In a polarized era, it’s rare to hear a veteran of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama presidencies agreeing with an economist and veteran of the George W. Bush administration.
What’s even more intriguing is that these prominent, often opposing voices were praising a law signed by President Donald Trump and passed by Congressional Republicans.
The law is designed to protect college students and taxpayers from wasting federal funds on higher-ed offerings that provide little or no financial payoff.
This new rule is “the greatest step forward in increased accountability” for colleges since the creation over 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 rule is among a series of measures that EdTrust, a left-leaning group, calls among the most dramatic changes to higher education in nearly two decades. Many were part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which Trump signed on July 4, 2025.
This rare moment of bipartisan unity around higher education reforms comes against the backdrop of deep partisan rifts on higher-ed issues such as bans on race-based diversity policies, restrictions on international students, cuts to research funding, huge fines levied on elite universities, and Trump’s relentless rhetorical attacks on “radical,” “woke” campuses.
And yet, amid those fights, “there are definitely some positive steps,” observes Catherine Brown, the senior director for policy and advocacy at the National College Attainment Network (NCAN), who particularly likes an “earnings indicator” added to the FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid. That tool warns college applicants that graduates of schools with the majors they’re considering have historically earned no more than those with a high school diploma.
“A lot of times the big headlines—like, ‘We want to cut funding for higher education’—create a culture where it’s not easy to see improvements that are being made,” Brown said.
Other Trump-era changes to higher-ed policy that have won broad support include the overhaul of an accreditation system that has long failed to improve poor graduation rates at many colleges and universities; limits on graduate school borrowing, which experts say could lower tuition costs; and the expansion of federal Pell Grant eligibility—previously available only to degree-seeking college students—to shorter-term job training, including in the trades.
Presidents and lawmakers from both parties had proposed similar steps.
“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.
Colleges and universities have resisted some of the moves, but analysts and advocates contend that even some of the most controversial could yield benefits. While taxing college and university endowments is contentious, for example, they say it also could drive top institutions to extend their benefits to more students because the tax would be based on an endowment-to-student ratio. Increasing enrollment would avoid the tax.
To be sure, the Trump administration appears to support some of these reforms for ideological and even punitive purposes, rather than for the reasons cited by earlier administrations.
Taxing endowments, for example, mostly hurts wealthy, selective universities and colleges that the administration has targeted for things like diversity, education, and inclusion (DEI) policies. And transforming accreditation—the de facto quality-control system that governs whether colleges and universities can receive federal grants and loans—also appears designed by the administration to punish accreditors that push diversity and to halt the teaching of subjects conservatives oppose, according to the president.
Accreditation is “our secret weapon,” Trump has said, to get rid of what he called “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” at American universities. Trump’s administration has fast-tracked new accreditors who he claims will promote “the American tradition and western civilization.”
That sounds like a crackdown on campus free speech to many in the academy.
But it is also true that accreditors have continued to certify colleges and universities that were defrauding students or had abysmal graduation rates. Nearly four in 10 accredited institutions graduate fewer than half of their students, yet are allowed to collect billions in federal taxpayer money, research shows.
“These are supposed to be the watchdogs of higher education, and some of them have not been doing a very good job,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at AEI.
That Trump is succeeding where Democratic and Republican administrations have long failed to make the accreditation system more accountable might seem surprising. Still, it’s a step toward accountability that policymakers have been seeking since Barack Obama’s administration tried to end eligibility for federal financial aid to university and college programs whose graduates’ student loan debt exceeded a given percentage of their earnings—the so-called gainful employment rule.
Even advocates who applaud the changes underway raise concerns about the fine print.
While Shireman and Akers generally supported stopping federal student loans from being used for majors and programs with low financial returns, for instance—it’s called AHEAD, for Accountability in Higher Education and Access Through Demand-driven Workforce Pell—they noted that the calculation will be based on how much graduates from these programs earn and not what they paid for their degrees. That means students can still get loans to pay for majors whose graduates earn seemingly good wages, but not enough to cover their borrowing.
Still, said EAB’s Venit, “One of the things everybody agrees on is we should raise individual economic mobility for students. They should come out better than they went in, and certainly no worse. This is something everybody wants.”
AHEAD, scheduled to take effect in July, will affect programs enrolling more than 2 percent of students, the Department of Education estimates, most of them at for-profit colleges and universities. That’s about a third of the proportion that would have been denied under a rule enacted during Joe Biden’s administration, according to an analysis by the center-left advocacy organization Third Way.
“Maybe neither side gets everything they want,” said AEI’s Cooper, who served on the committee that finalized the rule. “But we’ve landed on something that can make the accountability advocates on both sides content.”
