Jon Fansmith: Hello everyone, and welcome to this April 30, 2025, edition of dotEDU Live. Glad to have you joining us for this episode. And I'm Jon Fansmith, ACE senior vice president for government relations and national engagement. And unless Ted [Mitchell]'s going to drop in randomly into Mushtaq screen, again, I will only be joined this week by my regular co-host, Sarah Spreitzer and Mushtaq Gunja. Sarah and Mushtaq.
Sarah Spreitzer: I would be happy to be two people. I'll take that.
Jon Fansmith: And Mushtaq, I might step aside, let you do double duty.
Mushtaq Gunja: I locked the door so Ted can't come in today. So it's just going to be the three of us I think.
Jon Fansmith: Don't think it's a good idea to lock your boss out. Seems that seems problematic.
Mushtaq Gunja: We'll see if it works out for me. Alright, friends. Jon, Sarah, it is 100 days since the beginning of the Trump administration, may feel like a little bit longer than that. Jon, Sarah, reactions? How have you been tracking what's happened over the last 100 days?
Sarah Spreitzer: It does seem like longer, I'll say that, like 100,000 days. I don't know, Mushtaq, there's been a lot of press reports about looking back at the last 100 days. I thought it was interesting some of the numbers that have been pulled that President Trump has issued 142 executive orders, on the most of any president, he surpassed Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And it's interesting because we've seen a lot of modern day presidents really pushing that executive authority, but 142 executive orders, it's a lot.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And we'll be talking about some of those executive orders because there's been a few relevant higher ed recently. But I think it's interesting for me, I spent so much time hyper-focused on the higher ed side of it and occasionally, pull my head out and look at the rest of the world and we have the first quarter GDP numbers came out this morning, the economy actually contracted by about three tenths of a percentage point in what was really seen as in some ways a litmus test on the president's economic policy, especially around tariffs. And a lot of what we saw in the last election was voters were motivated by how they felt the economy was working for them. And there's been even within the Republican Party some pushback on the administration really in this tariff and economy space.
And I think the thing that's been interesting is it's early. It's hard to judge any administration when they're still getting their people in place, but they have been very, very active, not just in the higher ed world and the poll numbers, I know you track these Mushtaq, have not been favorable to president for this early in the honeymoon period. He's made big swings and not all of them are paying off it looks like.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. I was just looking at some of the polling data. His job approval numbers are dropping and they are dropping fast. He started at a little bit of a higher spot than he did the first term, but they've moved a lot. So CBS has them at 45, 55, 10 points underwater. Fox News has this approval rating at 44 and NPR at 43, CNN at 43, Times at 42, Post at 42, Pew now down at 40. I mean, these are all down a lot. He was in the positive by a couple of points on average about a month in, and he's underwater by about somewhere between 10 and 15 points now.
The other thing that's been striking, you alluded to this Jon and Sarah, YouGov has been asking about particular policy issues too, and I think the results of the polling on particular issues are really striking. So on a survey from April 1, some of the things the administration are proposing are generally popular with the public. So banning artificial food dyes, the public favor 68 to 17, using IRS tax records to identify those without status in the country, less popular but still 49, 36 popular, voter ID requirements 62, 29. So this sample that they used was not reflexively anti-Trump.
That same survey showed the public overwhelmingly does not favor some of the stuff that the Trump administration is proposing. Deporting immigrants to El Salvador without letting them challenge the deportation, 26 percent support, 61 percent oppose. Laying off 10,000 workers from HHS, 27 percent support, 62 percent oppose. Canceling $600 million in teacher training grants, 26 percent support, 63 percent oppose. This one really struck me. Shutting down the Institute of Museums and Library Services and it's a place that's close to our heart, 14 percent support, 71 percent oppose. Last week they did a couple of other briefings. Firing workers at the National Endowment for the humanities, 25 percent support, 54 percent oppose. Eliminating scientific research at NOAA, 15 percent support, 65 percent oppose.
I mean, I don't know, look from a big picture perspective, it certainly looks like Trump has overplayed his hand. Will he keep overplaying it? I mean, I think that's what we have to see, but it is, he came in maybe overthinking exactly how popular he was, how much support he had, but these particular policy proposals, many of them are not popular and I think it might be starting to sink in. It's going be really interesting to see how the courts react and then how Congress reacts. I mean they are closer. We might say, "Well, the Trump administration, whatever, they're not going to care," but Congress might care. I mean, these people are going to be here for longer than the next four years theoretically. So I guess we will see.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. I'll say, I saw somebody somewhere and I don't necessarily know that I agree, but I love this point. They said that the American public loves change candidates and hates change politicians, they don't like change. They like people who promise to change the system but they don't like it when they actually experience that change in action. And it's an interesting way to think about what's happening right now.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sure.
