, and if there is, could you give us advice about how to weigh in? Is there room for someone at our level to have a larger conversation about the threat to higher education generally that could begin to coalesce institutions and voices around a message that while fighting the skirmishes in courts at executive orders and so forth… begin to coalesce a sort of philosophical unity or uniformity around the messages of what higher education does for democracy and what it means for higher education to be under threat of control by the financial machinations, that are being proposed, really to take on the parts of the Republican and others project to de-emphasize and weaken higher education?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I think a couple of things. It's a great question, first of all, thank you for raising, and there's a lot of different directions we could go, and I'm sure Sarah will have her own thoughts. One of the things that I think is central to what you asked is this shifting in terms of the importance of federal funding. It didn't really used to be that way. Federal funding was very much sort of supplementary and it was specific to the individual, that's how our financial aid was spent. But as states have increasingly walked away from funding public higher education and decreasing the amount available, the role of the federal government supporting institutions has grown and grown and grown. And that has been for a large part of our history politically not a bad thing. The federal government has really strict restrictions on what they can do in terms of curriculum, and we have not seen those really tested.
There'd been a widespread understanding that that was not necessarily what the federal government's role in higher ed was. Their role was to provide support to students, to provide research support and to provide reasonable accountability over those things to ensure that the dollars are being spent appropriately and they're going to the right people. What's happened though is we've had an evolution where that federal funding is so critical to institutions that there's a greater awareness by policymakers of the leverage it provides them to do things outside of those areas. And as higher ed increasingly has become a political issue, and I think if you've been paying any attention through the last two or three campaign cycles, things about not just affordability and value, but social policies on college campuses have been raised into the spotlight. And it's not a shock that as more and more voters care about these things and want their elected representatives to do something about it, those representatives are looking at all of the leverage points.
And we saw this last year with the anti-Semitism investigations where the House Republicans announced what they called a whole-of-the-House approach where they talked to the Science Committee and the Oversight Committee. They tasked them all with looking at ways to leverage their touch points on campuses to force institutions to make the changes they wanted to see in the handling of this issue. This is the new normal of operations. It's a very fundamental shift. And where we have been with the federal government, I think a lot of this, this is my theory, Sarah may disagree, but a lot of this all boils down to that value proposition. If we have a population of people who take it as a bedrock fact, as they used to, as they did 15 or 20 years ago, that the surest path forward, the surest path up the economic ladder was a college degree or some level of post-secondary training. And that fundamentally while expensive in some cases was worth the return, a lot of these other issues that have begun to be promoted or rise to prominence, they just won't resonate as well, right?
You're not going to shoot yourself in the foot economically over an abstract social issue, but if you don't believe in that value proposition and increasingly lots of people don't, you're more willing to buy into these lines of attack. And that's leveraging members of Congress to pursue that. So, you asked what can you do? I'm laughing, because it took me 10 minutes to get to actually answering your question. We are, as a national level, ACE is doing lots of work. We've talked about our Office for National Engagement at the state level, the government relations we would do in terms of federal national policy. We're a great voice for our institutions and we are constantly working on and trying to influence and shift that debate. But really, I'm talking to a group of people who have an incredible view of what a campus does who are thinking in the bigger picture about what a campus can and should do at the leadership levels. And you understand and know how your institution engages, not just with your students and your faculty and your staff, but with your communities and the role you play in those communities.
And that's where we are trying to say, we can demonstrate, there's tons of objective evidence about how good postsecondary education is for the economic return for an individual, it's indisputably good for you to go to school and get some sort of certification or degree. What we need is more voices like yours who are talking to your communities and saying, "This is what we do for you. This is who we are. We're not just employers. We're also the source of your workforce, whether that's highly skilled or otherwise, we're the market for your products. We are the social and cultural centers of your communities. We're the places where people in your community gather to achieve things they wouldn't be able to do without our support and our participation."
If you are making those connections individually, it's a whole lot easier for the policymakers to say, "I don't want to engage." I talked about this thing about risk sharing, right? If risk sharing translates to an individual institution, a policymaker as, "That's one less medical outreach program my institution can run, because I'm sending this money back to federal government." If that's one less food bank that we can operate in our community, if that's one less cultural event we can host, those are the kinds of things that make them rethink these policies. And it is really on that individual community-based level that I think we need to redouble our efforts to demonstrate value. It's not just economics. It really is what we do in so many different ways to hold communities together and advance their interests. So, I guess that would be my answer.
