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U.S. education secretary Miguel Cardona encouraged attendees to keep fighting at a farewell event Tuesday.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
A cover of Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It” played in the background Tuesday afternoon in an auditorium at the Education Department as more than a hundred education access advocates, policy experts and agency staff gathered to reflect on the last four years.
Later, a local high school choir took the stage, singing and clapping along to Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.”
The music kicked off a two-hour celebration of the Biden administration’s efforts to get schools back on track following the pandemic, to expand educational opportunity and to make higher education more accessible. While the music was cheery, attendees and speakers acknowledged the looming changes, and a bittersweet discomfort was palpable in the room.
“It’s odd—it’s a celebration and an ending at the same time,” one guest said to another attendee.
In just five days, President-elect Donald Trump will take office and a new cohort of appointees, led by education secretary nominee Linda McMahon, will take the helm. And while Secretary Miguel Cardona and other senior officials acknowledged the “apprehension” and “fear” in the room over the uncertainty of the second Trump administration, they chose to focus on celebrating what the Biden administration had accomplished, saying that educators can’t afford to spend too much time wallowing.
“The truth is, I leave here with a great deal of hope,” Cardona said. “There’s no one education secretary or president that does that, and no one leader can bring our resolve … So whatever comes next—we got this.”
He also thanked President Biden for appointing him to the post, noting his background as a bilingual teacher and the first in his family to go to college.
“It should remind all of us of the significance of President Biden’s decision—in the middle of a crisis no less—to have a teacher and not some billionaire donor lead the Department of Education,” he said.
The event’s higher ed portion opened with videos highlighting the department’s efforts to provide loan forgiveness and expanding career and technical ed programs through new career-connection grants.
Under Secretary James Kvaal, who started working in the department at age 23, touted the more than $74 billion in relief provided to more than one million borrowers through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and the $183.6 billion in relief it provided to five million borrowers over all.
During Cardona’s time in office, not one federal loan recipient went into default, Kvaal added. (Student loan payments were paused for a bulk of Cardona’s tenure, and due to a yearlong grace period, borrowers were prevented from defaulting on their loans until last fall.)
“After graduating from college, young people should begin their adult lives with a sense of limitless possibilities, not feel weighed down by their debt or even worse off than if they had never gone to college,” he said. Now, “for millions of students, debt no longer stands in the way of the benefits of their studies.”
However, many of the department’s broader efforts to provide loan forgiveness were struck down or remain stalled in courts. Biden’s initial debt-relief plan, which would have forgiven up to $20,000 in loans for all eligible Americans, was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in June 2023. A more narrow second attempt at the debt-relief plan was also blocked in fall 2024.
Federal courts also blocked the administration’s borrower-defense rules, which would have made it easier for a defrauded borrower to seek debt relief, and more recently, an income-driven repayment plan, designed to make borrowers’ monthly bills more affordable.
But to Cardona and Kvaal, those lawsuits were an example of the department’s strength and commitment, not a signal of its weakness. They highlighted the department’s work with lawmakers to raise the maximum annual Pell Grant from $6,895 to $7,395 as well as the agency’s support for free community college programs at the state and federal level.
“When we walked into this quagmire together, I spoke about education in our country as a flor pálida, a wilted flower, or wilted rose,” Cardona said. “I said then that we’re going to have to be the master gardeners who bring the rose back to life, and that’s exactly what we did … What began in a plague is ending in progress.”
The secretaries did acknowledge what some critics describe as the blundered rollout of a new Free Application for Federal Student Aid last year, though they pointed to department data that shows more students received financial aid for this academic year and newly corrected outside data that documents an increase in first-year enrollment.
“That means our efforts to make the FAFSA smoother and simpler and easier are working,” Kvaal said.
Jury Medrano Jimenez, a first-generation Latina student at the University of Maryland who spoke at the event, said federal aid and other local grants helped her stay debt-free.
For Cardona, the last four years highlighted how important public education is to democracy. He called on attendees to continue fighting to improve the nation’s schools and colleges, saying there is still more work to be done, and that that won’t change just because people’s titles do.
“Our swords are sharper. We are ready for the battle ahead to defend public education,” he said. “Demand a seat at the table. Don’t expect anything less of your leaders. Now, if anything, expect more.”