Called “skinny” because it lacked details, the skeleton plan included stripping about $10 billion from federal education spending in the 2018 budget year, a 13.5 percent reduction. Taking into account inflation and population growth, the budget cuts would be relatively larger. Proposing severe budget cuts when Trump had run promising to do more for education set off alarms at the American Council on Education, the largest association of colleges and universities. Terry W. Hartle, a council vice president, called it a “historic assault on college affordability” that “would undermine opportunity for millions of low-income and working-class students who see higher education as the gateway to a better life.”
Trump would damage “nearly every program that helps students afford college,” Hartle said. Student loans would cost more and they would be harder to get. The Federal Work-Study program was to be cut almost in half, with spending plummeting from $990 million to $500 million. The remaining funds would go mostly to undergraduate students.
Judith Scott-Clayton, a Brookings Institution education economist who believes the work-study program is ripe for reforms, said that even though she found the existing program wanting, “it’s not possible to cut the program in half without sharply reducing access for those students that appear to benefit most: low-income students at public institutions.” Halving the program would have a second negative consequence. Many poor students have no familial or practical experience working in a white-collar environment. Instead of operating cash registers or washing dishes to support themselves in college, the work-study program provided many poor students with an introduction to the white-collar work environment by doing chores in labs, gathering data alongside field researchers, or just handling administrative chores in offices like getting students identification cards and solving financial aid problems. Without such soft experiences, many students may earn a degree yet never fulfill their potential because they arrive at their first career position ill-prepared for a sudden transition from how they grew up to what is expected in workplaces for jobs requiring a college degree. While the budget was skinny, it was also revealing about where Trump wanted to redirect federal money. Short version: poor kids dreaming of college should forget their dreams of future prosperity because instead Trump wanted to increase military spending by more than a billion dollars a week and bolster the budgets for Homeland Security and rounding up undocumented immigrants even if they led exemplary lives. The planned cuts made it clear that the HBCUs and their students were not at all important to the new president.
Lomax was aghast at the flip-flop from Trump’s unequivocal campaign and Oval Office promises of more government money and support for HBCUs and their students to severe federal budget cuts. The United Negro College Fund’s motto, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” had been updated a few years earlier by adding “but a good thing to invest in.” Like the HBCU college presidents, he had every expectation that Trump meant what he said about investing in HBCUs and their students.
“President Trump pledged to do more for HBCUs than any other president has done before,” Lomax said. “However, this budget is not reflective of that sentiment.”
The Trump plan to savage education was not aimed directly at black students and the HBCUs, at least not blatantly. It was aimed at all students whose parents were not prosperous enough to pay for two years of community college or for the seven or more years required for college and professional and advanced degrees after high school. But the way the Trump administration designed the cuts, HBCUs and their students would suffer much more than the average college. This is how institutional racism works, seemingly evenhanded on the surface, the barriers hidden in the structure of funding mechanisms.
Right after the meeting at which the college presidents who came to speak were kept mostly quiet, Education Secretary DeVos issued a statement. It is significant because unlike off-the-cuff remarks that can be gaffes, this one was written, reviewed, and edited. Here are DeVos’s written words, in which she seized on the opportunity to promote her Johnny one-note education policy:
HBCUs started from the fact that there were too many students in America who did not have equal access to education. They saw that the system wasn’t working, that there was an absence of opportunity, so they took it upon themselves to provide the solution. HBCUs are real pioneers when it comes to school choice. They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality. Their success has shown that more options help students flourish.
DeVos’s statement, to be polite, is nonsense. It is an example of the Trump kakistocracy in which the worst among us, especially the utterly unqualified and ignorant, hold high positions in the federal government.
While the first of these colleges was founded in 1864, as the Civil War raged, most HBCUs were formed during the Jim Crow era. By law and practice, even the smartest and most capable black students were barred by law or custom from almost every college, public and private, especially in the South. The existence of these schools reflects not choice but the racist politics of exclusion. African Americans had no choice but to create a separate, and poorly funded, parallel system of higher education because of the absurd belief that skin color determines character and intelligence.
Trump’s casual cruelty was evident in the plan to eliminate a program for the poorest of poor students, known as Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants. Each year more than a million and a half college students get an average of about $500 from the program. That is pocket change to Trump or DeVos, but to many students such small sums are the difference between getting an education and dropping out of school, between eating healthy meals and going hungry.
A few months later a presidential signing statement, attached to a spending bill, suggested that providing any federal funds for the historically black colleges and universities constituted official racial discrimination and thus was illegal.
