Throughout the election campaign, Donald Trump railed against colleges and universities for being too expensive, too partisan and too woke. “Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hardworking taxpayers, and now we are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all,” Trump said.
With Trump returning to the White House, how much of his higher education message is rhetoric and how much will be policy? And what comes next for students and colleges?
As they wrap up this election year season of College Uncovered, Kirk and Jon explore how college may change under a new Trump administration, cutting through the noise to ask a simple question: What comes next on campus?
To get a preview, we hear from Michael Brickman, who worked as a senior advisor in the Education Department during Trump’s first term, and Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, the nation’s biggest association of colleges and universities.
Jennifer Thornton with the Business Higher Education Forum and Maria Flynn of Jobs For the Future explain why one concrete policy likely to move forward quickly in a second Trump administration is the expansion of apprenticeships.
We also talk to students who backed Trump and those who reacted to his reelection fearfully. And Jenson Wu of The Trevor Project, which advocates for LGBTQ youth, tells how a second Trump term could have a particular impact on LGBTQ college students.
Listen to the whole series
TRANSCRIPT
[Kirk] This is College Uncovered. And here’s President elect Donald Trump railing against colleges for being too expensive, too partisan and too woke.
[Donald Trump] Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hardworking taxpayers. And now we are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all. We spend more money on higher education than any other country, and yet they’re turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions. We can’t let this happen. And it’s time to offer something dramatically different. When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxists, maniacs, and lunatics.
[Kirk] Trump’s anti-elite tone channels the frustrations of many working-class Americans, and politically, it’s proven effective. After all, Trump won the election decisively.
[Jon] So with Trump returning to the White House, how much of his higher education message is rhetoric and how much is potential policy? And what comes next for students and for colleges?
[Kirk] This is College Uncovered, from GBH News and The Hechinger Report, a podcast pulling back the ivy to reveal how colleges really work. I’m Kirk Carapezza with GBH News.
[Jon] And I’m Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report. Colleges don’t want you to know what’s really going on. So GBH …
[Kirk] … in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, is here to break it all down.
[Jon] So as we wrap up our election-year season, we’re going to explore how college may change under the new Trump administration. Today on the show, we’re cutting through the noise and asking a simple question: What comes next on campus?
[Kirk] We heard at the top of the show what Trump thinks of higher ed. So on Election Day, we went out to the polls to capture voters concerns about colleges.
[Voter 1] I hope that they make it easier for people to get in, because I don’t know about you, but I’m saddled with debt. I’ve got, like, $66,000 in debt. So, you know, just making it a little bit more affordable would be good.
[Voter 2] Probably tuition prices and student debt.
[Voter 3] Yeah, I’d say cost of education is probably the biggest concern. I would hope that whatever mechanism they can offer to make it more equitable for students to go to college, that doesn’t involve debt.
[Kirk] Make it more affordable so people don’t go into debt?
[Voter 3] Sure. But also no free handouts.
[Voter 4] I hope they bring more awareness to the to the amount of debt that students are in. And I hope they offer more programs or scholarships or whatnot.
[Kirk] When you think about American colleges, what are some of your top concerns?
[Voter 5] That they’re indoctrinated and they’re being led in a direction. They’re sponges, and they’re going to believe everything they hear. And they hear a lot of one side and not the other.
[Kirk] So your concern is that administrators and faculty are pushing political agendas?
[Voter 5] Yeah, 100 percent.
[Jon] So what will a second Trump term mean for the topic we cover in this podcast — higher education.
[Donald Trump] The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that.
[Jon] Let’s begin by separating Trump’s campaign rhetoric from political reality and exploring how likely changes in higher education policy will affect you.
We have a lot of clues about the president-elect’s plans, from his previous term to his comments on the campaign trail to the notorious Project 2025, which Trump has disavowed but was written in part by members of his first administration.
To get an idea of what may be in store. We talked to someone who worked in the US Department of Education during Trump’s first term.
[Michael Brickman] I think this is an administration like the first Trump administration that’s going to be skeptical of whether or not higher education programs are providing value.
