Colleges Expect Less Red Tape Under Trump, More Input on Policies

As Donald Trump returns to the White House, academics have expressed a catalog of concerns about the vulnerability of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, student loan forgiveness policies and academic freedom. But while the president-elect is expected to ramp up scrutiny of academia, policy experts say that certain executive actions could benefit colleges and universities as employers.

The potential rewards for institutions will vary, with private for-profit institutions likely to see the greatest gains. The incoming administration is expected to roll back regulations for colleges and universities, which should provide some benefits. Institutions also could see a boost if the administration changes union or compensation rules. Plus, the protection of certain tax credits could benefit colleges that provide health insurance and promote charitable giving.

“We forget sometimes that institutions are major employers. In many cases, they may be the largest employer in the state,” said Sarah Spreitzer, vice president of government relations at the American Council on Education. “In the labor and employment area, this administration coming in is likely to be more favorable to institutions than to employees.”

Trump’s record during his first term gives college officials reason to hope for policies they say will benefit colleges. Although higher education did receive comparatively less attention over all, then–education secretary Betsy DeVos undid many of the Obama administration’s policies within months of Inauguration Day, particularly those that added extra bureaucratic hoops for institutions to jump through.

Aaron Lacey, co-chair of the higher education practice group at the law firm Thompson Coburn, said the higher ed policy differences between Republicans and Democrats are largely driven by whom they focus on serving, the institution or the consumer.

For example, the Biden administration was heavily focused on loan forgiveness to benefit students, he said. But that often caused increased administrative burden for colleges, allowing them less say in due process. Trump, on the other hand, has historically favored the institution.

“The hope is that this administration—and it was true with Trump prior—will bring in more people who have actually served in institutions of higher education. When those people are creating policy over the next two to three years … I think they’ll be more fair to institutions.”

Less Regulation, Freedom of Focus

One of the most notable ways experts anticipate Trump will show favor toward colleges and universities as businesses is through deregulation.

Over the past four years, Biden finalized more than 15 different rules ranging from stricter accountability measures to new reporting requirements for online ed and added steps in the acquisition process. Those changes created more work for college leaders, policy experts and associations representing colleges say.

While neither Trump nor his education secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, have yet to outline their policy priorities beyond campaign trail promises, they’re expected to repeal or at least considerably amend many of Biden’s accomplishments, cutting the red tape and leaving institutions with more room to innovate. Industry analysts also expect the incoming administration to take a more favorable view of online education, which the Biden team was critical of.

Jason Altmire, president of Career Education Colleges and Universities, the association representing for-profit technical institutions, said that this would particularly benefit the institutions he serves.

“It’s not just pulling back the regulations,” he said. “It’s the concept of using regulation as a way to pursue a political agenda, which, in the case of the Biden administration, was an agenda attacking for-profit schools.”

But public institutions and nonprofit private colleges could also see benefits.

New rules issued in the last four years require colleges to report much more data about their programs, including information on enrollment, the total cost of attendance and the amount of private loans disbursed to students. Colleges have to submit that data by Jan. 15 under the gainful employment and financial value transparency rule. Additionally, just before the new year, the Biden administration finalized a rule that requires colleges to submit new data about their online classes, which could create a chilling effect for implementing nontraditional course structures.

Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at ACE, said that colleges are not opposed to increased accountability and providing the department with more data, but they need more time than they’ve been given to do so.

“You’re requiring them to do more, but what does that mean? That means they likely have to hire more people in order to meet these increased demands,” Guillory said. And if institutions don’t have the funds to hire more workers, “then you’re going to potentially have more errors.”

Lacey, from Thompson Coburn, added that even if Trump doesn’t fully repeal regulations, taking universities’ feedback when rewriting them—particularly ones regarding whether an institution is at risk financially and what data they have to provide to the department—could make them more effective.

He said that the department’s guidance related to outside companies that colleges contract with was an example of the need to include colleges in the decision-making process. That guidance was indefinitely delayed after pushback from colleges.

