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Justice Stephen Breyer, a Harvard Law alum with judicial roots in the Boston area, including helping create this federal court.
Bella Ramirez is a high-achieving student who hustles. As an undergrad at Boston University, she worked as a resident assistant on campus.
Boston has very high costs of living, so that was definitely helpful. And I also did a bunch of different paid internships. So I worked actually with NBC for a few years for different semesters, did a different freelance work around Boston since I was a journalism major. Reporting for Good Morning BU, I’m Bella Ramirez. And then I also ran a comedy production startup called Wicked Smock Comedy. That was definitely my lowest paying gig.
This fall, the 23-year-old from Pembroke Pines, Florida will become the first person in her family to attend graduate school after navigating the law school admissions process largely on her own.
It’s really nerve-racking to be looking at all of these different things and trying to assess everything based on online forums and talking to people and getting secondhand information instead of just, like I really can’t turn to my parents and say, what did you do in this situation? Because they really have, they’re turning to me and asking me questions.
Last summer, Ramirez withdrew from the waitlist at three top-tier law schools after Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Since that legislation called for new federal loan caps that took effect in July, Ramirez decided those limits would make certain schools financially out of reach.
I emailed them and I said, hey, because of these new restrictions, this is no longer seeming like a possibility.
In the end, she chose Cardoza School of Law in New York City, where a scholarship kept her borrowing within the new federal limits.
Had they not given me that package, I almost certainly would not be able to go to law school this fall.
This is College Uncovered, a podcast from GBH News that pulls back the IV to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza. Today on the show, who should hold power over higher education? On July 1st, the Trump administration’s sweeping overhaul of federal higher ed policy and financing took effect. The changes touched nearly every part of the sector, from who can afford graduate school to who ultimately decides which scientific discoveries receive billions in taxpayer funding. Supporters say Washington is finally bringing accountability to colleges that have driven up costs and pushed ideological agendas. Critics warn the federal government is exerting power over decisions that have long been made by consumers, financial aid institutions, university leaders and independent scientific experts. Today, we’ll look at what those changes mean for students, researchers and the future of American higher education. This fall, low-income students will gain expanded federal support for career and technical training. We’ll explain that in a bit. But for the first time, new graduate students like Bela Ramirez will face strict new limits on how much they can borrow from the federal government. Until now, graduate students could borrow enough in federal loans to cover the full cost of attendance. Beginning this fall, new borrowers in programs like law and medicine will be capped at $50,000 a year, with a lifetime borrowing limit of $200,000.
Amid record low test scores and record high numbers of students buried in debt, Americans want results.
In congressional testimony before the House Education Committee in May, US. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said universities have inflated graduate tuition because the government has offered loans with very few limits.
College costs are just exorbitant. Students are burdened with debt. We have $1.7 trillion in debt, 43 million students. Only about 25% of them are repaying their loans. So we really have to do something to bring down the cost of college.
McMahon said the new caps will force institutions to lower their costs, and the department says some schools lowered their prices even before these changes went into effect, including Santa Clara University School of Law, Johns Hopkins University Business School and Lewis and Clark’s Graduate School of Education and Counseling. For students, the big question is whether the new limits will reign in tuition or simply put graduate school out of reach. In Massachusetts, roughly one in three students have previously borrowed more than the new caps allow. Those who welcome the measure say it will force universities to control their costs. Those who oppose it say they fear it will push students toward private loans with higher interest rates or push them out of graduate school altogether.
In the long run, it could be beneficial, but we’re seeing by and far in the short run, it’s affecting a lot of students.
Josh Ferris is a research and policy analyst for Leadership Brainery. It’s a Boston-based nonprofit focused on expanding access to graduate school for low-income students. An online survey of a thousand perspective graduate students found about 60 percent are already factoring federal funding changes into their enrollment decisions. That suggests policy uncertainty is beginning to influence demand in real time. Ferris says Massachusetts could be hit especially hard, because according to US census data, nearly half of the state’s residents hold a bachelor’s degree and about 23 percent of adults over the age of 25 have an advanced degree.
That’s compared to the 13 percent on average nationally. And so our state will be particularly impacted for lots of industries that particularly require graduate degrees.
Industries like biotechnology and education. That’s why Massachusetts is among two dozen states challenging the policy in federal court, arguing the administration’s definition of professional programs is too narrow. And in June, a judge temporarily blocked the administration from enforcing the lower federal student loan limits, though that ruling only applies to people pursuing graduate degrees in nursing and other health care related fields. In a statement, a spokesperson for the education department told me the judge’s order still allows the federal government to enforce, quote, the statutory professional degree definition and loan caps, and the department is reviewing the order and will take appropriate action. Supporters say that the new loan limits will protect some students from taking on excessive debt, and the majority of students don’t currently borrow above the caps.