Sarah Spreitzer: I think that there's one thing about how people feel about the president and then how people feel about these policies, and Trump has again and again... The polls don't really impact his popularity. He still wins the vote, but I do think there's something interesting there on the policies, especially because these are policies that he campaigned on, being hard on immigration, taking a hatchet to the federal government, shrinking the overall size of the federal government and maybe it's the speed with which he is moving, but some of the changes I think looking past the first 100 days, we've already heard rumors that Elon Musk is going to be stepping down from a pseudo-government job. That they're going to start doing things slightly differently. President Trump had a cabinet meeting today, I think that the cabinet secretaries were talking about post 100 days, what were they going to work on. But yeah, I don't know if I hold true all of those polling numbers seeing how the last few elections have turned out.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. I think both things can be true. Both things might be true, that the public wanted some change at a high level and is very, very unhappy with the specifics of the way that some of that change is being carried out and I don't think that he campaigned on cutting scientific funding at NOAA or cutting the National Endowment for the humanities. At a broad level, sure, he said he wants to reduce the size of the federal government, but what that meant in practice, I don't think it was clear enough. If it were, then I think we would see different numbers here.
Jon Fansmith: Going back to where we started, there have been a number of executive orders, which is exactly like what Sarah was talking about. He is trying to put a lot of his campaign promises in place. 142, was that the number Sarah, executive orders issued already and there were-
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, 142.
Jon Fansmith: Six or seven of them that have a direct impact on higher education issued in just the last week that I think it's probably worth touching on. And Sarah, they're evenly split among our focus areas. So I'll start with one of the ones that has gotten a lot of attention and certainly I've been tracking pretty closely. The administration issued an executive order called reforming accreditation to strengthen higher education and in some ways guys, I feel like I've been talking about this executive order for months prior to it ever being released because it was widely expected. We were talking about this, I think the three of us back in November after the election that we would see this in some ways it's a surprise that we got all the way into the end of April before it was actually issued.
Likewise, what was in it I think was pretty much expected. There was the language around DEI programs and diversity that's become a de facto part of every executive order that touches on education, certainly calling out what I thought was interesting, in particular the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association for their inclusion of a consideration of diversity in their accreditation reviews of law and medical programs. Some other things that I think are a little bit more traditional in the space, wanting to promote innovation and talking about doing that by saying we want to allow new accreditors into the system. We want to speed the process by which new accreditors can enter the system. We want to speed the process by which institutions can change accreditors. We want to look at student outcomes.
We can go into this, I know we always get questions about accreditation, but one of the things that always strikes me about these proposals is the law dictates in many ways what accreditors have to look at. The 10 topics that they're required to look at, all the accreditors look at student outcomes, that's a measure that they pay attention to historically regional ones. A lot of what's said in the executive order is really putting a spin on what's existing practice, and I think a couple of the accreditors put out statements that really resonated with me. They essentially said, "In a lot of ways we welcome this because we're already doing this," and that doesn't align with how the administration portrays accreditation, but I think the practical effect, the diversity piece will certainly be impactful. And some of the other areas, maybe just reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what's already happening in the space.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, are there next steps that our accreditors should be taking and anything that our institution should be tracking as it relates to this accreditation EO?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. I mean, I think certainly the relationship you have as an institution with your accreditor. I know that the accreditors are looking very carefully at their standards. I think we've already seen some discussions over the last year and a half about how they address issues of diversity and inclusion and belonging, what that looks like in terms of standards and their overall perspective, what they're putting out. For institutions, unless you are in the middle of a transition between the accreditors, which we've heard from schools now this department has begun expediting to begin with and an executive order only reinforces, not a lot of immediate impact from this. I think what we're really going to see in terms of maybe fireworks or impact will be at the federal level when we get to NACIQI, the commission that oversees the accreditors, starting to have reviews of the accreditors as they come up. That's where we're going to start to see maybe some of these efforts around what's in the executive order put into practice.
Mushtaq Gunja: Great. And Sarah, there was an EO, executive order on Section 117. What was happening there?
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. So Section 117, which is an issue near and dear to my heart, as you all know, is the foreign gift and contract reporting that's in the Higher Education Act. It requires schools to report foreign gifts or contracts at $250,000 or more, and this is something that's been around since the eighties, but the Department of Education never actually did any formal rulemaking around it, and it was this odd reporting requirement that people didn't really pay attention to until the first Trump administration when we started to hear bipartisan concerns about foreign malign influence.
So the Department of Education started looking at it. Started really trying to encourage compliance by investigations. Those actions were somewhat pulled back by the Biden administration. The reporting requirements didn't change. Our institutions were still reporting, but the Trump administration I think had launched around 16 investigations and they had sat out there for 5 or 6 years in some cases from the Trump administration going into the Biden administration and towards the end of the Biden administration, they had closed those investigations. This executive order that was issued about transparency regarding foreign influence at American universities directs the Secretary of Education working with the Department of Justice to really start those investigations again, in some cases to reopen the investigations that were closed by the Biden administration. So we actually saw them already reopen an investigation into Harvard. The Harvard letter is on the Department of Education website, but one of the things I will point out is that the questions being asked right now of Harvard are not questions that were previously asked.
For instance, it asks for the names and details of all of the international students who may have been enrolled since 2010 at Harvard. It's unclear what does that have to do with foreign gifts and contracts. It also asks questions about the indirect cost rate or the F&A rate, which is something that we've talked about with the other agencies. It's unclear why is that part of a Section 117 investigation. This week we saw a letter sent to University of California Berkeley on Section 117. So I think what this executive order is doing is it's not changing the reporting requirements or how our institutions are doing the reporting, but rather it's really directing the Department of Education to start those investigations back up.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, same question to you then, Sarah, that I asked Jon, anything in particular that our institutions should be aware of, should be doing in the meantime and maybe in preparation for receiving one of these letters or maybe to try to fend off getting one of them in the first place?
