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More than half of President Biden’s higher ed agenda either didn’t move forward or was blocked by the courts.
Nearly four years ago, President Biden took office with ambitious plans to relieve millions of borrowers from student debt, protect trans students from discrimination and crack down on for-profit institutions. Getting that done required the president to use executive power to issue new rules and regulations and rewrite those put in place by the Trump administration.
But now, with Trump set to take office again in less than two weeks, many of the current Education Department’s most pressing agenda items, particularly those aimed at bolstering consumer protections for students, remain dead in the water.
Even rules that survived the gantlet of public comment and legal challenges—such as ones that hold institutions accountable and increase scrutiny over college mergers—could quickly be rolled back under Trump, landing in the graveyard alongside the rules that the Biden administration proposed or plan to pursue over the last four years.
As the clock waned on his administration, Biden took what’s likely his final action related to higher ed policy, finalizing new regulations that require colleges to report more data about their online programs, among other changes. But the final rules didn’t go as far as the administration planned. For instance, the department decided not to expand eligibility for some college-prep programs to undocumented students or to require colleges to take attendance in online classes.
And just days before that action, the Biden administration called time of death for several other efforts, scrapping two of the department’s remaining debt-relief proposals from consideration as well as a controversial rule regarding the participation of transgender student athletes in sports that align with their gender identity. Withdrawing the rules was part of “an administration-wide plan … to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from retooling them to achieve his own aims,” the Associated Press reported.
Combined, the dead regulations and significant modifications are a disappointing end, particularly in light of the Biden administration’s and advocates’ ambitious hopes. They wanted to improve consumer protection, promote accessible socioeconomic mobility and combat the mounting student debt crisis. But those same advocates also credit Biden’s bold ambitions, as his administration set out to essentially accomplish in four years what former president Obama did in eight. And the policies that have survived, such as making debt relief for public servants easier to access and opening up the Pell Grant to students in prison, will have a lasting impact, they say.
“The Biden administration has been very successful and productive,” said Carolyn Fast, director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan progressive think tank. “If you compare them to other administrations, they actually were pretty successful.”
An Inside Higher Ed analysis of nearly 40 higher ed policy topics on the Biden administration’s rule-making agenda found that 42 percent were finalized and thus far haven’t been blocked by the courts. But issuing rules on 16 topics is more than the roughly 12 higher ed measures finalized by the Trump administration, according to Federal Register documents. The Obama administration issued about 15 final rules over the course of its two terms, though several were packages of regulations that covered a range of higher ed topics.
Still, many of the president’s agenda items—including some of the most ambitious and high-profile ones—have not been implemented. Nine of the president’s plans for higher education, such as the long-running plan to outline colleges’ obligations to combat antisemitism, never progressed further than making the to-do list. Three efforts to update the rules for state authorization, accreditation and cash management made it through a key step of the rule-making process—negotiation—but then were withdrawn. Four were proposed but not finalized. And five were finalized but blocked by courts—the majority of which had to do with debt relief or student loans.
Causing ‘Whiplash’
The many tombstones in the Biden administration’s regulatory graveyard is in large part because the president’s early agenda was focused not only on undoing rules Trump had put in place, but re-establishing and expanding Obama-era policies.
That included overhauling Title IX, a rule that protects students from sex-based discrimination. The rule, which took the department nearly two years to finalize after proposing the changes in June 2022, is currently blocked in 26 states and at hundreds of colleges. Trump is expected to roll it back entirely to reimplement his own version.
This back-and-forth process of repealing an opposing party’s regulations and implementing your own has become commonplace in federal higher education policy over the last decade and will likely impact policies well beyond just Title IX in the months ahead.
But with each presidency, the game of “regulatory Ping-Pong” seems to intensify—frustrating college leaders who are forced to expend their resources to comply with certain rules, only to watch the next president reverse course a few years later.
Michelle Dimino, education program director at Third Way, a left-of-center think tank, said the regular change in executive policy causes “whiplash” for many institutions. But she noted the stakes are even higher for student borrowers.
“These are regulations designed to smooth the pathway for students,” she said. “So altogether, when you think about pulling back these packages of regulations, you’re creating an environment where it’s riskier to be attending federally funded programs of higher education.”
Dimino added that exchanges of power in the White House would be less damaging if the political parties weren’t so polarized and gridlocked on Capitol Hill.
“Because these were going through regulation and were not fixes that were made statutorily, you just open up the door for a new incoming administration from the other party to dismantle them and do their own process,” she said. “There’s just less stability than when Congress effectively legislates and moves policy priorities through its chamber.”