Most students are going to be just fine, especially if you’re attending a lower cost or public institution, you’re probably going to be able to borrow within the new loan caps.
Preston Cooper is a senior fellow working on higher education policy at the American Enterprise Institute. He argues the answer is for colleges to lower tuition, not for taxpayers, to provide unlimited lending.
Up until this year, institutions had really no incentive to control tuition because they could always just hike their tuition and push students to borrow more from the federal government.
Cooper sees the policy as a common sense way to stop giving blank checks to expensive institutions.
You know, if you’re overcharging your students, the reckoning is coming and you’re going to have to make some tough decisions.
For students like Bella Ramirez, though, the new caps are making their decisions tough and the debate over federal policy is not abstract. She says it determined where she could afford to attend law school and where she couldn’t.
And at this point, it feels very paid to play. And maybe it was always that case, but this seems like a much louder message.
As she gets ready for the fall semester, Ramirez would like to see the government take a different approach. One that expands support for low-income students trying to earn graduate degrees and boost their career prospects. The Trump administration isn’t just reshaping who can afford higher education. It’s also trying to reshape who decides what knowledge gets created. A proposed overhaul of the federal research grant system would give political appointees final authority over billions of dollars in scientific funding, decisions that have traditionally been driven by peer review. The White House says the changes would eliminate what it calls a quote, woke research agenda and better align taxpayer dollars with presidential priorities. Scientists warned they could inject politics into the heart of the scientific process.
This was my lab.
For more than half a century, Susan Gerby built her career inside this Brown University laboratory, once filled with microscopes, centrifuges and other specialized equipment.
So when I retired, I had to clean it out. And Brown said, oh, that’s so simple. You just tell us when and we’ll take everything to the dump. However, scientific equipment is really expensive and supplies are expensive. And so I spent about half a year cajoling my colleagues into realizing that they should want some of my used equipment, even if it was 20 years older.
In Providence, Gerby was the founding chair of Brown’s Department of Molecular Biology, and she spent decades conducting federally funded basic research on ribosomes and chromosomes. Around campus, her research earned her the nickname Lady of the Flies.
Our lab worked with a unique fly, not the common fruit fly, but a distant relative called Cyera. It’s the fungus fly. It eats mushrooms, and it has many unique biological properties of things that it does with its chromosomes that carry the genetic information. And so that gives us a wonderful handle on exploring how cells deal with chromosomes for various processes.
Gherby closed her lab last year when she retired after 51 years on the Brown faculty. But she remains active in the scientific community, advising professors and students. So when she read the Trump administration’s proposal to overhaul how federal research grants are awarded, she says she was aghast.
Instead of having the final decision made by scientists based on scientific merit, which is what currently occurs, the final decisions will be made based on how closely the proposed research aligns with presidential priorities.
At stake is far more than who signs off and pushes the paperwork. Since World War II, the United States has largely relied on independent scientists to decide which research proposals deserve federal funding through peer review. The administration wants political appointees to have the final say instead, arguing that elected leaders, not unelected experts, should decide how taxpayer dollars are spent. But scientists like Susan Gerby say it would fundamentally change one of the foundations of American science, allowing politics rather than scientific merit to shape what research gets funded.
Grants that have been awarded to colleges and universities are often full of material that’s clearly ideologically biased.
Jonathan Butcher directs the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, which says it’s working to put power back in the hands of American taxpayers who voted for government efficiency. Butcher says public trust in experts changed after the COVID-19 pandemic.
There was a flip and a significant constraint on forcing masks on people, closing down schools and then keeping them closed. And I think that made people second guess really what quote, the experts may be telling us either from science or from the media.
The proposal would also limit the use of grant funding for conference travel and scientific publications, potentially restricting how researchers share their findings. Another provision would allow agencies to deny funding based on researchers’ public statements if they’re deemed inconsistent with the administration’s priorities. Those proposals have alarmed many scientists and academic leaders.
I think it’s very important to have those who are engaged in the free pursuit of knowledge be the people who are adjudicators of the free pursuit of knowledge.
Lori Patton is president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She says interference from the government is contrary to how scientific research has worked traditionally. But legitimate oversight is essential.
It’s part of how we became a great scientific powerhouse after World War II. And I think that the power ultimately for that adjudicatory process should rest with the people who are pursuing the knowledge.
Our job is to describe the natural world as it is, and to report on how we best understand how it works.
Andy Ewald is a Johns Hopkins professor studying how cancer cells spread. He also serves on the Executive Committee of the American Society of Cell Biology, and worries the uncertainty surrounding federal research funding could discourage would-be scientists from entering the field because they require years of training.
And young researchers need to feel confident there’s going to be a job at the end of that. Volatility and grant funding also makes it harder for young researchers to complete their research projects and publish their discoveries.