Sarah Spreitzer: Well, I think all of our institutions that would hope are in compliance with Section 117. I mean, again, it's this small provision in the Higher Education Act. It was in the FSA offices under the Trump administration. It moved over to the Office of General Counsel. I think that the Trump administration is likely to move it again back to the GC's office, but I would really encourage all of our institutions to really look at their foreign partnerships and ensure that they're in compliance with Section 117.
Mushtaq Gunja: Maybe two other executive orders I wanted to ask about that have been released in the last few days. Jon, there was an executive order around HBCUs. Can you tell us a little bit about what was in that executive order?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And I think this is a really interesting one. It's an important one. There's a lot to unpack here, which I'll try to do quickly, but the Trump administration issued an executive order around basically recognizing the important role HBCUs play not just within the higher education space but nationally within a lot of different contexts, and it establishes a White House office for Historically Black Colleges and Universities. It has a lot of language in there, especially about promoting public-private partnerships, promoting their research enterprise at HBCUs, recognizing the funding challenges that HBCUs have, directing federal agencies to think about ways to prioritize or direct resources to those institutions. I'd say all of that is very welcome, much deserved, certainly appreciated.
I think one of the things that's actually most immediately beneficial though of this executive order, and there's been some good reporting on this too, we have seen at HBCUs and other MSIs for that matter, grants and funding that has been canceled, contracts that have been canceled with those institutions because of these DEI executive orders that have been out, and a lot of times at agencies, there's this very aggressive interpretation we've seen where if it mentions something that might be under those expansive lists of words, a contract gets suspended, a grant gets terminated.
And I think this level of profound attention to HBCUs at least gives them a really nice avenue, a window into the White House to say, Look, this is the work we're doing. This is not necessarily what you are worried about. This is not necessarily what you are trying to stop. Our views on that effort aside, getting that grant funding restored, getting those contracts restored, this gives them an opportunity, HBCUs a better opportunity to argue their case and address some things that again, these things probably shouldn't have been terminated in the first place. It's not great to restore what should have always been there, but given what else we're seeing, certainly welcome in this environment.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. Well, a little bit of good news there. And there are also executive orders that have been released around apprenticeships in-state tuition for undocumented students, EO around disparate impact. I don't want to get into all of those, but if either of you had a couple of words that you want to say about any of those executive orders, please go ahead.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. I would just say the one that's protecting American communities from criminal aliens, that was just issued yesterday. It has a section that's looking at institutions of higher education that offer in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants, but that obviously is going to run up against some state laws where they are requiring public institutions of higher education to offer in-state tuition to those immigrants. So Mushtaq, that's one that's definitely I think going to play out in the courts, but not surprising. I mean we've seen since the start of the Trump administration on January 20, when he did executive orders that said he was going to take action against state and localities that provided any direct or indirect support for undocumented individuals.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And that got a big boost too when Florida moved within their own state to rescind in-state tuition for undocumented residents, and I think there feels... We knew they were going to pursue this. Florida taking that action has only added fuel to that fire and again, it's an EO, it's not a law, but it's putting more pressure on states and localities in terms of how they serve these individuals, which is concerning.
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, a couple sentences on the disparate impact executive order or maybe we can't do it in a couple of sentences.
Jon Fansmith: That's a tough one to cover in a couple sentences. I mean, I think certainly you can look at this from a couple ways, and I think a bigger discussion of disparate impact and the importance of that in the education space is worth a longer discussion. There is a very clear reaction by this administration to the Biden administration and also Obama administration policies around the consideration of disparate impact, particularly at the K-12 level, whether that's around disciplinary procedures or other things. And we've seen that before from the Trump administration, early executive orders around K-12 disciplinary procedures and things like that where they very clearly in the executive order makes it very clear they do not agree with the consideration of disparate impact in terms of looking at the policies and practices of educational institutions in particular, but more broadly as well.
Mushtaq Gunja: Well, let's see if we can find a little time to spend more than just a couple sentences on that. That was a very good, for summary of the questions and concerns, Jon. Here's what I want to do over the course of the next 20, 30 minutes, I was hoping that we could spend a little bit of time talking about immigration and international students. There's been some movement on SEVIS and on some of the questions around international students, and I want to spend a little bit of time hopefully talking about reconciliation and what the funding outlook looks like because we learned a lot I think in the last little bit.
Why don't we do international students first? Sarah, a lot of reporting last week about what's going on with SEVIS. Read a couple of articles and may or may not be more confused, but maybe... Well, Sarah, let me just put it this in the form of a question. Did the administration backtrack on SEVIS, and have they given comfort to at least some of our international students who may have been at risk of having their legal status revoked?
Sarah Spreitzer: Mushtaq, the last time we spoke, I think on this podcast we were talking about these actions being taken by the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security where they were revoking certain student visas, but then they were taking the additional step of going in and terminating a student's record in the student exchange visitor information system. There were two reasons for this.
