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The assault on higher ed goes deeper than you think
The regime is quietly working to create a permanent underclass.
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President Donald Trump went after Ivy League schools with a vengeance straight out the gate during his second term, demanding hundreds of millions to settle sham investigations and restore federal funding.
Those attacks, however, are about hurting schools that Trump and his supporters views as bastions of wokeism. But in a much quieter but more widespread way, the administration and Congress have engaged in an assault on the attainability of higher education for everyone but the rich.
This is much bigger than budget cuts. It’s not merely a continuation of things like longtime GOP efforts to cut Pell Grants. It’s a far more wide-ranging assault designed to drastically limit access to higher education for lower-income and middle-class students.
Pricing out all but the rich and well-connected
One of the biggest obstacles that the administration has put in the way of prospective students is ensuring that student loan relief is essentially nonexistent and making repayment plans much more expensive. We’ve been dealing with this since before Trump retook office in 2025, as conservatives were incandescent with rage that people might see the tiniest shred of loan forgiveness.
Republicans in all three branches could not contain their enthusiasm at the prospect of foreclosing student loan relief.
The judiciary? The right-wingers on the Supreme Court struck down former President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt. Congress? North Carolina GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the Education and the Workforce Committee, was so excited by this development that she literally titled her press release “Foxx Celebrates as SCOTUS Puts Final Nail in Biden’s Student Loan Bailout Coffin.” Executive branch? Trump’s Department of Education might have broken an arm patting itself on the back for killing the SAVE repayment plan, a move that will increase monthly student loan payments for millions.
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Of course, eliminating student loan relief and most repayment options has the most direct effect on people who already have loans. However, it also serves as a deterrent to future students considering taking out loans, as they know the repayment landscape awaiting them is grim, especially if they don’t land a job in their field. But for many future students, taking out loans is a necessity, and without those loans, college isn’t in the cards.
You can easily guess which groups rely the most on student loans and will be hurt by this going forward. Roughly half of all undergraduates take out some federal loans, but that spikes to 82.9 percent of Black students seeking a bachelor’s degree. Women are significantly more likely than men to take federal loans for both bachelor’s and associate’s degrees. Four years out from graduation, Black borrowers owe, on average, $25,000 more than their white counterparts.
Now, a non-evil administration might look at this disparity and conclude it’s time to figure out how to close the racial gap so that Black borrowers aren’t disproportionately affected and can still access higher education. But this is the Trump administration. As far as Trump is concerned, it’s a feature, not a bug, if this move results in fewer women and fewer Black people going to college.