China has now surpassed the US in overall research and development spending, a milestone that the journal Science described as a structural shift in the global research landscape. Back at Brown, Susan Gerby, the Lady of the Flies, worries the uncertainty could accelerate a brain drain.
We’re already seeing scientists move to Canada and to Europe and to Asia.
Gerby has seen tight times before. She launched her career in the early 70s, just as President Richard Nixon froze funding of the National Institutes of Health. In 1972, Nixon railed against the press, the establishment and academics.
Professors are the enemy.
Professors are the enemy. Write that in the blackboard 100 times.
Professors are the enemy, Nixon said.
And so everything was frozen and it was a very hard time for young scientists to get started and you couldn’t get any grants for half a year or more. But if you persist, usually you survive.
Gerbi calls the proposed changes unprecedented and warns that politically driven funding decisions rather than scientific evidence could shape the direction of basic research for years to come. Joining us now in our GBH studio is Jon Marcus from our partners at The Hechinger Report. Jon has been following these and other major changes coming to higher education. Hey Jon, thanks for being here.
Yeah, Kirk, things have been busy on the beat lately.
That’s an understatement. Let’s start though with these new graduate student loan caps. Could these caps force colleges to finally lower tuition, or do you think it will put graduate school even further out of reach for low income kids?
Well, that’s part of the idea, and to answer that question, I need to go back a little bit to 2006 when there were previously caps on student loans. Those caps were removed in 2006, and there’s authoritative research that since then, colleges and universities have increased graduate tuition commensurate with how much money their students could borrow, so for every additional dollar that students could borrow for grad school and professional school, colleges increased tuition by that amount. Graduate school is a very important revenue source for colleges and universities, and they make a lot of money from it. So the idea of capping these loans now is to maybe cool down that level of annual increases. It’s hard to know whether that will work. The problem in particular with law school is that right now they’ve got plenty of applicants. So under the law of supply and demand, they don’t really need to lower their tuition. But the problem for students as a result of that is that they will have to find other ways to cover that gap. Where we might begin to see this eventually is in the MBA market and the master’s degree market, which is hugely dependent in part on international students who aren’t coming anymore. So they’re going to need to do something, and that could be lowering tuition, but it’s a little too early to tell.
At the same time, as we see these caps go into effect, the administration is also expanding federal support for short-term workforce training programs, and that includes opening up Pell Grants to some of these programs. I know that’s generated a lot of excitement. There’s also a lot of confusion. I’ve heard from some community college presidents who say, this is going to be a disaster. What are you hearing?
Yeah. So first, I want to say that we live in this moment of a zero sum game, where if the other side is in power and something is, and they do something, then it must be bad. In fact, Workforce Pell has been a bipartisan idea for many years. So has capping student loans. So have many other reforms that are actually happening now in Congress and to some degree being pushed by the administration. Workforce Pell is one of those. People have been calling for this for a long time. There’s something that’s happened with Workforce Pell that you don’t often see in government programs, which is that it’s happened so quickly, that it’s been really hard to stand it up in time. Technically, it takes effect on July 20th. States can put it into place on July 1st. But there are so many moving parts to this, and they had less than a year to do it, that most states aren’t ready and most institutions aren’t ready. So you have states like Pennsylvania that has, I think, 19 programs approved for this versus, I think it’s North Carolina has 300 some odd programs. In general, however, the idea of having grant money, Pell Grant money, which does not have to be repaid, to pay for something other than a bachelor’s or associate degree, I think gets a lot of bipartisan support, gets a lot of consumer support. What will the ultimate impact of it be? The Congressional Budget Office predicts that 100,000 students a year will take advantage of it. That’s a pretty small number compared to how many people use Pell Grants to get a bachelor’s degree.
Okay, as you know, this is a consumer-facing podcast. If I’m a student or a parent thinking about college or planning to take out loans, what are some of the biggest changes I need to know about right now?
Well, Work for Spell is one good one. You can now get money to go to trade school or for a short-term certificate. You can then stack that credential later if you choose to go back to school. It might even count as an academic credit toward a bachelor’s or an associate degree. So that might be a good first step. And again, still a little bit of a minefield to figure out what’s available and what’s eligible, but maybe worth a look. At the student loan end, there are a lot of changes. The most significant for undergraduates are people that are just considering whether they want to go to college is to the SAVE Act or the SAVE program, which was implemented under the Biden administration. And there’s about seven and a half million people that are repaying loans under the SAVE program that is connected to their income. It limits how much their payments are based on their income. It also gives you the potential for the debt to be forgiven after 10 years. That program has now gone away. And people who are already enrolled in that program have 90 days, and they need to be very alert for the communication from the Department of Education. Within 90 days, they have to choose another plan. If they don’t choose another plan, they could arbitrarily be put into one in which their payments are much higher.
90 days from July 1st?