One, we knew was for students that perhaps had participated in some pro-Palestinian or political activity in a campus protest or something like that. And then two, the wider swath of students I think seemed to have some criminal charges or criminal activity that was triggering the student visa revocation. Those students based on the criminal activity, it has now come out in the over 100 court cases that have been filed because of the student visa revocations that this was done where they were taking a national criminal information database, matching it up with the names of student visa holders and in some places not verifying if it was the correct person that matched the name on the national criminal database, or even whether or not charges had ultimately been dropped against the student, or perhaps it was being triggered because they had a minor run in such as some speeding tickets, which actually would not cause you to lose your student visa.
Because of these court cases, DHS has now taken the action of restoring some of those SEVIS records, but again, not informing the students or the institutions, they're just finding this when they're going into the SEVIS to see this. It's unclear whether or not they're actually restoring the student visas. And if your student visa is revoked, it doesn't mean that you have to leave the U.S. immediately. It means that you're out of status, but that really should only impact you if you leave the United States and then you try and re-enter on the same visa. Because the SEVIS records were being restored, I think the international students that saw their student visas revoked now feel that that hand pushing them to self-deport, may be easing off a bit, but it's clear that DHS in the court documents is trying to figure out a policy where they can actually go about this action.
And I think for us, very troubling is we still don't have information from DHS. We still don't have information from the State Department about these actions. If this is a new policy that's being put in place, where do we go with questions? Or perhaps a student sees their student visa revoked and they believe that they have the wrong person, they could take it to the immigration court, but that's going to require hiring a lawyer, the stress while they're studying or actually trying to finish up for the semester. So we know some of the SEVIS records are being restored, but again, continuing a lot of confusion, a lot of chaos, and I don't want to say that this is the end of these actions against this group of international students.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. Just taking a big step back, I mean it seems like maybe the Trump administration had this view that there were thousands of international students that were here wreaking havoc and had been breaking the law, and so they should have their visas revoked. And to effectuate that, it seems like they went into the FBI database, but when they went there, they found that there was basically no international students doing the wreaking this havoc that they thought was being wreaked. So when they checked with the FBI database, there were all these students that had unpaid traffic tickets or even paid traffic tickets in some instances, and they just went in to, I guess tried to revoke their status. I think they just didn't find what they thought that they were going to find. And now what happens next? I mean, as you say, Sarah, it just seems…
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. And if your student visa has been revoked, the only way to get a new visa is to leave the United States and reapply, and that's going to be problematic if they go into the system and they see that your SEVIS record had actually been terminated. So a lot of questions, and again, one of the things that I continue to tell people is that our institutions have a long working relationship with DHS and state. Our institutions have to be certified by DHS to issue an I20 that the international student then takes to the State Department to apply for a student visa. Then once they enter our campus, they're tracked through the SEVIS system. We are partners in addressing a lot of these issues and the fact that we're not getting a lot of transparency about these things makes it really hard for our international officers to do their jobs and then also for our students where it's just a lot of uncertainty.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sure. One last question here on the international students face. Gloria asked a good question in the chat. Are we starting to see lower numbers of international students apply and accept admissions offers, and are we seeing meaningful numbers of students self-deport? What are we seeing from a big picture point of view?
Sarah Spreitzer: Really good question. That data usually comes out in November through a report called the Open Doors Report, which is usually put out by IIE and the Department of State. Unclear if it's going to happen again this year. I mean, I don't have anything to indicate that it wouldn't happen, but given some of the rifts and the reduction in force at the Department of State, never say never. What we know is that our schools seem to be issuing the same number of I20s, but we are hitting the period when those international students are going to the U.S. consulates, the U.S. embassies to apply for visas and given the reorganization that's happening with the U.S. Department of State and we know that they're looking at closing embassies and consulates, we're going to be watching very closely that student visas are being processed in a timely manner.
Mushtaq Gunja: Thanks, Sarah. Jon, can I ask you about what's happening with reconciliation and the House bill? What's happening big picture wise? What's ACE doing about it? What are the contents of what we know of what's happening in reconciliation?
Jon Fansmith: And there is a lot happening in reconciliation. It is very significant and it speaks to the moment we're in that we're half an hour into this before we're even touching on this, but we have been talking about reconciliation really since the election because we knew that this would be with one party control of Congress, Republicans go to pass a lot of key priorities, both the president's campaign promises, but things around tax extensions and others that have been priorities for a while, reconciliation offers that. And we are finally beginning to see the details of what might be in the bills because the individual committees are marking up, they're creating their bills and passing them out of committee. That have the details about what reconciliation will include and really for higher ed, more importantly, what reconciliation will cut or change.
And just quick background, the House and the Senate are working on two very different tracks, but the House Education and Workforce Committee, and the House total, they have to find $2 trillion in spending cuts as part of their reconciliation process, and the Education Workforce Committee has to find 330 billion of cuts. The Committee Education Workforce Committee marked up their portion of the reconciliation bill yesterday. They passed it out of committee. They found $351 billion in savings, so cuts to student aid, to institutional support, especially to repayment for borrowers provisions for repayment for borrowers. There is a lot in this bill and it's worth talking about. I'm going to try and do it as quickly as possible, but for-
Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, before you do, what is reconciliation? I'm sorry. I used some jargon there and I shouldn't have done that.
Jon Fansmith: That's actually, yeah, and I probably should have talked about that.