Clare McCann, managing director of policy and operations for American University’s Postsecondary Equity and Economics Research Center, a research group focused on promoting more equitable outcomes in higher education, echoed Dimino.
“Ideally, a bipartisan Higher Education Act reauthorization would be able to provide more of that long-term clarity,” she said. “But in the short term, it’s going to continue to be confusing for schools and students to navigate.”
Legal Blocks and Possible Repeals
In addition to undoing the Trump administration’s policies, Biden’s higher ed agenda also included several more ambitious items, most notably debt relief, which has proven difficult to get across the finish line.
After making promises of debt relief for student loan borrowers in his 2020 campaign, Biden announced a controversial plan in August 2022 to forgive up to $20,000 in loans for all eligible Americans.
The Supreme Court shot down that plan in June 2023. That was the first of several legal setbacks for the president’s debt-relief agenda, though he has forgiven $180 billion for 4.9 million borrowers using other avenues.
Michael Brickman, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, suggested that much of the Biden administration’s higher ed agenda can be split into two main buckets: student loan forgiveness and “going after” for-profits—both of which, in his mind, “have broadly been a failure.”
“A lot of the things they sought to do were not legal and, at the very least, were not good policy,” he said. “They were able to inflict regulatory damage by writing letters and sending the message that there might be regulatory scrutiny … [But] I don’t think that’s what anybody wants their government to do.”
In addition to the first and now-withdrawn debt-relief plans, several other loan-focused rules have been blocked by courts. First, a federal appeals court in August 2023 blocked Biden’s borrower-defense rules, which would have made it easier for a defrauded borrower to seek debt relief. Then, a subsequent effort to make student loan payments more affordable for borrowers was also put on hold by a federal judge in July 2024. And finally, a more narrow debt-relief plan that targeted borrowers who met certain criteria was blocked last fall.
In the end, Brickman believes that Biden’s debt-relief agenda not only failed but also actually backfired.
“They always knew that it was illegal, but they thought they would get away with it. They did not,” he said. “They also failed to anticipate the ways in which this loan forgiveness conversation has contributed to the decline in confidence in college, because it is implying that going to college is not only a bad deal, but such a bad deal that students need a federal bailout.”
Success Depends on Survival
While the debt-relief effort is likely the most high-profile agenda item Biden failed to finalize, groups advocating for students say the Biden administration should be applauded for trying in the first place.
They also say the president has succeeded in some areas, pointing to the debt relief he has provided and new measures, such as the gainful-employment rule that requires institutions to be transparent and report more data on the cost of attendance and student outcomes postgraduation, among other changes. Others add that the proposals that didn’t survive have value in the way they shift the conversation about what policies are possible.
For example, the Biden administration has come the closest to actually requiring college accreditors to set benchmarks for student achievement. And the Biden administration’s gainful-employment rule is a stronger version of a rule first created under the Obama administration that the Trump administration rescinded. Under gainful employment, for-profit and nondegree programs can lose access to federal financial aid if their graduates can’t afford to pay back their loans or make less than a high school graduate.
“The Biden administration was very strong on some work that it did to try to make sure that students and taxpayers are investing in programs that actually do provide a benefit,” said Fast, from the Century Foundation. “If it survives, it would have an enormous impact on protecting students from wasting their time and money on career programs that aren’t going to help them boost their earnings or be able to pay back their debt.”
Whether gainful employment survives will depend on the incoming Trump administration and the result of a pending lawsuit that aims to block the regulations, which took effect over the summer.
Groups like the Career Education Colleges and Universities, which lobbies on behalf of the for-profits, are opposed to the rule, arguing it’s an example of executive overreach and represents ideological bias. Other nonprofit colleges have also pushed back, arguing the rule requires institutions to report too much data in too little time.
Some conservative analysts have argued that the Biden administration’s use of executive power will leave a playbook for future presidents to use. But regardless of whom the president is and what changes they choose—or choose not—to make, the rule-making process will remain lengthy.
Trump hasn’t said much about his plans for higher education policy beyond a pledge to abolish the entire Education Department, so it’s unclear what he plans to do with regard to gainful employment or how much he’ll use Biden’s playbook and depend on regulation.
That lack of specifics makes it difficult for McCann and other experts to predict exactly when and in what ways the pendulum will swing next, but she’s hopeful that the growing public demand for return on investment will create at least some continuity of policy between Biden and Trump.
“A lot of the rhetoric that we’ve heard from the Trump campaign and from folks who are associated with the transition is around increasing the value of higher education and increasing transparency into which colleges are producing value for students and taxpayers,” she said. “So that’s sort of the biggest thing I’m watching, is to see whether the incoming administration matches what they’ve said with action.”
