With Donald Trump back in office, a national conversation has begun about what his return to the White House could mean for immigration, climate change and a host of other key issues. Lost in the headlines, however, is consideration of how his policies could impact institutions of higher education — including Carleton.
“Higher ed is… a moderate[ly]-to-heavily-regulated industry in the United States,” said Professor of Political Science Steven Poskanzer, who is also a president emeritus of Carleton and specializes in higher-ed law. Because both private and public schools receive federal money, he said, “the federal government has a very significant role to play in shaping, governing and regulating how American higher education works.”
Schools across the country, including Carleton, rely on the federal government to fund significant portions of its financial aid and research programs. To receive federal funding, schools must comply with executive orders and agency regulations.
Higher education officials worry Trump could leverage funding to limit or eliminate colleges’ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, reduce protections for transgender and undocumented students and curb campus freedoms. Some floated policies — such as the proposal made by some in Trump’s circle to disband the Department of Education — are likely unworkable. Some Carleton programs almost certainly won’t change: for example, the college already follows Title IX guidelines from Trump’s first term. And, since the Supreme Court already overturned affirmative action in college admissions, many college administrators believe not much more can affect Carleton’s admissions.
Still, nobody knows exactly what — if any — notable changes will be made.
“Many things get talked about that don’t actually get implemented,” College President Alison Byerly said. “I think we want to be prepared, and I think we want to convey a sense of support.”
How, specifically, does the government regulate Carleton?
As a private institution, Carleton selects its own board members and is more independent than public colleges and universities which have increasingly controversial state and governor-appointed boards of trustees.
“As a private institution, we are fairly independent,” Byerly said.
But the federal government still has some sway. Most of its regulations start with laws passed by Congress, but each law varies in detail. Criteria for programs such as Pell Grants were extensively detailed in legislation, while the language of Title IX — which bans collegiate discrimination based on sex — is only a few lines long.
The president and the Department of Education wield power over how each law is implemented and enforced, and laws are often reinterpreted with new administrations.
“Virtually every time there’s a turnover, there’s some changes in details of those processes,” Byerly said.
Some regulations, like Title IX, set only a baseline for what colleges have to do. “If you want to go beyond [the floor], that’s fine. And so, lots of institutions like Carleton have gone beyond what’s required,” Kari Hohn, Carleton’s interim Title IX coordinator, said.
According to Poskanzer, other regulations could decrease college resources, like Trump’s ban on DEI training in federally-funded programs in his first term.
Other regulatory mechanisms, such as accreditation, are also gaining political attention. To gain accreditation and remain eligible for federal assistance, colleges prove they have met a certain quality of education to government-recognized accreditors.
Accreditors usually have “expectations that universities will be involved in diversifying, and so there has been a conservative backlash claiming that the accreditors are part of the problem,” Poskanzer said. “In Florida and in some other states, there have been efforts to establish alternative, perhaps more politically conservative accrediting bodies.”
Even so, federal laws require accreditors to consider certain factors such as the quality of educational programs. According to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, they also prevent the federal government from imposing academic or curricular requirements.
The threat of being forced to appear before congressional hearings similar to those that led the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania to resign could also lead college officials to make changes, even without federally mandated curriculum changes.
Byerly said that the fact that Congress held hearings to question college presidents about “what’s happening on their campuses, in terms of what level of protest is allowed and what kind of expression is allowed… is actually a significant change and a disquieting one.”
Some lawmakers also seem supportive of expanding the reach of Title VI — which bans discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in federally funded programs — to suppress campus free expression.
The government could also expand its tax on large college endowments like Carleton’s — a policy originally created during Trump’s first term. While taxes can’t target individual colleges, such an expansion might be punitive against what the new administration sees as a generally elite system of higher education, Poskanzer said. Or, the measure could be taken to raise funds for other of Trump’s proposals for education, like creating a free online university, said Byerly.
Regardless, taxing nonprofit institutions in that way is “a bridge that — once [it was] crossed — it’s not as hard to imagine them increasing the tax,” Byerly said. “Any money that we pay in taxes is money that we can’t be applying to financial aid.
But, Carleton and other schools aren’t without some say over what regulations are enacted. “When proposed regulations or proposed statutes are being debated, there’s a democratic process,” Poskanzer said, speaking about colleges generally. “That’s the first thing you do, is you try to educate your lawmakers, and you try to work with them.”
What changes are anticipated, and how could Carleton respond?
Civil disobedience to protest unwanted policy changes from the Trump administration is off the table when funding is on the line, said Poskanzer while speaking about colleges generally. While college administrators declined to say how much federal funding Carleton receives to avoid arousing anxiety or confusion, federal grants are crucial, especially for financial aid.
“We’re not equipped to shift entirely to only institutional resources,” said Art Rodriguez, Carleton’s dean of admissions and financial aid.