Sarah Spreitzer: Good question. What is-
Jon Fansmith: Reconciliation is a congressional procedure for passing legislation that was created to help Congress take difficult votes to cut spending because cutting spending is hard for Congress. They have lots of constituencies. They don't want to see funding cut. What it's become is actually a pathway for the majority party to pass legislation that's very partisan generally, that would not get 60 votes in the Senate to bypass the filibuster. Reconciliation because it's a special procedure has special rules, you only need a simple majority in each chamber. So 51 votes in the Senate and 218 in the House. It has some other things that expedite the process. There's limits on how it's amended timeframes, it has to move in. We've seen it used with the 2017 Trump tax cuts. We saw it with the Biden administration in their first two years with the Inflation Reduction Act. It's basically just the way big complicated non-bipartisan bills move.
This one has a lot in the higher ed space, so there's $351 billion in cuts I was talking about. It does a couple different things to Pell Grants. It provides about $10 billion in new money for Pell Grants, which is good. Looks like it's hard to tell without all the financial data. Looks like it addresses the shortfall that is looming in the Pell Grant program, so that's very much a positive. The flip side of that coin though is that the other way they address the Pell shortfall is they change eligibility for Pell. They move what's considered full-time enrollment from 12 to 15 credits per semester, which also moves the floor for half-time up, and then they eliminate anyone who would be under half-time enrollment from being able to receive a Pell Grant. This doesn't seem like a lot. I understand that, but if you work in a financial aid office, if you work with low-income students, especially if you work with working adult students who are low-income, adding a requirement for an additional full course every semester to reach your max Pell matters. That's why it saves money because this is a big change.
They do a few other things. They would eliminate the Grad PLUS lending program. They would significantly reduce Parent PLUS lending. It's only available under very limited circumstances. It would change annual loan limits by capping them at a median cost of attendance based on program. So every BA in History program, the median cost of attendance for those programs nationally, that would be the maximum borrowing amount at any institution. So, 49.9 percent of BA in history programs that would have a higher cost, students won't be able to borrow up to the full cost of attendance there.
The biggest thing, frankly, that we are concerned about is the inclusion of a risk-sharing proposal. Again, this was in the College Cost Reduction Act that passed the committee, didn't make it to the floor last Congress. People might be familiar with this, but basically what risk sharing does is say we are going to take a calculation of different groups of your students who are in repayment. They've left the campus, they're no longer studying, and look at what they should have paid versus what they have paid towards their loans. And whatever portion that was unpaid of what they should have paid, a percentage of that the school has to pay back.
The committee's own numbers in terms of evaluating what the impact of risk sharing would be, say that 90 percent of all schools would have a risk sharing payment, and even when you factor in these PROMISE grants that the bill also creates, which would provide some PLUS money for institutions under their formula that they think are doing well, even if you throw that money back into the pool, again, these are the committee's numbers, not ACE's numbers, 75 percent of schools lose money under this risk sharing plan. So that's three quarters of all institutions will wind up paying something back to the federal government on an annual basis. The total of that will be $18 billion. This is not insignificant money. It's a big pool of money.
What's more, and I think for a lot of institutions this will resonate, you find out what you have to pay the federal government back and you have three months to pay it back. This is not, you find out before you start your budgeting for the year. This is not, you find out what time to plan for it. This is at some point during your funding year, you have to come up with this money and you also have no way of calculating it because all the data you need to calculate, the federal government holds. So you're going to get a bill sometime in the middle of the year that you're going to have to pay. And if you don't, there's all sorts of penalties involved. It is a really problematic approach. So we will see where it goes. The House pass it off committee, it'll now go to the Budget committee. It'll be bound up with the other reconciliation bills and we will see.
I do think, and thanks to the people on this webinar, thanks to the members on our campuses who have been really good about explaining what we're sharing with remain, especially around, and I'm seeing it in the chat too, the implications for those schools that enroll the largest numbers of low income first generation, students of color that tend to have the lowest earnings outcomes when they enter the workforce. Those are the schools that get hit the hardest under a sharing scheme. So it's taxing the schools who can least afford to pay these penalties, and I think there's a greater and greater sense of that among members of Congress and in the public, but still we're at the start of this process, not the end, a lot more messaging to do around so people understand what this really means.
Mushtaq Gunja: It's really frustrating on the risk sharing, Jon, because I was listening to an interview with a representative who said, This risk sharing is really important because it prevents schools like Harvard from having philosophy students that are graduating, and they have no ability to be able to go get a job. I mean, now having looked at a lot of data in this Carnegie work, I know that those are not the places that are going to get hit. And also the incentive structure that's built into risk sharing is just to try to incentivize schools to not enroll low income students of color who had the hardest time getting good paying jobs in this labor market. So I just don't think it's going to have the effects that they think that it is going to have. I think they think it's another way to punish Harvard and humanities programs. It's just not the case.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. I think it's also though, as somebody with a medieval studies degree, a philosophy degree doesn't immediately mean that you're not going to earn a salary. To me, it's that it's going to harm those smaller humanities programs and it's going to impact those first generation students who may be thinking, "I want to get an English degree to figure out how to write, how to speak, how to analyze things." There's a reason our institutions offer those degrees. But Jon, back to what you started with, the Senate's in a very different place. So yes, it's all gloom and doom on the House side, but do you think the Senate's actually going to take what the House has passed out of committee?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah, Sarah, I mean, it's a great point because I think we are hopeful based on what we've heard from folks on the Senate side, that this doesn't have as much appeal on the Senate side. And it's worth noting. I talked about the House had to cut at least $330 billion. Those are their instructions. That was the requirements given to the committee on the House side and the Senate, that is very different. The Senate instructions are fined $1 billion in savings. So you have $330 billion, which they address with $351 billion in cuts. The Senate side is 1 billion. They can essentially do almost anything they want to do, and we know that risk sharing is not nearly as popular a concept on the Senate side.
