Virginia Foxx Reflects on Her Time in the Hot Seat

It’s Virginia Foxx’s last week as chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, and she’s feeling reflective.

When the North Carolina Republican assumed the chair in early 2023, she told Inside Higher Ed her main goal was to finally reauthorize the Higher Education Act, which had been languishing since 2008. But Foxx will fall short of that goal when she steps down as chair at the end of this year. The College Cost Reduction Act, a sweeping bill to overhaul higher ed, came four votes short of reaching the House floor last week, despite a final push from Foxx and other lawmakers.

It’s a disappointing outcome for the 81-year-old, who has spent her entire two decades in the House sitting on the committee.

But in many ways, Foxx has had a more prominent hand in shaping the committee, and her party’s higher education agenda, than any House member this century. She’s twice served as chair, from 2017 to 2019 and again since 2023, and was the ranking Republican member in between. She’ll vacate her leadership role after holding the gavel during one of the most eventful years for higher education in recent memory. She’s called the presidents of elite universities to the Hill to face hearings on pro-Palestinian campus protests, which led to two resignations, and shined a light on the Education Department’s botched rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

Higher education has been Foxx’s primary interest since long before issues like diversity, equity and inclusion entered the lexicon. She’s the only sitting member of the House who has worked in higher ed administration: She served as president of North Carolina’s Mayland Community College from 1987 to 1994, not far from where she grew up in Appalachia.

Foxx’s upbringing shaped her views on education: She didn’t have electricity or running water until she was 14, and she was the first member of her family to earn a high school diploma; she said that graduating from college—she went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—“changed her life.”

“I was raised poor, poorer than anyone you ever knew,” she told Inside Higher Ed, growing emotional in her spacious Rayburn office. “Education is the reason I’m here right now. But it’s not just education,” she added. “It’s hard work. It has to be both.”

That combination of reverence for the transformative power of education and staunch insistence on a no-handouts approach defined Foxx’s tenure as the country’s most powerful lawmaker in higher ed policy. It hasn’t made her many friends in the sector, but she said that’s part of the job.

Foxx will be succeeded by Representative Tim Walberg of Michigan, who will inherit a chair that Foxx turned into a magnet for national media attention and a bullhorn for what is increasingly a core component of the Republican agenda.

The congresswoman sat down with Inside Higher Ed to talk about her accomplishments and disappointments as education committee chair. The conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

Q: Passing the College Cost Reduction Act was a top priority for you, and that didn’t happen this term. If you couldn’t get it done, do you think reauthorizing the Higher Education Act will ever happen?

A: My greatest disappointment is that we didn’t get the CCRA passed. We were within four votes of passing it. We had four recalcitrant Republicans, all with parochial reasons. It was not because the bill was bad; they liked the bill, but their schools were telling them, don’t vote for it. Even though every school in this country would benefit from that bill, even though they might go kicking and screaming because it forced accountability on them.

But to get within four votes of passing major reform is phenomenal. It’s a major achievement in my view. Now, for the next term, we’ve laid the groundwork for reconciliation. I expect to see a large portion of the CCRA in the reconciliation language that we will be dealing with in the next session now that we have the Senate and the House and the presidency—and definitely President Trump is very interested in this. He wants to get the federal government out of education, if at all possible. And he is interested in what happens in postsecondary education. So the pieces of the CCRA that can go into reconciliation will go there, and then we’ll be working on separate legislation [for the rest].

What we wanted to do with the CCRA, and we will continue to work on it, is to help as many students as possible be successful in their college work. We had other areas of focus—we broke up the accreditation cartel—but we were mainly focused on students.

Q: You’ve opposed other measures aimed at helping students avoid or get out of debt, though, most notably Biden’s student debt relief agenda. How would you respond to critics who say your positions on those initiatives make it harder for poor students struggling with college cost?

A: What the Biden administration was doing was not solving the problem of the high cost of colleges; all it was doing was transferring debt from the 13 percent of people who had incurred it voluntarily to the 87 percent of American people who didn’t take on debt. What the CCRA does is say to colleges and universities, you need to keep the cost of a college education low. If you do that, you will be rewarded with what we call Promise grants. If you don’t pay attention to the students and help them succeed, then you will have to pay some of the cost. It gives them some skin in the game. If I were a college president again and I had a deal like that, I’d work really hard at it.

The esteem with which colleges have been held in the past is gone. But colleges earned that result themselves.”

Q: Has Congress’s attitude toward higher education changed in the two decades you’ve spent there?

A: Yes. Absolutely. The fact that we got four votes away [from passing the CCRA] is a big sign of that. It means that all the rest of those people were willing to accept this extensive reform. Many of them said, “My colleges don’t like it. They’re telling me to vote no, but I’m voting yes, because I believe that what we’re doing is important for the country.”

Q: You’ve been a harsh critic of many colleges, on everything from the campus antisemitism hearings to the question of program quality. Has that made it more difficult to work with them?

A: I loved my time in higher education. I loved helping students. But I didn’t come here to be popular with colleges and universities. I came here to be a good steward of hardworking taxpayer dollars. And for too long, the colleges and universities have had zero accountability.