[Jon] That’s Michael Brickman. He was a senior advisor in the Education Department, so he’s got a pretty good lens on what we might expect during a second Trump administration. Today, he’s education policy director at the conservative-leaning Cicero Institute and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Brickman predicts a lot of scrutiny of what American students and their families are getting for their money.
[Michael Brickman] That’s what’s important. Are you better off from your college education or are you worse off? And I think most people know that, at the macro level, you’re better off going and getting a bachelor’s degree. But that might not be true institution by institution. And even more importantly, it might not be true program by program.
[Jon] So how can the government help control that?
[Michael Brickman] Well, let’s start with the thing everybody agrees on, which is transparency. Everybody agrees there should be good information out there about the outcomes of students who graduate from particular college programs.
[Kirk] This effort to provide consumers with more information actually started under the Obama administration with the College Scorecard, right, Jon?
[Jon] Right. The College Scorecard looked at each college and university individually and it told you student outcomes after graduation. Brickman says the last Trump administration picked up from there, adding information about how graduates of specific university programs are doing.
[Michael Brickman] If you know you’re going to a certain university, you can pick among the programs and explore which programs provide the best return on investment. The other thing you can do is if you know you want to major in, say, chemistry, you can look at all of the different chemistry programs in your area or among all of the ones in the country that you’re exploring and compare and contrast. What is the cost? What am I likely to earn when I graduate? What are the outcomes in terms of how likely am I to graduate?
[Kirk] The first Trump administration was into scorecards, but not so into another proposal called gainful employment. That would measure whether students make enough money to justify the cost of their educations. And Trump has promised to block it.
Ted Mitchell is the president of the American Council on Education, the nation’s biggest association of colleges and universities. It’s the chief college lobby on Capitol Hill. Mitchell is also a former top policymaker in the Obama administration. And he says there’s a contradiction here.
[Ted Mitchell] Gainful employment is a really interesting one, because the first Trump administration was no fan and rolled it back. Yet in many ways, it is exactly what Trump the candidate and the Republican Party have been calling for: one, accountability; two, clearer alignment between higher education and the world of work.
[Jon] Looking ahead, we also know about one big thing Trump won’t be doing. It’s certain that he’ll bring an abrupt end to the Biden administration’s relentless and controversial attempts to forgive student loans. In 2023, President Joe Biden tried to forgive more than $400 billion in student loan debt, but was blocked by the Supreme Court.
[Joe Biden] I know there are millions of Americans, millions of Americans in this country who feel disappointed and discouraged or even a little bit angry at the court’s decision today on student debt. And I must admit, I do, too.
[Jon] Michael Brickman says the court’s ruling doesn’t mean there won’t be fresh attempts to reduce student loan debt. They’ll just take a different approach, such as putting colleges more on the hook for that debt.
[Michael Brickman] And then if the institutions are successful and their students are successful, then the institutions get paid and they may even be better off from a financial point of view than they are today, because their interests are aligned with those of their students. If students are consistently failing to be successful in the workforce or in later life when they graduate from certain programs, that should be on the institutions, not on taxpayers and not on the students.
[Jon] As we’ve reported on this podcast, colleges have dodged accountability for the generally poor outcomes of their students for decades. whether it’s low graduation rates or a lack of price transparency.
[Kirk] Yes. So as you can imagine, colleges are very nervous about all of this. Here’s Ted Mitchell with the American Council on Education again.
[Ted Mitchell] Well, I think like a lot of our colleagues on campuses, I’m anxious. And I think that that will be the first thing that we deal with, is the question of whether the overheated rhetoric of the campaign will carry over into policymaking. If we can move toward real substantive questions and substantive issues, I think there’s a lot of a lot of ground that we could cover in a Trump administration.