Chairman Cassidy of the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee has put forward some proposals around curbing Grad PLUS, addressing college costs. He's done that in a way with a number of members of the committee. Risk sharing is not an element of that. There are caps on that. There are things that we think are good and interesting ideas. There are some things there that we think probably need more work, but what we haven't seen is a lot of receptivity to that, and they have the flexibility. They don't need to hit those marks the way the House does, so there's more room to operate, more room for hopefully better policy to be implemented, things without the dramatic negative impacts we would see if the House version goes forward.
Mushtaq Gunja: Okay, so what's the timing?
Jon Fansmith: That's a good question. The House is moving really fast. In fact, they put in a lot of the provisions saying that the effective date of them would be July 1 of this year. If the bill were to pass and be signed by the president, that would take effect. That would be significantly problematic. July 1 is the start of the federal financial aid year. That would mean for the fall semester these changes would go into effect. Before people panic about that, the Senate has essentially said, We are going in end of July and maybe before we get it through, we want to see what the House is doing.
The House is going to have a real hard time, especially around things like what they're doing on Medicaid, which is the big driver really of this debate and will be the biggest factor in this debate. What cuts to Medicaid look like, and then even things around taxes. There's a lot of issues around the state and local tax deduction that are in play among Republicans, they have to resolve. So the House is moving slower probably than they'd like to. The Senate is moving much more deliberately. We're really looking at something where even assuming we can get over all the hurdles, and it's not a guarantee. This is tough to do with really tight margins in both chambers. Maybe the fall, early winter is I think what people realistically expect to see, even if the goal is to get it through before the August recess.
Mushtaq Gunja: Last question, and it's a good one in the Q&A, why the disparity between the 330 billion in the House side and the 1$ billion in the Senate, and which number is going to carry the day?
Jon Fansmith: Which number will carry the day, will be the result of negotiations. I don't think we have any reasonable way of predicting right now. The difference between the two is really the difference between being a member of the House of Representatives and a United States Senator. Senators by and large represent their states. That tends to have a more moderating influence, and when you talk about big picture impactful cuts, the pain points for senators are spread across a much larger map.
If you are a member of the House, overwhelmingly now, we have what a handful of actual legitimate swing districts in each election. Most members are in partisan districts. Most members are more afraid about being primaried by somebody from within their own party than losing to somebody from the other party. The calculus is different, and what we've seen in the House is a much stronger interest in proposing big cuts. Like I said, the House as a total has $2 trillion in cuts as part of the reconciliation package. The Senate is $4 billion. That disparity really reflects the political realities between the two chambers.
But I will say this, the House members have said, We can't accept anything that's lower than the 2 trillion in cuts. Members of the Senate have basically said, There's no way that's palatable to us and we'll approve it. It'll be a bit of a game of chicken between Senate and House leadership over what they can get through, what Trump is willing to accept, what he can muscle through, what the ultimate deal looks like at a level that if I knew that, I'd be betting on the futures markets and some other things.
Mushtaq Gunja: We were talking about the Ed and Workforce parts of the budget, but there are other parts of the budget that may end up impacting higher ed. Anything that you wanted to highlight in the dollars that we've seen out of Ways and Means or Commerce or Judiciary or anything else, Jon and maybe Sarah?
Sarah Spreitzer: We haven't seen Ways and Means yet, unless that happened today while I was in another meeting.
Jon Fansmith: No. Ways and Means is, and for folks who don't follow the committees, Ways and Means somewhat confusingly is the tax committee in the House. That one, and Energy and Commerce, which is responsible for Medicaid because those are the two biggest areas, Medicaid, and then the tax provisions that are in dispute. They just started talking about SALT yesterday, so there's a ways to go before those committees, even in the House moving on their faster schedule, will report their bills out and mark them up. We still don't know.
I'll say Judiciary, there's one interesting thing... Nobody cares about this, but I just want to talk about it. We talk a lot about regulations. There's a bunch of language in the judiciary bill and then some of the other bills about limiting the executive branch's ability to create regulations that would essentially flip the process from currently, administration does regulations. Congress can overrule them if they dislike them under limited conditions. This would say any regulation that has a significant economic impact has to actually be approved by Congress before it can go into effect, which if you think about how much 142 executive orders, all the regulatory efforts, every administration puts forward because Congress doesn't act, they've only passed five laws. If you flip the script and all of a sudden say, Congress has the authority for approving regulations, it's either a quagmire or something where no regulations get enacted. So it's a really interesting formulation. Who knows how it will go. The practical reality of it, it's hard to fathom. But anyway, I just wanted to mention that.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah. It's like Congress is why not try it. Let's see how this goes. But there was language in the Education and Workforce bill too, on negotiated rulemaking or saying you can't do negotiated rulemaking on a specific part of the bill.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And I can imagine people falling asleep as we talk about this.