The federal government also plays a role in funding research opportunities for students, particularly in STEM fields. The college provides most of the funding for academic departments, but many faculty members receive grants from federal offices such as the National Institutes of Health.
Psychology Department Chair Julia Strand said in an email that such grants “support a variety of features of the [psychology] research done at Carleton: paying for supplies, paying human participants, hiring students during breaks and term, taking students to academic conferences and hiring lab managers.”
Funding cuts would likely reduce the number of research opportunities that the college could offer. But, unlike financial aid grants, “even if we had no federal funding for individual faculty, there are still ways that students can be involved in research,” Strand said.
Access programs such as TRIO, an umbrella of federally-funded programs that provide support to students facing barriers in higher education, also face uncertainty. Two-thirds of the school’s 176 TRIO students qualify as low-income and first-generation.
Over email, Kim Hildahl, director of TRIO/Student Support Services at Carleton, said she worried federal policy changes could affect program funding, eligibility or reporting requirements, as well as affect students by altering Pell Grant and loan program criteria. Still, she said TRIO has historically received bipartisan support.
“We remain cautiously optimistic that the program will continue to receive the funding it needs, and we are prepared to adapt to any shifts to ensure that our students remain supported,” she said.
College officials worry that LGBTQ students — especially transgender students — and undocumented students will become more legally vulnerable and will lose access to opportunities under the new administration.
“That’s where obviously we would do all we could to support students,” said Byerly, “to offer legal advice and support in whatever they might have to consider in terms of their own situations.”
Speakers at various recent college events have said such support could include legal advice provided by outside counsel, subject to attorney-client privilege.
Benjamin Casper ’90, an ACLU attorney and immigration law expert, said in an on-campus event that he worries Trump will restrict student visas through travel bans, as he did in 2017 for Muslim-majority countries, or bans of people who have engaged in political activity within the United States. He also called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program a “wild card,” saying Trump might target it as he has in the past, but may also see a political advantage in granting legal status to DACA recipients.
Byerly said in a Thursday newsletter that she created an immigration task force, composed of staff across the college and co-chaired by Vice President for Inclusion, Equity and Community (IEC) Dina Zavala and college Chief of Staff Elise Eslinger, to “monitor the situation, gather information, provide resources, and coordinate response or support across offices.”
Zavala said that the college would publicize available resources on campus and encouraged students to contact IEC staff with questions. When asked if she predicted that IEC programs could be altered, Zavala said, “While we cannot speculate on what the new administration will do and how their actions may impact colleges and universities, the work of the IEC division is deeply tied to Carleton’s values.”
“The kind of support we might offer specific student groups could depend on how they are affected,” Byerly said over email. “We believe that advance announcements about our plans or practices may invite external scrutiny that could be counterproductive to our goals.”
College Chaplain Schuyler Vogel said he believes Carleton’s Chapel — which he described as the “conscience of the college” — may be able to provide direct support to students as a religious institution or by partnering with other local religious communities.
What is unlikely to change?
The Department of Education, Title IX policy and admissions procedures will likely remain largely the same.
Eliminating the Department of Education would likely be too inefficient because the programs it administers would need to be managed by other departments, according to Poskanzer. Presidents have always found it more useful to simply control the department.
Because Carleton still follows the Title IX guidelines that Trump enacted in 2020, Hohn said she doesn’t anticipate changes to the college’s Title IX program. Biden expanded the interpretation of Title IX to prevent discrimination based on gender identity in addition to sex in 2024, but his regulations were enjoined in multiple states after a series of lawsuits. Carleton later appeared on a list of colleges where the regulations couldn’t be enforced, and the guidelines were blocked in a federal court on Jan. 9.
Biden’s regulations would have helped the college, said Hohn, but “Carleton is a progressive institution that’s going to protect all of its students regardless of their gender identity.”
And while college admissions, too, were embroiled in litigation leading up to the 2023 Supreme Court ruling overturning affirmative action, it’s unlikely anything more will change.
“The worst has already happened,” said Byerly. “There’s not much more in the admissions process that is really subject to that kind of federal scrutiny.”
What’s next?
“Colleges and universities are not going to stop educating,” Poskanzer said. “They’re not going to stop believing that an inclusive and caring environment that supports students is critical to good educational outcomes. You don’t retreat from the goals that you have institutionally, but you will have to find a way of achieving as [many] of those goals as you believe is right, within the law.”
Byerly said she hopes students will not be discouraged. “All of these trends, all of these discussions, all of these impacts and changes — many of them predate the current election and may continue,” she said. “And so there [are] always opportunit[ies] to implement change and to alter the course of history and the course of how the country proceeds… I’m not diminishing how consequential this election is, but it is not the last opportunity that we will have to think about what we want this country to be.”