[Kirk] Mitchell Sounds hopeful. If history is a guide, though, some of Trump’s rhetoric already threatens colleges’ missions and their budgets. Trump’s hardline immigration policies in his first term helped drive a 12 percent decline in the number of international students at American universities and colleges. That’s according to the Institute of International Education. Along with losing the talent and perspectives those students bring, colleges also need them to contribute to their bottom lines. That’s because international students typically pay full price. On the stump in New Jersey. Trump promised to keep up the pressure on international students this time around. And speaking from the podium, he added a new threat.
[Donald Trump] When I’m president, we will not allow our colleges to be taken over by violent radicals. And if you come here from another country and try to bring jihadism or anti-Americanism or anti-semitism to our campuses, we will immediately deport you. You’ll be out of that school.
[Kirk] That kind of severe pledge concerns Ted Mitchell. He calls the potential decline of international students and immigrants to the U.S. a tragedy because, he says, they create a global atmosphere critical to American campuses.
[Ted Mitchell] It’s kind of a brain sweep in which American institutions help bring the best and the brightest from other countries to our shores. And I think that the, you know, the rhetoric of the campaign suggested that immigrants were the opposite of that. And our experience is that immigrants bring intellectual capacity, richness, eagerness and a can-do attitude to the country that we need to build, not stifle.
[Kirk] So far, the incoming administration hasn’t made any concrete plans that would deter international students from coming to the U.S.
So there might be a threat to international students. And another potential threat is to the Education Department itself. Project 2025 — that’s the conservative blueprint for a second Trump administration that we mentioned earlier — it calls for eliminating the Education Department, Mitchell’s former employer. So I asked him, is that realistic?
[Ted Mitchell] I think it is theater. The functions of the Education Department are deeply ingrained in college and university finance, K-12 finance. And those functions will have to take place, no matter whether there’s an Education Department or not.
[Kirk] Right. And there are limitations on the type of executive orders that future administrations can take. But could the Trump administration try a bunch of things to kind of reshape how the Education Department works and then just see what the courts say later?
[Ted Mitchell] Yeah, I think that’s right. And I think it’ll be an interesting race between executive order and legal action.
[Kirk] Trump has nominated former professional wrestling executive Linda McMahon to lead the department. McMahon’s selection sparked questions about her qualifications since she has limited education, leadership experience, and it rekindles concerns about Trump’s promise to close the agency. Of course, Trump isn’t the first president to propose getting rid of the Department of Education.
[Ronald Reagan] Well, thank you. Thank you all very much. And welcome to the White House again.
[Kirk] In 1988, President Ronald Reagan told a group of governors he’d do it, too.
[Ronald Reagan] It seems odd to us now that people would actually believe that a collection of bureaucrats sitting in a building in Washington, D.C., could actually do a better job designing and running our children’s education than the thousands of communities and millions of parents who know intimately their children’s needs.
[Jon] The Education Department has so far survived all of these attempts, Kirk. And eliminating it would require congressional approval.
[Kirk] Okay, well, we’ll see how that all plays out with Republicans now controlling both chambers of Congress.
Another outstanding question is how the next administration will approach campus unrest. Republicans in general and Trump in particular have come down hard on colleges for the way they’ve handled protests over the war in Gaza. After Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent campus protests, Trump announced his plan to circumvent in-person college campuses altogether by creating a free national online college. The former owner of Trump University — you may remember he had his own university — has proposed taxing big university endowments to pay for this new online college.
[Donald Trump] Americans have been horrified to see students and faculty at Harvard and other once-respected universities expressing support for the savages and jihadists who attacked Israel. We spend more money on higher education than any other country, and yet they’re turning our students into communists and terrorists and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions. We can’t let this happen. It’s time to offer something dramatically different.
[Kirk] Ted Mitchell says he expects Trump and other Republicans to continue to capitalize politically on Americans’ concerns about the cost of college and politics seeping into higher ed. But he says the idea that colleges are indoctrination factories is simply wrong.
[Ted Mitchell] And if you take a look, for example, at some of the more active members of Congress over the last year and ask the simple question: Did they go to college? Answer: Yes. Did they go to the very same colleges that candidate Trump was belittling? The answer is yes. That means if we’re indoctrination factories, we’re doing it badly. Universities are and need to be places where all points of view can be expressed, even points of view that we don’t don’t agree with.