Sarah Spreitzer: Okay. Sorry.
Jon Fansmith: And it's worth talking about. I mean, I love it. Obviously, you know I'd talk about this all day and that's the producers hate that fact about me, but there are limitations on regulations in part because we're coming right out of the Biden administration were congressional Republicans felt like the Biden administration did a lot of things in regulation they hated, and Congress didn't have the ability to weigh in. It's a little bit interesting to see some of these efforts when you have a Republican administration in place that would give the, in one hand, give Trump some authority to cut regulations, eliminate existing ones, but also make it much, much harder to implement new ones, but something worth tracking and certainly, again, we're early stages in some of this.
Mushtaq Gunja: I think with the president's budget and what's happening with appropriations right now.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. So right now the appropriators in Congress are basically sitting on their hands and waiting for a bunch of information from the White House. There's three things that are out there. One is a rescissions package, which was due, expected to be due out Monday, which essentially is a lot of the cuts we've seen at different federal agencies, programs terminated, staff eliminated. The administration has money Congress gave them to pay for those things. They put a package together, they send it to Congress and they say, Look, we're not going to spend this money. We don't need to. We're asking you to reduce the authority. If Congress doesn't actually change that, the administration is obligated to spend that money for the purpose it was provided. We'll see what happens. In Trump's last first term, there was a rescission package that was rejected by Congress, so it's not a guarantee the administration will get what they want, even with majorities in both chambers, but that would help codify what current year spending is.
The other thing the administration was supposed to provide appropriators is something called the skinny budget. This is in the first year of a new administration. It's basically an executive summary of the annual budget submission. It's the highlights, what they want to spend, key policy areas, key proposals. It gives the appropriators in Congress essentially a starting point to say, this is what the administration wants to do. They usually disregard it entirely, but it helps kick off the process, and both of those things are due to Congress. Neither of those things have yet come forward. They're expected any day now, but we keep hearing rumors that they may not be as close as we had thought.
Sarah Spreitzer: But we have seen a lot of pieces leaked though, Jon, I don't know on the education front, but we saw that NSF, it would be more than a 50 percent cut. I think with the National Institutes of Health, we saw that they would push forward on this idea of reorganizing the current institutes into a much smaller footprint at NIH, and also a very large cut for their budget. So yeah, I think there's a lot that's been leaking out even though it hasn't come out yet.
Jon Fansmith: And with leaks, it's always worth to put a caveat in. Sometimes leaks are intentional, sometimes leaks are accidental, sometimes leaks are strategic. There's a lot still to be determined, but I think it's helpful, Sarah, certainly in terms of where we think the administration is going.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sure. I'll ask about a few very specific programs and what we know about the status. So TRIO, Fulbright. Well, let's just start with those two. Jon, what's the status of TRIO in all of this? And Sarah, if you know anything about where we are with Fulbright, that would be great.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. So in terms of TRIO, generally the program, again, this is the question we get with a lot of things where I think there's concern and uncertainty about what this administration will do. TRIO is authorized in statute. Its funding is provided by Congress for that purpose. It is subject to the same Impoundment Control Act protections. Any other form of funding is. There has certainly been a lot more discussion about the TRIO Program, but in terms of current fiscal year funding that remains intact, programs should be funded.
Now, there was a recent decision by the Department of Education where there were pilot programs in, I believe California and Oregon that allowed some TRIO programs to serve undocumented individuals, and that was at the discretion of the department. The department withdrew their authorization to do that. These were pilot programs. They were looking at how those services would benefit those populations. So obviously it's harmful in the middle of a study to eliminate that as well as the obvious impact on the students themselves. But otherwise, more broadly we will see going forward, I saw a mention of Work Study in SEOG too. I think we expect to see across a lot of areas, big cuts in FY26 once the appropriators get started and they get that information from the administration we're just talking about.
Mushtaq Gunja: Sure. Sarah, Fulbright?
Sarah Spreitzer: Fulbright, I wish I had news. I mean, my understanding is that it's still pretty much paused at the Department of State. We're having this problem across the board, I think at various agencies because programs are being paused to be reviewed, but the pause is taking many, many months. We've also seen the implementation of Doge rules around drawdowns of any funding where they have to fill out all of these forms for any of the funding that's being drawn down, even if it has previously been funded. So I'm putting Fulbright in the category of National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the other federal funding agencies that we usually see funding from, or the regular order does not seem to be happening. So my understanding is Fulbright is coming out in a trickle. I don't think we're back up and running as we were pre-February when students were getting their stipends on time in a regular order. I could be wrong, but I haven't seen anything to say that the pause on the funding has been lifted.
Mushtaq Gunja: There's a question in the Q&A about HSIs. I mean, given the executive order on HBCUs, have we seen any movement on something similar or helpful related to HSIs?
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. I mean, actually the opposite, really. The Biden administration had created White House initiatives around a range of different MSIs, including HSIs and TCUs and others. The Trump administration rescinded those executive orders, de-established those offices when they took office. So far in that space of the Minority Serving Institutions, HBCUs are the only ones that the Trump administration has both maintained and even expanded the representation within the executive branch of.