I think about the people I represent. I think about the people who live in 50-year-old single-wide trailers at the end of a dirt road, who worked every day of their lives or are still working and paying their taxes—that’s my responsibility. My responsibility is not to make colleges and universities happy. I’m not trying to antagonize them, I’m just trying to get them to understand that they’ve been on a gravy train for a long time. I think the American people want that to stop. Higher education institutions have never been held in as low esteem as they’re being held now.

Q: Do you think that’s a bad thing, that fewer Americans believe in a college education?

A: I absolutely do think that’s a terrible thing. Part of what has made this country great has been excellent education in the past, but we’ve fallen down a rabbit hole. Our K-12 education is in the pits; our higher education is in the pits. What we’ve seen on the campuses in terms of antisemitism, with 40 percent of students graduating from college making no more money than they would have had they not gone to college, something’s wrong with this picture. And so the esteem with which colleges have been held in the past is gone. But colleges earned that result themselves. They’ve been very complacent, even the so-called elite ones.

I’m not anti-intellectual, which I’m accused of all the time. For heaven’s sakes, I got a degree in English.”

Q: When it comes to oversight, you’ve pushed the bar forward a good bit. You’ve subpoenaed universities and brought their presidents to the Hill for hearings that led to multiple high-profile resignations. Would you say you’ve set a new tone for how Congress interacts with universities, a new power dynamic?

A: I never set out to set a tone. I’ve just been doing my job. Oversight is part of our job. The hearing we held last December where we brought in those presidents, we had no idea how that hearing was going to turn out. We were concerned about the safety of Jewish students and faculty, and we wanted those presidents to come in and assure us that they were going to make sure that the students and faculty were safe and felt safe. I told that to those presidents, in this office. They said, “What do you want to get out of this hearing?” I said, “I want you to grow a spine and show us that you have some morals and that you’re going to do the right thing for these students.” And they failed to do that.

Q: Whether you intended to set a new tone or not, many would say that unlike your predecessors, you’ve used your chairmanship as a bully pulpit and drawn more national attention to your core issues. Do you see that having a lasting effect on the committee?

A: I hope it does. I hope people will pay more attention to the Education Committee, even though I’m no longer chair, because the committee is doing good work. The committee touches the lives of every person in this country. People don’t pay enough attention to the breadth of that committee and the depth … Most of the time, the committee works in obscurity. And that’s OK, as long as the work gets done. Nobody’s looking for publicity, or at least, I wasn’t looking for publicity. But national attention to important issues is always good.

Q: Do you support Trump’s proposal to abolish the Education Department?

A: I definitely agree with it. I have always felt that way, because I read the Constitution, and the Constitution does not say education is a responsibility of the federal government. There are 49 enumerated powers, I believe, for the Congress. And if you look them up, you’ll see education is not there. My approach is, if it’s not in the Constitution for the Congress of the United States to deal with, then it shouldn’t be handled at the federal level.

Q: The National Review recently called Education Secretary Miguel Cardona the “worst secretary in history.” You certainly haven’t minced words when discussing his job performance over the past four years. Do you agree with the Review’s assessment?

A: He has not lived up to the potential I thought he had. I’ll say that. I thought he had a great background for being secretary of education, but I think you need somebody at the head of every department that has administrative experience, which he lacks.

I’m not trying to antagonize [colleges]. I’m just trying to get them to understand that they’ve been on a gravy train for a long time.”

Q: You were a very vocal critic of the Education Department’s rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid. What do you think went wrong?

A: I believe [Cardona] brought in ideologues who did not know how to do their jobs and who spent all their time trying to get debt relief done and didn’t focus on FAFSA. They were so focused on fulfilling Biden’s campaign promise of debt forgiveness that they just didn’t focus on the main task of the department. And that’s not the way you operate.

Q: Before you got into politics, you served as president of Mayland Community College in North Carolina. How did that experience shape your views on higher education policy?

A: It really informed me very well on the Workforce, Innovation and Opportunity Act. I saw that at work in the community college, and I saw what was wrong with it: Almost all the money being spent on administration instead of directly helping students. That’s why WIOA was one of my main focuses—which, by the way, is in the [continuing resolution]. It’s one of the few major pieces riding along on the [continuing resolution] that’s going to pass. I’m very proud of that.

Q: Do you believe we’re moving more toward workforce preparation programs and away from the traditional four-year higher ed?

A: The two things are tied together. What is the purpose of education if not to get someone a job? I’m a big believer in expanding people’s minds; Bobby [Scott, the ranking Democrat on the Education and the Workforce committee] thinks everybody should get a liberal arts education at a liberal arts school. I would love for everybody to get a liberal arts education at liberal arts school if they can also gain the skills they need to get a good job. I’m not anti-intellectual, which I’m accused of all the time. For heaven’s sakes, I got a degree in English. But the two should be tied together.

The goal of education should be enriching your mind, helping you learn to think, but also help you to gain the skills you need to be successful, and that does not have to be a baccalaureate degree. Seventy percent of the people in this country don’t have baccalaureate degrees. They’re the ones running the country. Those are my people.