[Jon] Okay. We’ve heard a lot about what Trump might do in office. Here’s one thing that has solid potential because it’s got bipartisan support. It’s a concrete policy that’s likely to move forward quickly in a second. Trump administration. Both presidential candidates pushed it, and it has the potential to vastly change the ways young people prepare for the workforce. It’s the expansion of apprenticeships to train people on the job for all kinds of fields.
[Jennifer Thornton] From what we can see from, you know, the campaign and then also the President’s previous administration, there is a commitment to apprenticeship.
I’m Jennifer Thornton. I’m the senior vice president of the Business-Higher Education Forum. We work with higher education and business leaders to build and strengthen pathways into work.
[Jon] Thorton says there’s already years of momentum behind this idea of apprenticeships being substituted for a conventional college education. Apprenticeships have long been a route into jobs in the trades — think plumbers, electricians, welders. Now they’re expanding into technology, health care and other fields. And in most cases, people are paid while they learn. Trump has been a big proponent of them. After all, he used to host a reality show called The Apprentice.
[Donald Trump] So I say, Tiffany, you’re fired.
[Contestant] Thank you, Mr. Trump.
[Donald Trump] Thank you very much to you. Okay. Thank you very much.
[Jon] Here’s Jennifer Thornton again, talking about how apprenticeships work in the real world.
[Jennifer Thornton] Apprentices learn hands-on skills through a combination of on-the-job and classroom training. They are paid and these wages increase over time as somebody is in an apprenticeship program. They’re essentially like trainees and they have a permanent job waiting for them when they complete their program. You know, you go to college and then you might get an internship at college, and that provides some hands-on to complement the part in the classroom. And I would say an apprenticeship is kind of the reverse. You spend more time learning on the job with some time in supplemental education.
[Jon] Not only did both presidential candidates support this idea, so do most Americans. When Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, brought it up at a union hall in Wisconsin, the crowd went crazy.
[Kamala Harris] A college degree is not the only measure of the skills and the experience of the qualified worker. That’s right.
[Jon] The nonpartisan group Jobs for the Future did a survey of voters about apprenticeships right before the election. Maria Flynn is jobs for the Future’s president and CEO.
[Maria Flynn] We did the poll because we do believe that these are bipartisan issues. And 84 percent of registered voters overall are really in favor of expanding apprenticeship programs. And so I think that will be, I know, a focus of the Trump administration. It was in their first term.
[Jon] Kirk, think about what a huge change that is from the idea that everybody has to go to college. And we’ve already been seeing people voting with their feet as college enrollment declines. That questioning of the value of a four-year degree coincides with Trump returning to the Oval Office. Here’s Maria Flynn again.
[Maria Flynn] What are the alternatives that can give someone that post-secondary education and training that they need, but in ways that can also kind of get them into the labor force and earning for themselves and their family in ways that traditional paths really don’t designed for?
[Kirk] Dropping degree requirements can also give a big boost to Americans who can’t afford to go to college or simply don’t. Byron Aguste served as deputy director of the National Economic Council in the Obama administration. And he says requiring college degrees for entry level jobs benefits mostly well-off people.
[Byron Auguste] You are screening out over 70 percent of African-Americans. You’re screening out about 80 percent of Latino workers. And you’re screening out over 80 percent of rural Americans of all races. And you’re doing that before any skills are assessed. It’s not fair.
[Kirk] I asked Ted Mitchell, with the American Council on Education, about this criticism that we’ve turned college from a bridge to opportunity into a drawbridge that gets pulled up if someone hasn’t gotten through. Even he agrees that there should be other pathways to the workforce.
[Ted Mitchell] Degree requirements and degrees themselves have always been a proxy for skills, and the marketplace has recognized that it is an effective proxy for skills. But I think the point that a lot of us are making is that it’s not the only way of measuring skills. The bachelor’s degree will always be important, but it need not be the only signal of the employability of Americans.
