President Donald Trump has moved to close the Department of Education. Doing so could have far-reaching consequences on learning in the United States, according to Michelle Miller-Adams, a senior researcher with Kalamazoo’s W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
The DOE handles many aspects of education, from student loans to accommodations for students with learning disabilities. Miller-Adams explored the implications of potentially closing the Department of Education in an interview with WMUK.
Miller-Adams started by discussing one of the DOE's biggest roles in education: giving out federal loans.
Michelle Miller-Adams: The federal government is the largest lender to students. There is $16 trillion in student debt out and that debt is serviced through the federal government, through various federal contractors. There's been some conversation from the administration about moving that federal student loan function over to a different agency. I think a lot of people thought it might go to the Treasury Department, but the latest word is it might go to the Small Business Administration, which administers some loan programs. But this is a massive loan program. So, there have been really no operational details about how that transition would occur.
But the DOE also handles oversight of universities, weeding out what Miller-Adams calls predatory universities, as she explains.
Miller-Adams: For-profit institutions that may be engaged in false advertising, that are very happy to take your money and your Pell Grants, but don't do a good job at all of giving you an education, that lie about their completion rates or their job placement rates — there's been extensive loan forgiveness for students who borrowed money to attend those types of institutions, and there's been accountability, where the Department of Education has either fined or has shut down some of those institutions that have violated those rules. That function is also going to be gone.
Another area worth mentioning, and this came up with the K-12 system as well, is that the Office of Civil Rights is located at the Department of Education, and it's charged with enforcing civil rights laws on students' behalf, whether those are school children or college students. So, issues related to accommodations for disability, or racial or gender-based discrimination, those were investigated by this Office for Civil Rights, which has effectively been shut down.
Michael Symonds: So, is it clear on whether or not the civil rights office is going to stay and what it's going to look like?
Miller-Adams: Yeah, none of this is clear at all. And they might keep the office, but if they've eliminated the staff that works at that office — and disproportionately, the layoffs came in that Office for Civil Rights and in the federal student loan areas of the Department of Education — it's hard to see how those rules are going to be enforced.
I read an interview with someone who said, basically, they closed these regional offices which are the place that you would go to file a civil rights complaint. And these people who used to work in these offices said there are probably thousands of unanswered emails in the inboxes at those offices, around civil rights complaints that will just never be investigated.
Symonds: How is this going to affect accessibility for students who want to get higher education? Are we going to see less students being able to get into higher education because of this?
Miller-Adams: I don't think so, necessarily. I think you could even see more students being recruited by lower-quality institutions, for example, but not really having the tools to know that they're going to an institution that isn't going to do a very good job of giving them financial aid or getting them a degree.
Symonds: We talked about grants there for a little bit and how that would affect accessibility. But what about grants that go specifically to minority communities? That feels like something that would be ripe for attacks by the administration.
Miller-Adams: Very ripe, yes. So, one grant program of the Department of Education was support to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, known as HBCUs. And these are minority-serving institutions and they got federal support and they will not get that support anymore. (While federal funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities still exists, Miller-Adams said that without the DOE, that funding may go away.)
Miller-Adams: There are also many, many stories of institutions with scholarship programs that are determined at least in part by race or by gender or by minority status. Universities are not going to be able to have that type of scholarship anymore. We've actually already dealt with some of those questions here in Michigan. We had a proposal that made race-based admissions by colleges and universities illegal. So, it's actually going to be easier for Michigan to comply with that.
But I've heard stories of, say, a scholarship that somebody set up at a public university that is for Black students coming to that university. The scholarship may continue, but it's going to have to be administered privately. It won't be allowed to be administered through the institution. So, I think— and then I also think just civil rights law, ADA law, there's a real question around enforcement. Are our campuses going to be accessible to people with physical disabilities? Are accommodations going to be in place for people with learning disabilities? That's a, that's just all a really big question mark.
Symonds: How does that affect all these predictions that we're making and how we're looking into the future of how this is going to affect people?
Miller-Adams: It's really risky to make predictions. However, uncertainty itself is problematic, right? If students are confused about who's servicing their loan or who's making their loan or what kind of loan they're getting or are they paying too much for their loan, the option is going to be to just not take that loan and just not go on to higher ed.
Symonds: In your mind, what is the biggest risk of this dismantling, potential dismantling of the Department of Education?
Miller-Adams: For me, I think the biggest concern as we've talked about is this issue of transparency, accountability, getting information out to the public, having that threat that enforces compliance. The Department of Education essentially put a floor under what states can do. And it's not surprising. The Department of Education grew out of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the understanding that schools were separate and unequal and that somebody was going to have to make sure that they became more equal, and that somebody was the federal government.
And through a series of laws and then ultimately the creation of the Department of of Education in the late 1970s, that floor was created. So, states that maybe don't want to put that much money or don't care that much about equality into their higher-ed systems could go about their business. The Department of Ed said, "No, there's a floor beneath which you cannot fall."
Whether that concerns loans that exploit your students, colleges functioning that don't give degrees, accreditation agencies that aren't serious about accrediting, civil rights compliance that maybe you're not meeting, to me, that's the biggest risk.
Education is a local responsibility in the US. It always has been. There are thousands of school districts. Even within states, there's tremendous local autonomy, but there are national laws. And if you don't have the ability to enforce those laws, those laws are meaningless.
Michael Symonds reports for WMUK through the Report for America national service program.