Americans of both parties, by wide margins, want tax dollars denied to programs with poor financial payoffs, a survey by the left-leaning New America Foundation found. Two-thirds, in a separate survey by the student loan provider Sallie Mae, said they favored limits on student borrowing.
Undergraduate student loans are already capped. But limits on grad school loans were removed in 2006. Taking advantage of this larger pool of new money, graduate schools raised their listed prices by $1 for every dollar students borrowed, according to University of Texas and University of Chicago researchers. Graduate student debt exploded.
At least since 2023, advocates on the left and right have argued for restoring caps on graduate borrowing, as the current Congress has now done. Starting 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.
The change affects about a third of graduate students and half of professional school students, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, which predicts that many will have to turn to private lenders to make up the difference. It also set off a national firestorm, as nursing and other fields were denied professional status.
But there are indications that the caps may force graduate schools to slow tuition increases, fill the gap with scholarships, and even shut down high-priced programs. The Santa Clara University School of Law in California has already promised $16,000 scholarships to entering students to “offset the impact” of these new loan limits and make its $63,280 annual tuition more attainable.
“This has been the most controversial plank of the reforms, but it’s a major step forward to cost control and trimming government subsidies to programs that cost too much and may not be delivering value,” Cooper said.
There’s also been bipartisan support for pushing selective institutions to accept more students and spend more on financial aid. Taxing endowments at the wealthiest schools could drive them to expand enrollment, some analysts have argued.
Because the tax is based on enrollment—affecting only universities with the equivalent of $500,000 in holdings per student—some could avoid it by admitting more applicants, Cooper and others say.
“For institutions that are very close to the cap, increasing your enrollments might not be a bad idea,” he said.
Brown University, for instance, could avoid the tax by increasing class size by 10 percent, Cooper found.
Some changes are still in limbo, either laws yet to be passed by Congress or, in the case of executive orders, awaiting judicial rulings.
An attempt by the Trump administration to limit reimbursements for expenses related to federal research universities’ conduct, including the cost of labs, utilities, supplies, and manpower, has been blocked by a federal appeals court, which upheld a lower court ruling that called it “arbitrary and capricious.”
Lawmakers on the left and right have called since the 1980s for containing these costs. After some universities were discovered misusing federal funds— at Stanford University, for example, on an antique commode and depreciation on a yacht—President Bill Clinton tried to limit federal reimbursements to a proportion of research grants, though not as severe as the 15 percent maximum the Trump administration wants to impose.
One proposal cut from the OBBBA would have required colleges to reimburse Washington when their students default on federal loans. Another notion that was abandoned sought to improve completion rates by requiring students receiving federal Pell Grants, which help lower-income families pay for college, to complete at least 30 credits a year—the minimum typically needed to graduate on time. That’s up from the current 24 credits.
Speeding federal financial aid to students was another widely praised accomplishment of the Trump administration. It rolled out the aid form, the FAFSA, in September rather than in December. The number of autumn submissions doubled over the previous fall. It helped that both Democrats and Republicans had previously worked to simplify the form.
“They’re not the sexiest changes, but some of the FAFSA technical changes have been hugely consequential,” said Brown, at NCAN. “Some of these small things can make a big difference in terms of students ultimately going to college.”
Other long-sought proposals gaining traction include one to make it easier for students and families to calculate what college will actually cost them and to compare prices—something institutions now make confoundingly difficult. Half of colleges and universities tell prospective students they’ll pay less than they actually wind up spending, and more than 40 percent don’t disclose their costs, a Government Accountability Office study found.
Bipartisan bills to bring transparency to college costs have been introduced repeatedly since 2017, including a new bill whose sponsors include Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, and Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican.
“For as much attention as there always is on how much partisanship exists in Washington, D.C., it’s often overlooked how much bipartisan agreement there is on things like price transparency,” said Justin Draeger, senior vice president for affordability at the Strada Education Foundation. (Strada is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.)
“As the cost burden has shifted more to students and families, they’re asking questions about what the payoff is going to be,” Draeger said. “And colleges and universities have to be able to answer that for them.”
A package of bills now under consideration includes one that would require reporting graduates’ earnings, career outcomes, and average loan debt by major. Postgraduate placement rates and income figures provided by colleges and universities today are often misleading and inaccurate.
Growing public skepticism about the value of degrees, more than politics, may, in the end, account for this flurry of new rules drawing bipartisan praise, said Cooper, of AEI.
“The thread running through a lot of these changes,” he said, “is a lack of trust in universities to always do the right thing.”
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org, orjpm.82 on Signal.
This story about higher education reforms was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.