[Kirk] Do you think that the quote, unquote, ‘college-for-all’ movement is ending?
[Ted Mitchell] I think that it is. I think it’s being replaced by a college-opportunity-for-all movement, which I think is very healthy.
[Kirk] And Mitchell says the idea now is to put the choice of whether to go to college with students and their families.
[Jon] The gap between Americans with college degrees and those without them is fueling partisan divides. And Trump got a lot of support from millions of high school-educated voters who think many college-educated Americans are out of touch with their problems.
[Kirk] Yeah, this time Trump really tapped into that us-versus-them mentality. During his successful presidential campaign, he expressed his hostility toward academia, and he threatened to cut funding to colleges that don’t get in the line and crack down on protests or cut their diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Of course, most colleges and universities aren’t going anywhere. But since his election victory, Trump has pledged to dismantle the, quote, ‘U.S. indoctrination system’ by seizing funds from schools that refuse to comply with new measures of accountability.
[Donald Trump] The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical left, and we will do that. Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system. The accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers, but they have failed. Totally. I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxists, maniacs and lunatics.
[Kirk] For the record, accreditors don’t have political affiliations. But Trump said his administration will accept applications for new accreditors who impose, quote, ‘real standards’ on colleges.
[Donald Trump] These standards will include defending the American tradition and western civilization, protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly, removing all Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucrats, offering options for accelerated and low-cost degrees, providing meaningful job placement and career services and implementing college entrance and exit exams to prove that students are actually learning and getting their money’s worth. Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hardworking taxpayers, and now we are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all. We are going to have real education in America. Thank you.
[Jon] Despite this rhetoric, Michael Brickman, who worked in the Education Department in Trump’s first term, says fears that Trump will try to restrict speech or control curriculum at universities and colleges are unfounded.
[Michael Brickman] Conservatives actually have a problem with the restrictions on speech and the restrictions on protest, because typically conservatives are the minority on these college campuses, especially when you look at the faculty and administrators. And so conservatives have absolutely no interest in chilling speech, but they do have an interest in ensuring that all students have their civil rights protected. There actually is no problem with both protecting free speech, the right to protest and ensuring that, say, Jewish students have a right to walk to class without being harassed because they’re Jewish.
[Jon] Still, many professors, administrators and students worry about a lot of other things that Trump and his supporters have said. Now, we should be clear this is more about tone than policy.
[Kirk] Yes, some academics on the left and the right are sounding the alarm. A new survey by Inside Higher Ed finds over 90 percent of faculty strongly or somewhat agreed that academic freedom is under threat across the political spectrum. On the right, some professors say anyone who’s not a hard left progressive is openly mocked and derided. Meanwhile, on the left, professors say Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance want to undermine colleges.
Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, hears those alarms sounding about threats not just to higher education, but to democracy.
[Ted Mitchell] I think that the good news for higher education is that this is what we do. We support the development of critical-thinking citizens who can identify threats to democracy and act on them. We’re just going to stay the course. We are going to be the very best colleges and universities that we can be. And in doing so, we will protect democracy. We will grow a spirit of democratic citizenship. We will build America the way our founders wanted it to be built.
[Kirk] Maybe in today’s political climate, that’s an idealistic sentiment when some students on the ground fear more immediate threats. We should say not all students are worried, of course. College-aged Americans slightly favored Harris in the presidential vote by 52 percent. But 46 percent voted for Trump. That’s up 10 percentage points from the previous election.
[Sound of crowd at party] U-S-A! U-S-A!
That was an Election Night watch party at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. And this is Matthew Trott, a junior and a Republican we’ve been talking to throughout the season. Here he is reacting to Trump’s reelection.
[Matthew Trott] I’m ecstatic. It blew all my expectations out of the water. Frankly, I think like a lot of people, I felt it was going to be about like a coin flip.
[Kirk] What do you think this means for you and other college students?
[Matthew Trott] I think it will be a much more favorable economy for us to get a job, buy a house, start a family. It’s the economy I keep coming back to as the biggest impact for college students. Without doubt.