Sarah Spreitzer: And I would just add, as someone who used to work with individual institutions of higher education and worked with Democrats and Republicans in those delegations, it's important to meet members kind of where they are and to be transparent and to take their concerns seriously. And I think that that conversation is much better for an institution talking to a congressional member who may have graduated from your institution, or where the institution may sit in that congressional district, because they're going to listen to you much more than the American Council on Education. We know that we have a problem in messaging when it comes to cost, when it comes to return on investment, when it comes to concerns around value. And I think it's very important not to dismiss those things out of hand, and to really listen to those concerns and then kind of have that conversation and build a relationship with the congressional office where you can be a resource as they're trying to respond to these concerns that they're hearing from their constituents. Really important, and thank you for that question, Dana.
Dana Matthew: Thank you.
Sarah Spreitzer: Daryl Carter, you've been very patient.
Daryl Carter: Good morning, everyone. Daryl Carter, ACE Fellow, East Tennessee State University. As the new administration prepares to come in, there's a lot of fear. Most of it justified around what their objectives may be and how they may go about it? But politics is also about the art of the possible. And the fact of the matter is that Democrats traditionally are not as in lockstep with leadership as Republican rank and file are. And so my question to both of you is that where so many of these Democratic members, particularly in the House, but also in the Senate come from states or districts which also have strong Trump support, where do you see those Democrats possibly breaking with Democratic leadership to join Republicans to support various pieces of legislation, appropriations, et cetera, this upcoming year and over the course of the next four years? Thank you.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, and I'll say I think it's an interesting question, because in some ways we have a really good data point over the last two years, the past Congress, and where the respective parties and really in the House, the Senate, because of the filibuster it's very hard to accomplish anything that doesn't have some bipartisan support. So, the house is a little more of a litmus test of the respective party's ability to stay united. And I will say I will give credit to the Democratic leadership team. It's also one, a whole lot easier being in the minority. When you're in the minority you just have to oppose what the majority is doing in the House, which is easier as a unifying message than trying to come up with the ideas in advance on the by consensus. But we have seen a really very clear divide in the House Republican caucus between the Freedom Caucus members in particular, and especially a handful of them who are very, both have a high national profile and sort of an autonomous view on how to move forward policy.
And then those 17 to 25 or so swing district Republicans who, kind of the flip side of the question you're asking, need A, give Republicans the majority, and B, need to show much more moderate, especially around social issues, positions to retain their seats. Especially sailing into the headwinds of in two years the midterm election, which tends to rebound on the party in power. So I think we have seen, at least over the last few years, Democrats a little bit more united in part because they stay together as a block. They don't have that much authority necessarily, but with the tight margins, they just need to hold the line to see Republican initiatives fall apart. It's been a much harder job for Speaker Johnson, speaker McCarthy before him to make sure that he could identify proposals that bring all of his caucus in line. And funding is a great one.
Sarah talked about the appropriations process. Every appropriations bill that has passed has passed with Democratic support. Because Democrats voted as a block and stayed together as a block and agreed on what they could support. And ultimately, Republicans couldn't get enough of their membership to support any funding bill, so they had to turn two compromises that Democrats had. It's a surprising amount of power from minority to wield to have that much influence in the outcomes base, which is why some of the cuts that we've seen proposed just haven't enacted. So I mean, I take your point, I think those dynamics work in both ways. They're just much more pronounced for the majority. The majority has to deliver and they have to hold their group together, and we know Republicans are going to have a hard time with that. We've seen them have a hard time with it in a better situation in the last Congress than we'll be going into in this Congress.
Sarah Spreitzer: Andrea Duffy.
Andrea Duffy: Hi everyone. Andrea Duffy, home institution Colorado State University, host institution is Tufts University. Thanks so much for creating this opportunity. We still know that there's a lot we don't know. So my question is, in the days and weeks and months following January 20, which will be here very soon, what are some resources that you would recommend in addition to this podcast, of course, that can help us stay abreast of developments, changes, and help us best advocate for our institutions in higher education?
Jon Fansmith: I'm sure Sarah has her own list. I'd say certainly ACE's podcast, ACE's resources are of course a great go-to. There hyper-focused and pretty easy to find on our website in terms of the policy space. I would also just give a big shout-out to the folks at Inside Higher Ed who I think do a really good job of not just covering what's happening, but giving space for deeper dives into some of these policy issues and what that looks like on a campus. The Chronicle of Higher Education does a great job too. I've just tended to find Inside Higher Ed a little bit more focused on the policy side aspects of that. And then I'm sure given the institutions you're at that you're represented by more than one association, and certainly given the ACE speaks for everybody. But if you're concerned about the needs, particularly private institutions or community colleges, those associations often have materials and updates tailored to those particular institutional types that are worth keeping abreast of.
