A Clarifying Read From the Hechinger Report

It’s rare in an era of partisan division to hear a veteran of the Clinton and Obama presidencies agreeing with a right-leaning economist who worked for George W. Bush.

Yet these prominent voices from opposite ends of the political spectrum teamed up to mostly praise a law passed by the Republican Congress and signed by President Donald Trump.

The purpose of the law: to protect college students from borrowing federal money to enroll in programs that give them little or no financial payoff when they graduate.

This new rule is “the greatest step forward in increased accountability” for colleges since the creation more than a decade ago of the federal College Scorecard website, which discloses graduates’ earnings by institution. That was the conclusion of Bob Shireman, a senior fellow at the progressive Century Foundation, and Beth Akers, who holds the same title at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, or AEI.

The new accountability rule is among a series of measures that the left-leaning advocacy group EdTrust calls the most dramatic changes to higher education policy in nearly two decades. Many were part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBBA, and will become effective this year. And several could improve protections and lower costs for families and students.

• The Trump Administration has a chaotic side on the left that tends to suck a lot of oxygen out of the room and cause continual over-reaction from higher ed observers. While that chaos is there and important, there is also significant negotiations and policy work underway on the right.

• The governing themes that animate administration work (and Republican congressional efforts through OBBB) are the general anti-woke category but also shifting power to the states, transparency on pricing and outcomes, a focus on sector-neutral outcomes, and pushing to integrate higher education and workforce initiatives.

This view of the Trump Administration higher education policy work has remained quite accurate in my opinion. But higher education at large still over-indexes on the chaos while not preparing for the policy implementation, and the importance of “sector-neutral outcomes” is not fully understood.

“Policymakers from both sides of the aisle and of all political stripes have wanted some of these things for a long time now,” said Ed Venit, managing director at the higher education consulting firm EAB. [snip]

“Maybe neither side gets everything they want. But we’ve landed on something that can make the accountability advocates on both sides content,” said Cooper, who served on the committee that finalized the rule. [snip]

Advocates on both the left and right have called since at least 2023 for caps on graduate borrowing to be restored, which the current Congress has now ordered. Beginning in July, most graduate students will be limited to a maximum of $20,500 a year in federal loans, for a total of $100,000; the top amount for professional programs such as medicine and law will be $50,000, or a total of $200,000.

This moment has the feel of a quiet tyranny of the majority. Accountability now enjoys bipartisan support, and in many ways rightly so. But broad agreement can also flatten dissent. In the shared urgency to “do something” about outcomes, policymakers converged on a common framework without fully reckoning with its edge cases. The result is a policy that reflects the will of the many, applied through a single metric, and one that risks imposing disproportionate consequences on institutions and communities that lack the economic advantages baked into that standard.

Other long-sought proposals are now gaining traction, including one that would make it easier for students and families to understand what college will actually cost them and compare prices — something institutions now make confoundingly difficult to do. Half of colleges and universities tell prospective students they’ll pay less than they actually will, and more than 40 percent don’t disclose the cost at all, a Government Accountability Office study found.

Bills to change this have been introduced repeatedly since 2017, with broad bipartisan support, including from Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who are among the new bill’s sponsors.