OPINION:
Higher education is a woke mess, and “President Autopen” made it significantly worse.
That’s not to say there weren’t serious problems with American colleges and universities before President Biden. Of course there were. Tuition costs have been skyrocketing for decades, while the value of a degree has continued to diminish. Instead of preparing students for a challenging job market, higher education has focused on indoctrination and political activism.
Rather than fixing the problem, Mr. Biden’s Department of Education spent four years fueling diversity, equity and inclusion by fortifying the institutions that were causing the most damage. Meanwhile, the department went out of its way to destroy the career colleges and Christian schools that might give the legacy education system a run for its money.
Thankfully, President Trump and his Education Department are taking concrete steps to correct the discriminatory, woke drift in American education that was exacerbated by the last administration. Earlier this month, the White House asked nine schools to agree to a federal funding compact. Next month, the Education Department will convene a regulatory review that could reverse the historical bias against apolitical career colleges by eliminating the little-known gainful employment rule. These moves are measured and reasonable, and they demonstrate a much-needed prioritization of practical, real-world education over theoretical, useless degrees.
The White House’s proposed federal funding compact calls for cooperation from academic institutions on “America First” priorities. First, the compact proposes to limit international students because foreign students make up 39% of the Ivy League and more than a quarter of a million Chinese nationals are studying at American universities. The compact also bans courses of study that incite violence against conservatives and their ideas. Charlie Kirk was killed on a college campus. That’s no coincidence.
Brown University, one of the schools that has rejected the compact, negotiated with the Trump administration this summer. Unfortunately, the school has evidently decided to return to a shortsighted, Trump derangement syndrome-induced approach to the president’s commonsense compact.
Using government funding as a lever to fix the woke campus cultural epidemic is a noble pursuit, but it’s a game of whack-a-mole. We need to fix the regulatory mess at the heart of the issue, which includes obscure policies and rules that prioritize woke, four-year universities and punish apolitical career colleges.
One of these little-known, Obama/Biden-era rules is called gainful employment. That rule will be on the chopping block at the Department of Education next month in a negotiated rulemaking committee. Mr. Trump and his Department of Education eliminated the rule during his first administration, and they should eliminate it again.
The gainful employment rule requires career colleges that offer occupational training programs to prove that their graduates will earn more money than their peers who didn’t go to college. The rule applies only to career colleges, not schools such as the Trump compact-rejecting Brown University, where students can major in “valuable” and “lucrative” fields such as ethnic studies and gender and sexuality studies.
Unlike the Ivy League, career colleges attract nontraditional students. When a single mom is pursuing a degree in speech pathology or massage therapy at a career school, we shouldn’t determine her loan eligibility by comparing her salary to that of a construction worker with a high school diploma and 15 years of experience in the field. That’s absurd, it’s a double standard, and it’s precisely what the gainful employment rule mandates.
Research shows that if the gainful employment rule were applied to all colleges, 80% to 90% of the programs that would fail would come from traditional four-year schools, not career colleges. That’s because career colleges and technical schools don’t trade on woke indoctrination as their reason for existing. They are too busy training students for careers in nursing, information technology, physical therapy, automotive engineering and more.
The useless areas of study at “elite” schools such as Brown, on the other hand, obviously fail to prepare students for actual gainful employment. That’s why the rule is so misguided (and misleadingly named), despite the insistence from Obama/Biden-era unelected bureaucrats that wokeness attained at four-year schools qualifies students for the workforce.
The Trump administration and the president’s appointees at the Department of Education have made significant progress toward making American education great again. It’s infuriating, but not surprising, that the proposed compact was rejected by seven schools that would rather have nothing to do with Mr. Trump than accept a good idea when it comes along.
Regardless, the negotiated rulemaking committee meeting in December is a critical opportunity for MAGA education reformers to keep up the good work, abolish the gainful employment rule and replace it with a new metric that doesn’t punish career schools.
• Terry Schilling is the president of American Principles Project. Follow him on X @Schilling1776.
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