What Does the Department of Education Actually Do?
It's a lot more than just financial aid
I was not planning to do a second post this week, but given that it appears that we are hours or days away from a Trump administration announcement about their plans for the federal Department of Education (DOE) now seems like a pretty good time to talk about what exactly the DOE does and why dismantling it would impact a lot more than just financial aid.
A few disclaimers before we dive in:
I’m not speaking on behalf of any current, former, or future employers. Despite having watch A LOT of Law & Order in my day, I’m also not a lawyer, so will try to avoid pretending to be one. I’ll be transparent though: I think ending the DOE or reducing its capacity is a BAD THING that isn’t based on evidence or good governance. It is a move designed to punish, not improve.
We don’t know exactly what will be proposed yet, though we do know that the DOE cannot be dismantled by an executive order alone (assuming the government intends to follow the rule of law). Ending the DOE doesn’t necessarily mean an end to some current programs - some could get moved to other agencies or pushed down to the state level.
Beyond the idea of shutting down the Department, there is also a risk of the Department being starved for resources and staff, which could also be really detrimental for many students and families and doesn’t necessarily require an act of Congress to make happen
I’m going to primarily focus on the higher ed side of the DOE, so this won’t touch on the really important k-12 work they also do.
A Brief Primer on the Department of Education
The DOE was established by President Jimmy Carter (perhaps the MOST polar opposite in terms of temperate, intelligence, and character to our current President?) in 1979. With less than 4500 staff, it is the smallest of the 15 federal Cabinet agencies and lost over 5% of its staff during the first Trump administration.
It’s annual budget of over $241 billion (for fiscal year 2024) ranked it as the agency with the 7th highest budget 1 but it’s critical to know that over 97% of its annual budget goes out the door to students, families, schools, and other financial assistance programs.
Historically, the Department of Education has NOT played a role in things like developing curricula, determining requirements for enrollment or graduation, or establishing schools and/or colleges or universities. The current moves at the federal level to try to shape curriculum at both the K-12 and post-secondary level by calling for the elimination of CRT or the teaching of topics related to diversity are well outside the scope of their traditional authority and should be something that people on all sides of the political aisle should be concerned about as a precedent.
What Does the Department of Education Do?
In terms of higher education, the primary work of the Department of Education happens in a couple of main categories:
Operating student financial aid programs
Data collection, reporting, and assessment
Establishing and enforcing protections for students, including investigations related to discrimination
Providing resources to support increasing equitable access to higher education for students who have disabilities
Consumer protections through accreditation processes
Funding programs to increase student access to higher education and support to increase retention and graduation
The full scope of the work of the DOE is quite comprehensive and includes, but is not at all limited to, things like:
Awarding Pell Grants to over 7 million students per year, the majority of whom are attending public colleges and universities. Around 90% of these grants go to students whose families make less than $50,000 a year.
Awarding some form of financial aid (grants, loans, or work-study) to over 70% of all undergraduate students.
Operating the Graduate Plus loan program that allows for students in graduate or professional programs (like med school) to help fund their educations. This program has a 2% default rate, meaning that most borrowers are making progress on paying back their loans after graduation, suggesting that these loans pay off in the long run for both individual students and communities that need people like doctors and lawyers.
Collecting data so students and families can get unbiased info on how selective individual schools actually are, how likely they are to offer merit aid, and how many of their students are retained and graduated.
Plays a critical role in the regulatory Triad (federal, state, and accrediting organizations) to ensure that college and universities meet minimum quality standards and aren’t diploma mills or making false promises about worthless degrees. The DOE can withhold financial aid funds from schools that fail to meet minimum standards.
Funds for GEAR UP programs that are designed to increase access to higher education for low-income students by providing academic support, resources for college planning and FAFSA completion, and scholarship support. These programs are highly effective and are generally considered to be a fiscally conservative approach as the monies spent in this program result in future savings as program participants are less likely to be on means tested public benefits programs, more likely to be employed, less likely to be incarcerated, and less likely to have children born into poverty.
Operating the TPSID grant program that funds institutions of higher education to provide individual supports and services for students with intellectual disabilities, increasing their ability to find gainful employment
Ensuring women have access to athletics and other campus opportunities through Title IX regulations
Enforcing federal civil rights laws through the Office for Civil Rights, including conducting investigations related to failures to provide disability accommodations, sexual harassment, racial harassments, and religious discrimination. The OCR has the ability to issue fines and withhold federal financial aid to ensure colleges and universities are following laws designed to keep students safe and provide access to educational opportunities. There is some debate about whether the OCR is aggressive enough and/or can intervene quickly enough, but that doesn’t negate the importance of this level of kind of oversight.
Offering grants to colleges and universities trying to improve services for veteran students, expand efforts to help students meet their basic needs, reduce the costs of textbooks, and for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (which were systematically underfunded for decades) to increase and improve their graduate programs.
Bottom Line
The Department of Education isn’t perfect. No government entity is (or any entity, really) and I won’t claim that there aren’t improvements that could be made to make the agency more effective.
I don’t think pushing these programs to other federal agencies or to the states is the answer. I’m a BIG fan of state government, but there are some things that really have to done at a federal level, especially given that so many students cross state lines to enroll in college. A student who goes to school in Minnesota shouldn’t have stronger protections from sexual harassments or discrimination than a student who goes to school in Florida. A student who wants to be able to see how many students graduate at the University of Kansas should be able to answer that question as easily as a student looking for that information for Howard University. We should have some ability to know that the medical school, teaching program, nursing degree from Iowa meets the essentially the same quality standards as the one in Wisconsin.
Beyond that, if the mark of a highly functional culture is how we treat the more vulnerable among us, we should want low-income, first-generation students in all states to get some extra helping getting ready for college. We should want to make sure students who have disabilities or are pregnant/parenting or come from historically excluded populations have access to higher education.
To quote Paul Wellstone, “we all do better when we all do better”, so we should protect programs like the Pell Grant which decades of evidence have shown to be effective at helping low income students obtain a college degree.
(Fun fact: Research has shown that Pell Grants have a great ROI for the government as data shows that “the federal government would recoup the entire cost of the grants in 10 years from tax payments on the increased earnings” of Pell recipients.)
We should also acknowledge that ANY large scale changes of programs within the Department of Education will be costly, painful, and potentially make college access more difficult (anyone remember what happened when they tried to just change the FAFSA?), so a rush to dismantle a whole agency could be potentially catastrophic for some students, families, and schools.
What Do We Do Now?
For those of us who work in higher education, we wait to see what exactly is going to be proposed, how legal it is, and how quickly the courts may intervene while also trying to respond to the inevitable questions/concerns/panic that will ensue. We are still waiting for the confirmation hearings for the pro-wrestling enthusiast that Trump thinks is qualified to lead the agency, so we’ll see how that impacts this discussion, if at all.
For students and parents, now might be a good time to reach out to your Congressional representatives to express support for the Department of Education and to express concern about any moves to eliminate the agency, if that is where you land on the issue.
You can also feel free to share this post, if you find it helpful for understanding all of the things that are at stake here.
Coming in behind (in order): Department of Health and Human Services, Social Security Administration, Department of the Treasury, Department of Defense, Department of Veteran’s Affairs, and the Department of Agriculture