[Kirk] And what do you hope he does about that?
[Matthew Trott] Well, I just hope he’s able to bring the cost of living down, help lower inflation more, and just make sure that jobs stay in the United States.
[Kirk] Now let’s hear from the students who’ve reacted fearfully to Trump’s win and Republican gains in the House and Senate — particularly students of color or who identify as LGBTQ. Both groups have been on the receiving end of Trump’s criticism, and a second Trump administration is widely expected to revisit the gender equity law known as Title IX. Trump has said he wants to reverse a Biden-era policy protecting transgender students.
[Samantha Greene] It just feels like we are, in fact, going backwards.
[Kirk] Samantha Greene leads the Black Student Movement at UNC. You heard from her before the election in Episode 5 about the pushback on campuses against diversity, equity and inclusion.
So what message do you think Kamala Harris’s defeat sends to college students like you?
[Samantha Greene] We are all kind of here with, like, a central mission of, like, doing better by our own community and other communities. And so I do think that this election kind of marked a milestone for us while we were watching it happen, where we saw somebody who had all those, like, traits of, you know, they had the education, they had the experience, all the things that we try to obtain to do the work that we’re hoping to do and still lose is something that I think it really shook a lot of black students because it’s like, wow, if she can put in all that work and have all those all that criteria and still lose, what can I do?
[Kirk] After seeing Trump’s most widespread campaign ad on TV and online …
[TV commercial] Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you. I’m Donald J. Trump and I approved this message.
[Kirk] … Cody Clark, a senior at the College of Wooster in Ohio, told me he was worried about the impact of a second Trump presidency on transgender students and their rights on campus.
[Cody Clark] The layers that we’re peeling back of, like, transphobia, xenophobia, racism, it’s just, like, wild.
[Kirk] Clark is a trans man and says he stayed in his home state of Ohio for college, despite the state’s growing number of anti-LGBTQ laws. Clark says he’s disappointed and fearful that Trump got reelected.
[Cody Clark] You can expect something but still not know how to, like, handle it when it gets there. And that’s kind of what happened. It’s a huge loss. It’s a really big setback. But I knew that either way, we would have our work cut out for us. And it’s hard to really prepare.
[Kirk] As he prepares to graduate this spring, Clark is studying urban studies and dance. And since the election, he’s been spending a lot of time with his friends on campus.
[Cody Clark] Last night, I went to the music building with my partner and her new friend and listened to them play cello for a while. And then I went out and just danced for a little bit. And then one of my friends came in and started dancing with me. And that was that was super helpful. We both cried a lot and, you know, it was very nice to just process — process in community.
[Kirk] After he graduates this spring, Clark says he’s planning to move out of Ohio to a state that’s more welcoming to transgender people. But no matter where he goes, a second Trump term could have a significant impact on Cody Clark and other LGBTQ college students. That’s the expectation of Janson Wu. He’s with the Trevor Project, which advocates for LGBTQ young people.
[Janson Wu] They fear bullying and harassment due to the divisive rhetoric that has surrounded this election.
[Kirk] Here’s one of the things Trump said about transgender people during the campaign. At a Catholic Charities event in New York City, Trump diminished them, mocking vice presidential candidate Tim Walz for his support of their rights in Minnesota.
[Donald Trump] I used to think that Democrats were crazy for saying that men have periods. But then I met Tim Walz.
[Janson Wu] We’ve witnessed a staggering increase in anti-transgender rhetoric in this campaign, and that has had a huge impact on young people, including LGBTQ+ college students.
[Kirk] The Trevor Project’s most recent national survey finds 90 percent of LGBTQ youth reported that politics had a negative impact on their mental health.
[Janson Wu] It’s the first peer-reviewed study that found a causal relationship between anti-transgender laws and an increase of suicide attempts amongst trans and non-binary young people by up to 72 percent. So the words, the rhetoric, are harming young people, not just the policies.
[Kirk] From your vantage point, how should colleges respond to this?