This was part of a Trump meme that would grow over time, the assertion that the real victims of racial discrimination in America are whites, a message aimed at working-class whites in what for decades were factory and mill towns until the owners moved the jobs to Mexico or China or automated and made the jobs obsolete.
Cutting much needed help for poor students, especially poor black students, was not the end of the new policies that would ensure long-term harm to these strivers while helping the very people and institutions that candidate Trump accused of taking care of themselves in Washington at the expense of others. The Trump administration came out foursquare for bankers who loan money to students and their parents, taking Wall Street’s side against any people who run into difficulty repaying these debts, a subject I will examine later.
Overall the budget messages were clear: campaign promises to build bridges to a better life, especially for African American young people, were not just the usual hot air from a politician who fails to deliver, but were in fact calculated lies that exploited dreams of a better future when the real plan was to create a nightmare for young strivers no matter how hard they studied in school. Trump’s plan was not to make things better for them, but to make them much worse.
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Taking an axe to education spending contradicted both Trump’s America First policy and Make America Great Again slogan. A reduced commitment to education makes America less than great now and especially in the future. As noted, half of America’s economic growth since World War II arose from taxpayer investments in scientific knowledge, which requires advanced education. Other countries, especially those in Asia with advancing economies, were pouring more money into education. China had begun experimenting with giving some freedom in the classroom for debate and even challenging professors to encourage entrepreneurs and scientists, rather than producing graduates reared on unquestioned fealty to their instructors and future bosses. Trump’s cuts could make America second or third or worse, creating a future that would be less prosperous and leave America in the bac
k of the class compared to other modern countries as an increasingly complex world requires much more rigorous intellectual development to prosper.
It got worse when the full 2018 budget came out weeks later. Over ten years, the cuts to education spending would come to $142 billion. Poor students of modest means would be hit hardest by the Trump budget.
DeVos defended these cuts. She had made a name for herself in asserting that public schools were not doing a good enough job, though many of her remarks suggested her deeper agenda was moving away from secular schools toward religious-based education. Her family has poured vast sums into electing politicians who support her vision of public schools, which she largely succeeded doing in Detroit.
After two decades, the Detroit charter schools she championed have not improved the miserable state of Motor City education and in some ways made it worse and less accountable, the Detroit Free Press found. Public schools in Detroit did far better than charter schools, the newspaper reported. Among all Michigan schools, 23 percent of Detroit public school students performed in the bottom quarter. But 38 percent of Detroit charter school students were in the bottom quarter. That was one of the milder problems the newspaper uncovered in a year-long investigation published in 2014 and updated in 2017.
The newspaper’s editorial page, which advocates for school choice and charter schools as one way to reform education, ran a scathing editorial about DeVos’s lack of qualifications to become education secretary. Stephen Henderson, the Free Press editorial page editor who has followed DeVos for years, described her as “willfully impervious” to facts. Two decades of DeVos family money pushing charter schools, the editorial said, have made the Detroit school system “a laughingstock in national education circles, and a pariah among reputable charter school operators.”
All DeVos accomplished, Henderson wrote, was donating so much money to politicians that she managed “to bend the conversation to her ideological convictions despite the dearth of evidence supporting them.” Worst of all, the paper found no indications that DeVos “is even interested” in issues of accountability, performance, and quality in education, unswayed that few Detroit charter schools are high performers. “DeVos and her family have not been daunted by these outcomes. It’s as if the reams of data showing just incremental progress or abysmal failure don’t matter. Their belief in charter schools is unshakable, their resistance to systematic reforms that would improve both public and charter schools unyielding,” Henderson summed up.
That background grows in significance when evaluating what DeVos said about Trump’s budget for education. She said it demonstrated “a series of tough choices we have had to make when assessing the best use of taxpayer money.” Those choices were to cut education in favor of militarism and policing. Think of it as jettisoning brains for bullets.
Next on the Trump chopping block were subsidized federal loans, called Stafford Loans. These loans are free of interest so long as a student remains in college, in contrast to other student loans, on which interest accrues as soon as loan proceeds are disbursed.
In a direct contradiction to his promise to limit student loan repayments to fifteen years and no more than 12.5 percent of income, Trump sought to eliminate all repayment-based-on-income subsidies for students from large or poor families or those who go into low-paid fields after graduation.
Also to be ended was loan forgiveness for students who perform several years of public service by working for government, Native American tribal organizations, or charities and faithfully make their monthly payments for ten years. Trump even proposed ending Perkins Loans, in which colleges share in the cost, a sign of their commitment to students.