Sarah Spreitzer: And I would just put in a plug for your institutional office of government relations. Most institutions now have an office of external relations or government relations, and they're probably a great resource and definitely someone you should ask if a member is coming to Congress or a member of Congress is coming to your campus or you want to get involved. I know Tufts has a very active office of government relations. They're really great. They're great colleagues, and they're very helpful also in informing their national associations of what's happening on campus. And that's usually how we learn about issues is when a campus tells us. And so that's really important. But thank you for the question. Danielle, I think you're next.
Danielle Egan: Thank you again for this opportunity. This is great. Danielle Egan, home institution, Connecticut College, host institution Salve Regina and Queens College City, University of New York. I'm trying to, because there is such a constellation of things coming together with all of this. It seems like if there is the venn diagram, one is kind of curricular kind of potential interventions in terms of DEI and as well as kind of students. Some is economic, others are visa and immigration. And I mean at our campus, one of the things I keep coming back to is we have not traditionally had to think about things like childcare for students because of our student population, but if you look at mixed status families, we know that it's quite possible that will actually change. Whereas if families are deported, some of our students may be taking care of younger siblings.
But I guess what I'm trying to figure out is, what is that in the center of everything, the thing that could bring all of these things together? Is it reconciliation? Is it the threat to Title IV? What is the linchpin that this administration has that could impact all of these different areas that shape higher ed's promise and capacity?
Sarah Spreitzer: Sorry, Jon, I was going to jump in here. I would just say, I mean, the linchpin is the fact that we are dependent on federal funding, that we are Title IV schools. We take federal student aid, we receive research funding. All of those give the federal government the authority, right, to put restrictions or to do things on our campuses. And we talk a lot about how the fact that our institutions of higher education are actually in partnership with our federal government in addressing issues of national need. It's not a bad thing that we are partnered with the federal government. But that is the linchpin and that is their authority. I think over our institutions. And I would just say in this time, thinking about those students that might be impacted by what's coming. A good thing to do is to kind of have a meeting of the different offices across campus to play out these different scenarios and how you might be preparing your students and your campus community. I know many campuses are already engaging in this.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, Sarah answered that perfectly. The one thing I'd say and just continuation of what she was saying, we've talked about this in the immigration space. We've talked about this around DEI. It's really important to remember that while we may be under assault, we may be under pressure, may be several linchpins, right? There may be several focuses where this is coming from regulations or executive orders or legislation. That what we do is important, that we know who we are, we know what our mission is, we know the students we serve, and why we serve them, and that there's lots we can do to support those students and those staff that don't change regardless of the federal policy environment.
We will continue to navigate that. It will be a challenge. Undoubtedly, there are threats. Things will happen that we will not like, but we talked about with immigration, you can't say no to a federal warrant, but you can make sure that your students have access to the legal assistance that might help them deal with it. That they know that they're valued and part of your community. That you stand up for your values in your principles in a way that supports them and makes them see you as supportive of them. This is not, like Sarah said, we are partners with the federal government. We want to preserve that partnership in a way that is healthy and beneficial to the institutions and serves national needs. But that doesn't mean we have to change to be what the current federal government wants us to be. Compliance is not necessarily acquiescence.
Sarah Spreitzer: Thanks Jon. Peggy, you have the next question.
Peggy: Good morning. I am a fellow Sage with the Fellows like Ron Carter. So, one name I haven't heard about today at all is Vice President Vance. I'm still having a little hard time imagining him in that role, but what do we know? What do we need to know about him around issues of higher ed in particular, but I'd say more generally, just what can we expect from him in terms of both the role he might play and just kind of his general stance on issues?
Jon Fansmith: Thank you. It's an interesting question, and I'll say Sarah might have some more illuminating thoughts. Generally the joke about the vice president is it's the least important office in Washington D.C., right? I think it's a little bit harder to predict. President Trump has not tended to show a great interest in sort of the detail level policy work. And while Vice President-elect Vance has only been a senator for two years, he doesn't have a long legislative history. He has been very outspoken about higher education. For those of you who might've seen a presentation I was giving over the last few weeks, I would cite one of his quotes where he talks about attacking colleges and universities as being essential to accomplishing their policy goals. And that's not language we're familiar with hearing. Attacking was his word, not mine.