From July 1st. And those notifications from the Education Department began to go out in cycles on July 1st. So will that affect students that are in the pipeline? I think one of the reasons we’ve seen a big decline in college going among high school graduates is this constant fear of and anxiety about college debt. And so the more we talk about it and the more we see it, I think the more it actually tends to discourage students from going to college.
Jon, you’ve also been reporting on how the administration’s visa and immigration policies are affecting international students who often pay full tuition. What does that mean for colleges and for domestic students in light of these new measures?
Yeah, this is really interesting. For a long time, colleges used to talk about international students as a way to bring diversity and multiculturalism to their campuses. Now, that isn’t true. It was a way to bring money. It was a way to bring revenue, especially in the 2010s when the number of domestic students started falling. Many universities recruited international students quite successfully. International students make up 6% of the total enrollment in this country, but 12% of the revenue. Now, they’re not coming. The number that came last year was already down 22%. We’ve looked at federal data for this spring, and the numbers continue to go down. Really bad news for universities, especially universities that are heavily dependent on international students for revenue. And what they’re doing as a result is that they are cutting programs, cutting services, significantly cutting staffing. More than 300 universities and colleges have made some level of cuts. And a number of them have begun to explicitly connect it to the decline in the number of international students.
And Jon, these schools were already facing public scrutiny, as you and I have reported on. They’ve been trying to enroll more domestic students, especially from rural parts of the country, including veterans. I spoke with Kevin Bay. He’s an Army veteran and retired CIA officer who graduated in 2005 from the Harvard Kennedy School. Today, two-thirds of that school students are from abroad. And granted, that’s part of the mission of the Kennedy School. But Bay says that’s an imbalance that colleges can no longer ignore.
When the numbers get so lopsided that it starts raising questions in terms of who ultimately is our target audience, that’s potentially a valid recalculation that higher ed across the board should be making.
And I’ve heard others say that these schools need to recalibrate because they’ve become, quote, addicted to international students and their tuition dollars. What do you make of that rather conservative assessment?
Yeah, that’s, I can’t argue with it. And that’s part of the conversation that’s going on around why there are restrictions on international students. But the reality of it is, if you’re, you know, as you say, this is a consumer-facing podcast, if you’re a parent or a student, your education is being subsidized by these international students. Eight out of ten international students pay the full tuition. Only, well, fewer than two out of ten American students pay the full listed advertised price. And that is inevitably already having repercussions.
Right. So if you think college is expensive now, wait a minute.
That’s an interesting point that you raise, because colleges are also in a really tough position around increasing tuition. Because American consumers are very price conscious at this stage. They already think college costs too much. They don’t want to pay more for it. We went to a number of colleges where international enrollment is way down, that have increased their tuition, and asked them how much of that tuition increase was a result of international enrollment declines. One hundred percent of them did not want to answer that question. Where I think you’re going to see this is in cuts to programs. So domestic students are going to pay for this one way or another. They’re either going to have less access to services, fewer staff. In some cases, universities have laid off advisors that help students. That’s going to have an impact on retention rates. But they probably also will, to some degree at least, see an increase in tuition.
Stepping back for a moment, Jon, how do all of these changes fit together? Connect the dots for us. Is this a series of disjointed policy changes and trends? Or are we witnessing a fundamental restructuring of American higher education?
All of these things we’re talking about come on top of huge domestic enrollment declines, down almost 2 million since 2011. A decline in the number of 18-year-olds that begins this fall, that will see another 13% decline in the number of 18-year-olds that are typical college freshmen. A decline in the proportion of high school graduates going right to college, from a peak of 70% to about 60% in just 10 years. All of these things are problems for colleges and universities. Add on to that, deferred maintenance, increased labor costs, increased costs of benefits. I wouldn’t want to be a college president right now. Much of this predates some of the culture wars and political division.
It’s easy to blame the Trump administration.
It’s easy to blame the Trump administration. Many of these trends, including the decline in international enrollment, they started before Trump. You can’t blame this administration or Republican Congress for all of these problems. There’s a new estimate, an authoritative estimate, that 442 colleges are now at risk. Private nonprofit colleges, 120 of them at significant risk. That’s a quarter of the total. And so we’re going to see a lot more colleges close.
That’s Jon Marcus, Education Reporter with The Hechinger Report. Jon, thanks so much for your reporting and your analysis.
Thanks for having me.
This is College Uncovered. This episode was produced and written by me, Kirk Carapezza, and it was edited by Azita Ghahramani, Matt Baskin and Adeline Sire. Mixing and sound design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. Our project manager is Isabel Hibbard. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT. Head of GBH podcast is Devin Maverick Robins. College Uncovered is made possible by Lumina Foundation. It’s a production of GBH News and distributed by PRX. Thanks so much for listening.
The post College Uncovered: Who should hold power over higher education? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.