These Trump cuts could reasonably be interpreted as a war on the poor, especially the nonwhite poor, which critics said all along was what should be expected from a Trump presidency despite all his campaign claims to the contrary. Brains are not distributed according to the wealth of parents. Many rich kids grow up to be intellectual, moral, or performance duds. History is rich with examples of artists, inventors, politicians, scientists, and generals who grew up in poverty that they escaped through education, leaving an important mark on the world.
Cutting avenues to success for poor, working-class, and even middle-class young people is a Make America Worse policy. The most valuable assets possessed by America—or any modern country—are the brains of its young people. The world of today and tomorrow requires rigorous development of intellectual skills of all kinds. In the twenty-first-century economy, reading, writing, and arithmetic are not even a sufficient base. In the knowledge-driven society in which we now live, the arts, law, music, philosophy, and poetry take on new meaning to deepen one’s understanding. Critical-thinking skills to perceive and analyze problems not yet imagined are the building blocks of a great nation. And given the many belief systems, desires, and interests of people not just in America but around the world, developing a sophisticated understanding of other cultures is also crucial to peace and progress.
There are more dimensions to this Trump assault on the brains of the young and poor. Trump the candidate ran against Wall Street and abuses by financial interests, and said he would also champion veterans. Instead, in a move rich with irony, Trump and DeVos took up the side of the bankers against the borrowers, as we shall see in the next chapter.
Bankers Before Brains
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump spoke passionately about a crisis in student loan debt. He sought to position himself as friendlier to young strivers than Barack Obama, who was forty-two years old when he paid off the last of his student loans in January 2004.
“Students should not be asked to pay more on debt than they can afford,” Trump said less than a month before the election. “Debt should not be an albatross around their necks for the rest of their lives.”
The burdens of student loan debt matter not just to those who take out loans or forgo higher education because they are unwilling to go into debt. These burdens, as we shall see, impose huge costs on society. They retard economic growth in ways as powerful as they are subtle. And they distort the demographics of generations to come with the potential for profound consequences about the future of life in America.
Trump proposed that students who faithfully pay on their loans every month for fifteen years be excused from the remaining balance. Obama had proposed twenty years, George W. Bush twenty-five years. However, Trump also wanted students to turn over up to 12.5 percent of their income, not the 10 percent Obama proposed.
The net effect of the Trump shorter term but higher payment would be a 6 percent discount compared to the Obama plan, not that people attending his rallies were likely to take out a calculator or pen and paper to run the numbers. But Trump’s proposal also came with one serious flaw—the 12.5 percent maximum increased the chances of defaulting on the loans, which would wipe out the forgiveness benefit.
Trump also said he would make colleges and universities reduce tuition by getting rid of administrative “bloat.” He never cited any legal authority for this. Nor did he offer any data indicating how much administrative expenses could be reduced or whether there was enough waste in higher education administration to enable meaningful tuition reductions.
He also threatened to take away the charitable deduction for donors to colleges unless colleges spend more from their endowments on student aid. Trump could never do that. Only Congress makes laws. And that idea had about as much chance of becoming law as Congress had of banning college football.
Within days after the election, Trump the incoming president began parting ways with Trump the candidate. The rhetoric that made Trump appear to be a champion of indebted students stopped. Trump made appointments that showed he would take the side of the for-profit schools that charged high fees for schooling of little value and the lenders who made those schools so lucrative by selling debt to students. Trump the champion of students, the modern knight who promised to slay the financial dragon of student debt, decided to
feed the dragon more of the cash students hoped would be theirs because they stayed in school to get their degrees.
Casting aside the concerns of student borrowers, and the parents and grandparents who guaranteed their loans, the Trump administration brought in people right out of the commercial colleges, which depend on student loans for nearly all of their revenue. And these appointees came armed for battle against the borrowers.
By picking Betsy DeVos to be education secretary, Trump signaled that he was never serious about what he said during the campaign. At her confirmation hearing, DeVos was unable to articulate issues that any former education secretary could have expounded on with facts and insights aplenty. Two Republican senators could not bring themselves to vote for DeVos and so she was confirmed only because Vice President Mike Pence, as presiding officer in the Senate, cast the tie-breaking vote.
Two aides brought in by DeVos fit perfectly Trump’s description of the Washington swamp dwellers he had promised to flush down the drain, not elevate to positions of power and influence. Both came from jobs where their salaries depended on their skill at vanquishing student loan borrowers.
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