Hello and welcome back to The Markup, Inside Higher Ed’s weekly roundup of all things higher ed policy. I’m your host, Katherine Knott, IHE’s news editor.
In just 12 days, some of the most significant changes to federal higher ed policy in decades will take effect, and some of them are likely to upend how students finance their education. We’ve been talking about the policies for the last year, but they include new loan caps on graduate students, a Pell Grant expansion and yet another repayment plan for borrowers. A new accountability measure based on earnings is also supposed to kick in on July 1, but the Education Department has yet to finalize the regulations.
We’ll be watching carefully to see how these changes play out on campuses and want to hear more from you all about the consequences—both intended and unintended—as well as what you need to know from the Education Department. You can reach out to me at katherine.knott@insidehighered.com.
And now, let’s get back to what happened in the last week.
This Week’s Big Story
The Trump administration took another chunk out of the Education Department, announcing plans to shift civil rights investigations to the Justice Department and management of special education programs to the Health and Human Services Department.
We’ve been expecting the move, because the administration has spent the last year outsourcing dozens of programs and responsibilities from ED to other agencies. (You can see the full list here.)
Still, the department’s announcement sparked intense pushback as former ED staffers, left-leaning advocates and others argued the changes would put students at risk and create more barriers for those seeking justice or support. Trump officials have largely dismissed these concerns, saying that nothing about these programs will change even with the involvement of another federal agency.
“This partnership will not impact students, parents or families who believe they have experienced discrimination,” an ED fact sheet states. Under the agreement, the Education Department will refer complaints to Justice for investigation but will still make any final determinations.
But Catherine Lhamon, who ran the Office for Civil Rights during the Obama and Biden administrations, is skeptical of that claim. For instance, the Justice Department has a different approach to investigating complaints. Whereas ED has to review every complaint, she and others said Justice can pick and choose which ones to investigate. That could mean that some complaints fall through the cracks.
It’s unclear from Tuesday’s announcement what will happen to the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights’ current caseload and its backlog of complaints or how many complaints DOJ will pick up. For context, in fiscal year 2024, OCR received 22,687 complaints.
ED officials also wouldn’t say if they are planning to hire more lawyers at Justice. As of 2025, DOJ had 577 full-time positions in its civil rights division, while ED’s OCR had 530. And OCR operates on a larger budget—$140 million compared to $107 million for the DOJ’s civil rights division.
