Welcome back to After the First 100 Days, Inside Higher Ed’s weekly roundup of news from the Hill to the Oval Office. I’m your host, Katherine Knott, IHE’s news editor, who is ready for the weekend.
It’s Day 144 of the second Trump administration, and we’ve reached the end of week 21. This week, we saw continued fallout from the State Department’s intervention into the Fulbright program and learned about the Education Department’s plans to move career education programs to the Labor Department.
But the big news this week came from the Senate, where Republicans released their plan for higher education reform. The 71-page bill is part of the Senate’s answer to the reconciliation bill that passed the House last month.
The House and Senate agree on a number of things, like capping graduate student loans, eliminating Grad PLUS and expanding the Pell Grant to cover shorter-term workforce training programs. But the senators have a different idea on how to hold colleges accountable. Instead of risk-sharing, the Senate proposed a plan we’re calling “gainful for all” that ties programs’ access to federal student aid to students’ earnings. Our team ran down the various changes here. There’s even a Venn diagram for you.
So what’s next? Well, we are still waiting for more Senate committees to release their plans before they can all be combined into one bill. Senators are trying to pass legislation by the end of the month. If the legislation is different from the House’s version, the two chambers will negotiate to reconcile the differences.
In Other News: Tennessee wants a federal judge to declare that the current criteria for Hispanic-serving institutions is unconstitutional. We’ve been expecting some sort of challenge to this status as well as the designations for minority-serving institutions, but one source called this lawsuit “a punch to the gut.”
So, will it be successful? Unclear, but it’s possible, especially after the federal lawsuit against Texas’s policy to offer in-state tuition to undocumented students quickly resulted in a policy change.
At stake is $229 million that’s specifically appropriated to the country’s roughly 600 Hispanic-serving institutions. Advocates argue that funding is critical to ensure students get the support they need.
On Tap for Next Week:
- A federal judge is holding a hearing June 16 about President Trump’s order to restrict visas for scholars and students connected to Harvard.
- More reconciliation plans should drop. We’re waiting for the Senate Finance Committee, which controls tax policy and the endowment tax.
That’s it for Week 21. Aside from Inside Higher Ed, what are you reading this summer? I mostly read romance novels these days, but I’m excited to dive into Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. Email me your list or any questions to katherine.knott@insidehighered.com.
As always, when news breaks this afternoon or over the weekend, you can find the latest at InsideHigherEd.com. In the meantime, I’ll be catching up on American Ninja Warrior. Have a good weekend!
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