Considering unease on many campuses regarding the Trump administration’s higher education policies — and proposals about college accessibility and affordability by presidential candidates who would like to win the White House next year — some academicians say the 2020 elections present significant opportunities to address urgent issues facing postsecondary learning.
The U.S. Department of Education, with secretary Betsy DeVos at the helm, has championed career and technical education, continued support of funding for historically Black colleges and universities and promoted unconventional ways of addressing the challenges facing higher education.
At the same time, the administration has implemented or recommended various controversial policies and positions, among them support for legal challenges to affirmative action; opposition to continuing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program; warning schools that not enforcing freedom of speech rights could result in loss of federal research dollars; proposed revisions to Title IX guidance; what appears to many to be a softness toward for-profit institutions, a sector under fire for fraudulent practices and poor student outcomes; and recently repealing Gainful Employment regulations.
“What concerns me is what seems to have been a concerted effort to undermine efforts on the parts of institutions to try to expand access for historically marginalized populations,” said Dr. Liliana Garces, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy in the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education.
The administration has sought to discourage the constitutionally permitted use of race as a factor in admissions decisions, noted Garces, the Sid W. Richardson Regents Chair in Community College Leadership who also holds appointments as an affiliate faculty in UT Austin’s law school.
In several highly publicized cases, the Trump administration has sided with plaintiffs who are challenging race-consideration policies at colleges and universities, such as a suit pending against Harvard University on behalf of Asian American students who contend that affirmative action policies there unfairly discriminated against them.
The U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed allowance of the use of race as one of various factors that a college may consider when admitting students, most recently in 2015 in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. As a result, the Obama administration issued guidance for schools to use in crafting policies that promoted diversity and inclusion in their student populations.