“If someone that really understood higher education had seen that Dear Colleague letter, it seems unlikely it would have seen the light of day, at least not without having first been workshopped a little more and revised,” he said.

In the end, Guillory thinks Trump’s deregulation at large will help universities redirect resources to help students.

“With less regulation, that then frees up institutions to then focus on the things they should be focusing on internally—helping support students both inside and outside of the classroom,” he said.

Allowing Employers to Set the Bar

In the last four years, graduate student unions have increased, propelled by a supportive Biden administration, and campuses have seen a flurry of union activity as students joined faculty and other university workers in historic strikes.

But the number of unions is expected to plateau or drop under Trump, who has shown he tends to favor more employer-friendly policies.

National Labor Relations Board appointees proposed yanking student workers’ right to unionize at private institutions during Trump’s first term. But even if the NLRB doesn’t go that far this time around, it could still make organizing a new union very difficult.

Steven Bloom, assistant vice president of government relations at ACE, said that while Trump’s union policies could be a detriment to faculty and staff, they could pay off for chief financial and human resource officials.

“If institutions don’t have students or others on campus, like faculty and staff, organizing, they’re going to have a freer hand for establishing the whole range of benefits, the pay rates and the responsibilities that employees would have,” he said.

Trump is also likely to roll back an overtime regulation finalized by Biden and the Labor Department in April 2024, lowering the cost of compensating college personnel.

Biden had proposed raising the bar for overtime exemption 65 percent from about $35,000 to over $58,000. This meant colleges and universities across the country would have had to either raise the salaries of thousands of student affairs and athletics employees or start paying them time and a half when they worked more than 40 hours per week.

But a federal judge struck down the expansion in November, and Trump is unlikely to appeal, effectively terminating the regulation.

“We can be pretty confident that the Trump Department of Labor would withdraw that regulation, and if they were to issue a new regulation making changes to the [overtime] threshold, it would be much more modest than what the Biden administration tried to do,” Bloom explained.

Trump’s skills-based approach to immigration policy could also provide some benefits to colleges. While the president-elect has maintained his overall anti-immigration stance from the first term, this time around he has placed more emphasis on ensuring that what immigration does occur legally promotes the introduction of skilled workers. In fact, Trump promised in a podcast interview last June that foreign-born college graduates would receive legal permanent residency if he was re-elected.

Although he has since backtracked when asked about the proposal, Spreitzer from ACE said that if the president-elect were to carry out his promise, it would likely boost international student enrollment and help counter domestic enrollment declines.

“With any new administration coming in, we’re always going to look for those opportunities where our institutions can be helpful in working with the new administration,” she said. “And this one, I would say, is no different.”

Concerns Remain

But while some of Trump’s policies might boost colleges’ bottom line, higher ed lobbyists are still hesitant. They worry that growing public doubt about the value of a college degree could lead to more scrutiny and overshadow the traditional conservative belief that institutions best operate under minimal regulation.

“What we’ve seen over the past year or so is increased oversight of institutions of higher education from the Republican Party and growing skepticism of what’s happening on college campuses,” Guillory said. “We are just not sure as to how that translates to further accountability for institutions.”

Even if there is a trend of deregulation and Trump introduces his own, less restrictive policies, it will likely cause whiplash for university officials as they try to understand and comply with the new rules. But Lacey says it’s worth it.

“The two administrations are moving in a similar direction. They’re not diametrically opposed,” he said. “There are probably always going to be two or three ideological points where folks just won’t agree. But I do think, with [certain policies], we’re kind of getting in a direction that makes sense … the back-and-forth is less and less.”

But Spreitzer says it’s too early to tell if the business benefits will outweigh the curricular concerns, and even if they do, it’s hard to separate the two functions of a university.

“I don’t think we can make that separation,” she said. “They are employers and they are educational facilities. They serve many purposes.”