He has spoken a lot about, especially elite institutions, a skepticism of elite institutions in higher education generally. Will he play a more impactful role in policy shaping and participating? Vice presidency isn't really set up necessarily to do that structurally, but this is an administration that hasn't shown a great dependence on norms before. And so a non-traditional approach to this, whether there might be a vice presidential commission around higher education or things like that, things around the endowment tax, certainly you could see him being an advocate going to the hill in support of that provision. Since it's something he's been talking about. Things don't immediately leap to mind, but I would be shocked if we weren't hearing from him regularly on the role and value of colleges and universities.
Peggy: And he forgot that he went to Yale.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah.
Peggy: I'm sorry, but that's just too much.
Sarah Spreitzer: I will say as a senator, he was only in the Senate for one term or maybe less than one term, so I don't know how much sway he's going to have with his Senate colleagues, but I could see him taking a role in working the Senate just as Trump is working with Speaker Johnson. I also know that our colleagues at Ohio Institutions did a lot to educate JD Vance when he was a senator about the value of higher education and he served on the Senate committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. And so he's aware, especially on the federal research side, I think about the importance of research funding for our institutions. But beyond that, as Jon said, the role as vice president has never typically been one that's been extremely active, so we shall see. Nayshon, I think you have the next question.
Nayshon Mosley-Milford: Awesome. Thank you, Sarah. Nayshon Mosley-Milford, my home institution in Chicago, state University in Chicago, Illinois, and my host institution is Radford University in Radford, Virginia. Sarah, first of all, I want to thank you for addressing something that was a part of my initial question, which was regarding appropriations. I know you talked about that earlier on and you indicated that we're currently in the continued resolution and more than likely we'll see level funding for fiscal year '26. And so I want to pivot a little bit and ask a little bit about the reauthorization of Higher Education Act. We haven't seen a reauthorization since 2008, but TRIO programs are very close to my heart, and so I would love to know what can we expect from the Trump administration regarding federal funding for such programs as well as other things like financial aid?
Sarah Spreitzer: I think first to the Higher Education Act, and Jon's going to grimace if I say anything wrong here. I think what we're seeing with the Higher Education Act is we're likely never, or at least in the near future, going to see a full reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Rather we've been seeing pieces of it moving and I think the College Cost Reduction Act, I mean that's basically the reauthorization of the Title IV programs. Specifically on TRIO, TRIO has such an amazing advocacy network. I mean, when the TRIO folks go up to Capitol Hill, they are forced to be reckoned with, and it is a program that I think has generally had bipartisan support and that more members want to see it funded and they want to see more TRIO programs funded. So I think as far as individual programs within the Department of Education, I would feel good about that one going forward.
Again, we may see cuts proposed in the President's budget that Congress then restores. You may see level funding just because we may have a continuing resolution or that's the fiscal environment, but I don't see TRIO being called out specifically for cuts. But I don't know, Jon, if you have a different opinion?
Jon Fansmith: No, I am very concerned about cuts in a lot of areas for higher education, whether that's research or other types of financial aid. We've seen proposals to make big cuts to Federal Work-Study and SEOG and other programs, but TRIO and a real shout out to Kim Jones at the Council for Opportunity and Education, somebody known for a long time and love immensely and is fantastic at what she does, and that organization's fantastic at what they does. They have a really strong connection across the aisle with members, and TRIO is one of those programs where the story tells itself, right, but they're telling it really well to all the people that are making the decisions. So TRIO I think is probably a relatively safe area of higher education funding. In part because it's an incredibly important and valuable and demonstrably so program and also just because there's some really great and thoughtful people who are carrying that message around the Hill for them.
Sarah Spreitzer: But thank you. Thank you for the question. Michael, I think you're going to get the last question here.
Michael Harris: Thank you. Michael Harris from Southern Methodist University, and this year I'm spending the year at the University of Utah. I want to go back to a comment that was mentioned earlier about Vice President Vance talking about attacking higher education. Those of us in red states under unified Republican control for a bit have experienced these attacks for a while now, kind of ideological-based attacks. And I'm wondering what lessons you've learned from those states that have faced, obviously the federal policy looks a little bit different, but there's a lot of the same ideology behind what I suspect we're going to face in the near term. What lessons have you all learned and how are you applying those to your work and advocating on behalf of higher ed?