[Janson Wu] So first and foremost, our research has shown that colleges that provide mental health care access to LGBTQ young people, we see a decrease of 84 percent in the likelihood of suicide attempts. That’s a major number. We strongly recommend all colleges ensure that all students have access to affirming and inclusive mental health services.
[Kirk] Is that possible? When I talk to administrators, they say, ‘We can’t add more counselors.’ They don’t have the resources to do this. What would you say to administrators who say, ‘We’re strapped here, We can only do so much.’
[Janson Wu] It’s not only possible, but it’s a responsibility for colleges who have a student body that is crying out for help.
[Jon] Kirk, we’ve been talking about some pretty heavy stuff here. So this is a good time to add for listeners, if you or someone you know is in crisis, the National Suicide and Crisis Hotline is available by dialing 9-8-8.
[Kirk] Yes. Thank you, Jon. Now, you’ve covered higher education through several presidential transitions — we won’t say how many. How would you characterize this one?
[Jon] Well, you know, this transition comes at exactly the same time that colleges are already in a lot of trouble. They have issues with declining enrollment and declining revenue. And now they have a president who is very critical of them and whose supporters might be increasingly questioning why they should go to college. And as we say a lot in this podcast, not everyone has to go to college, but somebody does, in a knowledge economy that competes with other countries where the college going rates are going up. Ours are going down, and that threatens our economic competitiveness.
[Kirk] Right. I must say, the stakes for higher ed seem especially high this time around. Whether it’s the debate over cost and value or free speech and campus protests or the future of diversity, equity and inclusion programs on campus. Did you have that sense? Do you feel like the stakes are higher this time around?
[Jon] I don’t know that the stakes can get much higher than they’ve been in the last couple of years with, you know, presidents of Ivy League universities dragged in front of Congress. I’m I’m speculating that maybe there’ll be other issues. There’ll be so much going on in the case of a Trump administration like the last time that this one might get lost. And colleges and universities can sort of stay a little bit more under the radar.
[Kirk] Right. And we’ve already seen colleges kind of stepping back from issuing statements on things like Trump’s reelection or other hot-button issues. We’ve covered a lot of ground just in this episode and throughout the season. What else will you be watching as a second Trump term take shape?
[Jon] Well, there are a lot of other issues that affect college students. Reproductive rights, for example, that, as we’ve reported, are affecting where students choose to go to college. Those are issues that I think you’ll hear about a lot. Young people voted at lower rates this time around, but they still voted in large numbers. And they tell me when I visit campuses that what’s on their minds are such things as reproductive rights, but also climate change, student loan debt — the things that that affect them immediately. These are students, as they constantly remind me, who grew up having to learn how to defend themselves in elementary school against mass shootings. So they have a lot of concerns about things like gun laws. So I think that there’s a lot of things that aren’t specifically about higher education that nonetheless affect it.
[Kirk] This is College Uncovered from GBH News and The Hechinger Report. I’m Kirk Carapezza …
[Jon] … and I’m Jon Marcus. Thanks for listening to another season, as we’ve explored the politics of higher education. More than ever, college campuses are on the front lines in America’s culture War, and GBH News and The Hechinger Report will continue to follow it.
[Kirk] You can find all of our previous episodes wherever you get your podcasts.
We would love to hear from you. So send us an email to GBHNewsConnect@WGBH.org. Or leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-2486. And tell us what you want to know about how colleges really operate. We just might answer your question on the show.
[Jon] This episode was produced and written by Kirk Carapezza …
[Kirk] … and Jon Marcus, and it was edited by Jeff Keating and Lee Hill.
Ellen London is executive producer. Production assistance from Diane Adame.
[Jon] Mixing in sound Design by David Goodman and Gary Mott. All of our music is by college bands. Our theme song and original music is by Left Roman out of MIT. Mai He is our project manager, and head of GBH Podcasts is Devin Maverick Robins.
College Uncovered is a production of GBH News and The Hechinger Report, and it’s distributed by PRX. It’s made possible by Lumina Foundation.
Thank you so much for listening.
