What President Trump Will & Won’t Change About College & Financial Aid

There’s a new president in the Oval Office. So in today’s video, I’m going to break down what we do and don’t expect to change about college and financial aid for the next four years. I’m not going to dip my toe into punditry, I’m not going to talk about what I think is good or bad, or right or wrong. You can do with that as you will. I will tell you that I’m an educator and I’ve been helping high school students achieve their college admissions goals since 1998. So my politics are that education is good, and helping more people get an education is good. Don’t @ me.

I’m only going to base this information on things we’ve heard the current president say on the campaign trail, or things that were policies he enacted during his first administration. We’re going to start with the Department of Education. The president promised that if elected, he would abolish the Department of Education. However, the Department of Education was created by an act of Congress, and therefore it can only be dissolved by an act of Congress. Which, given the makeup of the House and Senate, is highly unlikely to happen and can’t be accomplished with a stroke of the pen.

Likewise, the FAFSA, which is administered by the Department of Education, even if it were to go away, the FAFSA wouldn’t go along with it. It too was created by an act of Congress. So if the head department disappeared tomorrow, the FAFSA would be administered by a different department and would keep on chugging. Now, there’s a lot that’s changed about the FAFSA last year into this year about equations and who gets how many dollars. But those changes were written into law by an outgoing Republican senator, and now they exist and they were administered under the last administration. So at this point, it’s pretty bipartisan and we don’t expect that to go anywhere anytime soon.

The next is the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program signed into law by then President Bush in 2008 with a 10 year clock. It was supposed to allow borrowers who lived up to certain requirements to apply to have the remainder of their loan forgiven starting in 2018 when the current president was in office. And so when many of those borrowers applied for their loan forgiveness, 99% of them were rejected. The Senate didn’t like that. They brought in the Secretary of Education to get chewed out on TV and gave the Department of Education a bunch of money to fix that problem and allow borrowers to reapply.

They did. And about 99% of those who reapplied were also rejected. So what we’ve seen is that this administration hasn’t and likely won’t have a priority towards student loan forgiveness like the last administration did, forgiving over 10% of the student debt held by borrowers today. That said, who knows what’s going to happen four years from now, or four years from then and on and on, because the pendulum swings. And so we expect it to be boom or bust in terms of loan forgiveness depending on which administration is in charge into perpetuity.

Next, we’re going to discuss the SAVE plan. When then-President Biden tried to discharge a $10,000-$20,000 student debt blanket for borrowers it was blocked by the Supreme Court. Then immediately he put out the SAVE plan, which aimed to do three really important things, as well as some smaller things.

But, the three really important things: One, it ended capitalizing debt, which meant if your income driven payment was less than the interest back then the interest would compound and you would owe interest on the interest on the interest. Ending capitalizing debt would end that.

Second thing it did was it increased from 150% of the poverty line to 225% of the poverty line a 50% increase the living allowance for borrowers on income driven repayment plans. And then it also brought down from 10% to 5% the percent of borrowers’ discretionary income after that living allowance that they had to pay.

That was also blocked and has been brought to the Supreme Court, which has not heard it yet. And so now that there’s a different administration in the White House, we do expect them to drop their defence of the SAVE plan. So it likely won’t wind up going to the Supreme Court. It’s pretty much dead in the water. So we’re basically back to business as usual as it’s been for decades, no sweeping changes.

Next, let’s discuss Title IX, which was created back in the 70s to have equal opportunities for men and women in education. Now, of course, the president cannot with a stroke of the pen abolish Title IX, however, the president can interpret Title IX and direct the ED department to interpret it as he does. And he has said that when president, he’s going to repeal all protections in place for trans students and trans athletes, which means we may very well likely see trans men competing in women’s sports and changing in women’s locker rooms. Likewise, we will see, likely trans women, changing in men’s locker rooms and competing in men’s sports based on the gender they were assigned at birth.

And finally, we’re going to talk about citizenship. The president has said that he will work to end birthright citizenship. However, that is hard coded in the 14th Amendment, so highly unlikely to happen. And because being a US citizen or permanent resident of these United States is a requirement for filling out the FAFSA we don’t expect any change in eligibility for students who are in high school applying for the FAFSA for their college years, or even college students applying for their next college years. That said, in his last administration, the president did try to make sweeping changes to immigration policy, which are his purview, to include things like anyone who has received any federal benefits would be ineligible to apply for citizenship.

So that means that if a US citizen or permanent resident got the Pell Grant, got the FSEOG, the TEACH grant, and either they were not a citizen or their parent were not a citizen or were not here legally, then them getting those benefits may then preclude them or their parents from ever becoming US citizens.

We haven’t heard much talk about that in the intervening four years however, it was a big talking point in the last term this president served, so we could very well likely see that come back again. So please do keep that in mind when filling out the FAFSA depending on what your immigration and citizenship statuses are for both student and parent.

Guys, there’s going to be a lot more to come. We don’t know everything. And of course, campaign promises are one thing and serving in the presidency is a whole other thing. So we’re going to be watching it just like you. If you do have questions, you can feel free to reach out to us at 732-556-8220 and we’ll answer what we know.