Project 2025 and Higher Education

A radical blueprint for a second Trump administration promises to make higher education in the U.S. more expensive and dangerous for some students, while also limiting what students and faculty can discuss and investigate on campuses.

Project 2025, the extremist policy agenda published by former Trump administration officials, is a 922-page roadmap to a future Trump administration. Its dystopian wish list of policy recommendations would cut Social Security and Medicare, require states to report women’s miscarriages, limit access to contraception, gut civil-rights laws, invalidate gun-control laws, and much, much more. It also would hike taxes on the poor and middle class. 

“In many ways, [Donald Trump] is an unserious man. But the consequences of putting him back in the White House are extremely serious. Just google Project 2025. By the way, can you believe they put that thing in writing?” asked Vice President Kamala Harris, at a campaign event in Wisconsin last week. “It’s a detailed and dangerous blueprint of what he will do if he is elected president again.”

Higher education is not the centerpiece of Project 2025, but it is addressed in the document, over and again. It also is addressed in Trump’s “Agenda 47,” on his campaign website. Here are a just few of their promises for faculty, staff, and students on U.S. college campuses.              

Curtail Student Loan Forgiveness and Repayment Programs

Project 2025 would eliminate the Biden administration’s income-based repayment plans and do away with federal student debt forgiveness for public-service workers, which so far has cleared $69.2 billion in student debt for 946,000 borrowers.

On average, people with federal student loan debt—which is more than 43 million Americans—would pay 1.3 to 2 times more per month under the Project 2025 plan, according to a Center for American Progress analysis, with increased payments totaling $1,822 a year. 

All lending programs should be privatized, according to Project 2025. And, if that’s “not feasible,” Parent Plus loans should be eliminated. “[They’re] redundant because there are many privately provided alternatives available,” Project 2025 states. 

Eliminate the Department of Education

Project 2025 calls for bold changes to the federal government, including a call to break up the Education Department and disperse any surviving higher education programs across other agencies. 

But what’s scarier is the idea that the experienced, non-political staff members in these agencies would be replaced by political appointees, says NEA senior policy analyst Susan Nogan. “It would create an imperial presidency, served by party loyalists who will replace the skilled civil servants,” she says. 

According to Project 2025 and Trump’s “Agenda 47,” the president would issue an executive order on day one to “fire rogue bureaucrats” and replace them with more loyal subjects. Currently about 4,000 federal positions are appointed by the president; the new plan would increase that number to at least 50,000.

“The question is: do you want people with the skills, expertise and credentials to perform their jobs or do you want people who love Donald Trump?” asked Jacqueline Simon, policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees, in The Guardian. “If that’s what the main factor is to get a job, you won’t have the same food safety, workplace safety, consumer product safety, mine safety, and clean air and water.”

Remove the Guardrails

College accreditation ensures high-quality programs for students—taught by highly qualified faculty who have the academic freedom to pursue knowledge without political or other interference—so that students don’t pay tens of thousands of dollars for worthless degrees. 

Authorized by the federal government, these accreditors are essential to college operations: if a college isn’t accredited, it can’t get federal funds. But the process has become a point of contention on both sides of the political aisle. While progressives argue that accreditors are “too lax, letting low-quality programs off the hook, Republicans bristle at the restrictions altogether,” Inside Higher Ed notes. Many have championed for-profit colleges that have run afoul of accreditors.

Under Project 2025, instead of the current system of independent, nonpartisan accreditors, states could create their own, more politically pliable accreditors. 

“Governors who have built their political brand on attacking higher education–like Florida’s Ron DeSantis–would be handed a powerful new mechanism to punish universities whose faculty or academic programs they disapprove of, and to reward universities that promote their ideological preferences,” notes PEN America. 

“This would have disastrous effects. Many of the worst educational gag orders, along with DEI bans and faculty tenure bans, have been voted down or toned down because legislators realized they were putting their schools’ accreditation status in jeopardy. If Project 2025’s recommendations are adopted, that guardrail disappears.” — PEN America

And it’s not just Project 2025. Trump makes the same promise in a campaign video, saying, “Our secret weapon will be the college accreditation system…When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs.”

Limit what Students Can Learn and Research

The next president should issue an executive order, and Congress should pass a law, banning any federal funds from going toward “critical race theory (CRT),” according to Project 2025. Since for many right-wing policy makers, CRT means any study of race and racism—and since federal student loans are woven deeply into institutional budgets—the impact of this could be quash any classroom conversation about structural racism in the United States. 

Congress also should “wind down so-called ‘area studies’ programs at universities,” which receive federal funding through Title IV, writes Lindsey Burke, a Heritage Foundation director and author of Project 2025’s chapter on education policy. These types of programs generally focus on specific geographic areas and foster global awareness. For example, the six area studies programs at the University of North Carolina include the African Studies Center, the Center for European Studies, and the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies.

Project 2025 also opposes climate change throughout, notes Bryan Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University and author of Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Age of Climate Crisis. He points specifically to a passage embedded in the chapter on the Environmental Protection Agency that says, “Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs.”

Roll Back Protections for LGBTQ Students—and Women

Project 2025 calls to rescind the Biden administration’s Title IX regulations, saying, “The next Administration should abandon the change redefining ‘sex’ to mean ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’ in Title IX immediately across all departments.” Sex would be defined only as the “biological sex recognized at birth.”

In a recent interview, National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education President Paulette Granberry Russell notes the impact would be significant. “Currently the expanded definition provides protection for students who identify as LBGTQIA+, and the removal of those protections could lead to increased discrimination and harassment,” she says. At the same time, Russell says, “students will have fewer legal avenues to challenge discrimination and less protection in cases of harassment and bias.” 

At the heart of Title IX is the belief that every student should be safe and free from sex-based harassment, sex-based discrimination, and sexual violence. When Trump was president, he and then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos revised the rules so that Title IX only applied if harassment was so “severe and pervasive” that it “denied” a student access to education. In other words, schools would have to ignore incidents of harassment until victims suffered something awful, repeatedly. 

The Biden administration’s regulations require schools to address any sex-based harassing conduct that inhibits a student’s ability to participate. Project 2025 also would end all ongoing Title IX investigations. Indeed, Project 2025 proponents already have tied up Title IX implementation more than half of states, winning temporary injunctions that prevent education officials from doing what they can to make campuses safer for women and LGBTQ students. 

And that’s not all!

Other notable mandates from Project 2025 include:

• Minimizing the importance of a college degree: “The President should issue an executive order stating that a college degree shall not be required for any federal job unless the requirements of the job specifically demand it.” — Project 2025. 
• Putting more money into international business programs: “The next Administration should promulgate a new regulation to require the Secretary of Education to allocate at least 40 percent of funding to international business programs that teach about free markets and economics…” — Project 2025. 
• Discontinuing publication of the religious institutes that apply for exemption from Title IX. By order of the president, this “list of shame” should be removed from public websites and “prevented from being published in the future.” — Project 2025.