Policy Corner

There is, she said, certainly room for improvement in some of these areas—the challenging rollout of the new FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) last year is one example of how the agency could be doing things better—but she worries about what might replace the current processes and how new ones would be implemented.

“In terms of access to college, the Pell Grant is incredibly important,” she said of the undergraduate financial aid program designed to assist students from lower-income backgrounds. “The goal of all of these programs—Pell, FAFSA, loan programs—is to improve service and access and knowledge, above all, for potential students and their families. But the issue with all of the recently proposed changes is they haven’t been thought through or planned carefully. So there’s a fear of actually making things worse.”

That’s not just a problem for students and families, but for institutions as well. Wollman said that Pell recipients make up 30–70 percent of the student body at many schools, including many regional campuses of state schools. To have such a large percentage of a student body suffering uncertainly about their access to funding could be disastrous to those schools’ enrollments and their bottom lines, which are highly tuition-dependent. Diminished access to higher education would also have widespread consequences beyond campuses.

“If you aspire to go to college, we want you to be able to go because we know that over your lifetime, you’re going to be far more successful financially,” said Wollman. “You’re going to be a better citizen—people who go to college tend to be more engaged in their community, they vote more.” So, she concluded, it benefits us all to have more educated citizens, and hurts us all to have fewer.

The Trump Administration has said that, once shuttered, important core functions of the Department of Education could be moved to other agencies. It has been floated that student loan administration, for example, could move to the Small Business Administration, and the Justice Department has already announced a partnership with the Office for Civil Rights for their discrimination investigations. But, said Wollman, these are not well-conceived plans for improvement, and for some of the department’s responsibilities—especially its data collection and dissemination—plans are less clear.

“The National Center for Education Statistics is so important to our work,” Wollman said of the small statistical agency responsible for monitoring student and institutional performance, which, as part of the Institute of Education Sciences, lost almost all of its employees in mass layoffs in March. “I go there for data all the time—for my classes and for my research—and I honestly don’t really know how we will be able to fully educate our students about what’s happening in higher education or do research that is based on data without it. . . . There’s no other national repository of this amount and type of data. So this is a crisis for research and teaching in higher education.”

Ahead of a looming demographic shift that predicts declining numbers of college-aged students, she said, this loss of data also disadvantages those who want to use such statistics to make college decisions based on things like an institution’s four-year graduation rate or alumni earnings.

“These are really important things to know about schools for accountability,” said Wollman.

As we wait to see the effects of these changes at the Department of Education—as well as the agency’s ultimate destiny—Wollman has advice for leaders of colleges and universities: Work together across institutions, even if that doesn’t come naturally.

“They are going to have to collaborate, despite the exceptionally competitive environment in which they operate, and they’re going to have to collect and share even more of their own data,” she said. “One of the things they can collaborate on is making the case for why higher education is valuable—to combat the public loss of trust—using very specific data on earnings, outcomes, graduation rates, and the economic impact they have on their city or town. . . . We need to change the narrative about higher education and its value. And individual leaders and institutions can’t do that alone.”