Jon Fansmith: That's a great question, Michael, and I think there's a lot of different lessons we've learned, and I think the way I probably put it's, they come in at different levels. One of the things we saw, certainly from the first Trump term is this idea of saying, well, we're going to be the resistance or we're going to be the opposition, or we'll fight every fight and whatever you do is wrong and we'll be oppositional. Hardening the lines of opposition in some ways doesn't get you very far, and I want to talk, I'm talking at the federal level and I'm going to take this to the state level. Because I think there's some important parallels there. There are also, frankly, lots of legitimate concerns about higher education, and I talk about this a lot. The value proposition is not a Republican attack on higher education.
The value proposition is a concern that Americans feel broadly, and Democrats act on that and Republicans act on that, and while some politicians may use rhetoric or may take approaches that are more political in nature because of that underlying concern, we have real challenges that we need to talk about and address and resolve not just to our satisfaction, but to the public satisfaction. And hesitating to engage on the level of admitting there are challenges. It doesn't mean we undercut the value of what we do or we say it's not important or that we're doing some of the things we're accused of, but saying we know there are opportunities and what that might look like. Whether that's doing more for support services to get students completion or looking at what's affordable or what kind of programs they offer and what ways they align with workforce.
There all reasonable questions to ask and address. That said, I think, and you picked this up from my comment, we've seen this a lot at the states. There's a lot of discussion not just about the value proposition and legitimate ways to address that, but using these conversations as political forces, and I think we talk a lot about going back maybe Governor Youngkin in Virginia was sort of the progenitor of this, raising the element of education and higher education as a campaign issue. Certainly Governor DeSantis in Florida, the attention he got, the primary, the focus he gave to these issues, using them in a very politicized manner, has played out again and again and across the states. And what we've tended to find from talking with our members in red states and in blue states, right, the attacks come from both sides. Is that when you have honest conversations with your lawmakers, with your representatives, when you talk about the things that you do?
DEI is a perfect example, right? A lot of times the debate around DEI is guided by a very limited and very incomplete understanding of what institutions mean when they talk about DEI. We've had member presidents who talk to their state reps and said, "My DEI office is where my office of veteran students is located, where my disability support services section is located, where my outreach to rural students section is located." It's what we are trying to accomplish with this area. You can use whatever terms you want, but what we are doing is something that you actually would agree with and you would actually support, making sure that students feel they belong on a campus so they can succeed on that campus and reenter society or may stay in the society. Growing in their roles, expanding their economic opportunities, building their communities.
When you have those conversations on those terms, a lot of this noise, the politicized hype, it fades away. People understand that. There will always be people who seek to manipulate the moment for political gain, and again, that's not just Republican, that's both sides. This is a politician thing, not a party thing. Those things will always happen. We have a really good story to tell. We don't always tell our story very well, but we have a great story to tell in those one-on-one conversations. That's how we tend to do it the best. But Sarah, I know you will have more and better-
Sarah Spreitzer: No, I was just going to add, I always think about how the overall popularity of Congress is very low, like below 20 percent, but when people talk about their member of Congress, they're always very popular. It's the same, I think for institutions of higher education. People think about Yale, they think about Harvard, they talk about the cost. They talk about the fact that people are unable to get admissions into these institutions. But when you ask about the regional public or the community college or the small private that's in their backyard, they're like, "That's a great institution of higher education. It does so much for the community. It educates the people of our community. That's something that we want to save." And so to Jon's point, it is important to have those conversations with the congressional members in your backyard, because they are going to listen to you much more than they're going to listen to, say the American Council on Education or another national group that may be trying to address these issues.
Jon Fansmith: I'm looking at, not just are we coming up on time? I think we've shot well past your time, but I know I'll speak on behalf of Sarah here. Thank you so much for your questions, for your thoughts, for your engagement with ACE and for what you do in your campuses and in your communities, and especially thanks for letting us crash your meeting to participate today. Again, you'll be able to hear this podcast go up on our website later in the week. But it's really worth taking a moment to just reflect on the fact that you are all representative of a really great tradition within the ACE Fellows program that, as we mentioned at the top for over 60 years has empowered leaders and built communities. And really strengthen the heart of American education, and that's going to be more important than ever. We're in a challenging environment as we just talked about. So thank you all for what you do.
We are tremendously appreciative and grateful for that, not just for letting us join your take your time, but for the work you're doing on our campuses and to support your students in your institutions. Thanks so much for joining us. More information if you'd like to join the Fellows Program in the show notes and link to it, and thanks everyone, we'll talk to you soon.
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