Mushtaq Gunja: HSIs, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and MSIs, we referred to earlier Minority Serving Institutions. Last question, and maybe a hard one because I know it's all in flux and maybe affected by the difference between the 330 billion and the 1 billion, but PSLF, I mean, what do we know about Public Service Loan Forgiveness or anything more about applications being approved? What's the status of that program right now?
Jon Fansmith: Public Service Loan Forgiveness, there's a lot of questions because there's two things that are happening with it simultaneously. The reconciliation bill rolls back, the Biden administration's expansion of Public Service Loan Forgiveness. Essentially, the Biden administration won't go into the details, very few people would be able to get PSLF if they followed the law as it's written. The law was written in such a way, it's really hard to qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. The Biden administration made it easier for people to qualify in keeping with the intent of the law, but not the way it was actually written because you'd roll that back. That would save money. That's in reconciliation.
Separately, the Department of Education right now is going through the process of identifying topics to do negotiated rulemaking on for this year, and one of the topics they have raised is eligibility for Public Service Loan Forgiveness. There was a public hearing yesterday, there'll be another public virtual hearing tomorrow, and then public comments are due on Monday to the department on these topics and others.
Two things, Public Service Loan Forgiveness, in addition to the department's rulemaking around this, the other elements it could include, there's been a lot of discussion about who should be eligible on two fronts. One is that there are a lot of people who essentially work in public service, they are doctors, nurses, EMTs, others, but because they work for private corporations, a private hospital, an ambulance company, they are not entitled to Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which is restricted to government employees and nonprofit employees. So there's a lot of interest in seeing how we more equitably allow for PSLF access to people who are doing the work we want to reward, but are maybe not doing it for the employers we envisioned when the bill was drafted. I think that's a positive, looking at that.
The other thing though is this administration put an executive order on Public Service Loan Forgiveness out that essentially said eligibility should be removed for nonprofit organizations in the executive order's terms that are doing things illegally. When you parse the examples they give, what they're talking about are organizations that promote reproductive rights, and organizations working in the environmental and climate space. Organizations working to support undocumented immigrant populations, is a very partisan interpretation of what should be an eligible nonprofit organization. Certainly, not one intended by the drafters of the bill, which was signed by a Republican president as had bipartisan support. So it would also be just frankly, Mushtaq, incredibly difficult to write language that says, These groups we like and these groups we don't, and therefore, one's eligible and therefore one's not. But that might be a factor in negotiated rulemaking on PSLF, if we get to it.
Mushtaq Gunja: With a clear first-members viewpoint discrimination problem. I mean, you can't order associations by what the viewpoints say is false. You just can't do that. But I guess we'll see.
Sarah Spreitzer: So can we actually end on a happier note, Jon? We've spent this whole time talking about what's been taking up our time in government relations, none of which is happy, but our friend, Mushtaq, was extremely busy this week with a certain project he's been working on.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yes. A question we should discuss-
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. More than 100 days of work, Mushtaq.
Sarah Spreitzer: Question is, tell us about Opportunity Colleges, Mushtaq.
Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. Thank you. I have had the privilege of getting to work on the Carnegie Classifications, and the classifications are published every three years. They were last published in Spring '22, and last week we published the full Carnegie Classifications. We previously published the research part of the classifications, like the R1, R2 research college and university list, but last Thursday we published the full new classification, which has a revised basic classification. 31 new classifications, groups that should look mostly familiar to all of you, but with a few tweaks here and there of additions of schools, and a slightly different multidimensionality view of higher education instead of just sorting institutions by the highest degree they offer. We're also looking at different categories, different metrics, including the types of degrees that you offer. So I'm very excited by that.
And then we created a new Student Access and Earnings classification to be able to try to center students in the classification regime. And we didn't know exactly what the data would show when we went into the project, but I'm so excited to note that the vast, vast majority of our schools are doing an excellent job on both access and on earnings. Something like 81 percent of our institutions are having their median students earn more than a representative counterparts are. So 81 percent of institutions doing an excellent job on earnings. 75, 76 percent of institutions are doing a great job on access, meaning that they're educating the students in the geographies they serve. So it's just wonderful to see what the higher education landscape is doing in 16 percent of institutions are doing both providing high access and having their students go off to meaningful amounts of employment and huge amounts of earnings.
So really excited to be able to do this work. Please come find it, carnegieclassifications.acenet.edu. There's so much fun information there. Come find me if you have questions about any of it. Thanks for ending us on a happy note, Sarah, and it is a good note. It's wonderful to see how well our institutions are doing overall.
Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah.
Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And Mushtaq, I'll just say since you weren't able to track the chat while you were talking, lots of praise and love for you, your responsiveness, your engagement, the work you're doing, so well-deserved kudos. Sarah and I certainly see it all the time, but it's being recognized outside our little bubble too.
Mushtaq Gunja: Carnegieclassifications.acenet.edu or just Google search Carnegie Classifications, you'll be able to find it. Thank you all. And thanks everybody. We'll be back in just a couple of weeks. Thank you for all your engagement, and thank you for all the questions in the Q&A and the questions in advance, really helps us organize these outlines. So thank you. Thank you. We will see you all soon.