The more I learn about the higher education portions of the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), the more I like it. But recognizing that we tend to fall into information bubbles, I do try to seek out opposing views. So, I was pleased that Inside Higher Ed ran an op-ed by Rachel Fishman from New America attacking the bill. The critiques against the OBBBA were so weak that I ended up even more supportive of the bill after reading it.
To start with, the hyperbole was a bit much. According to Fishman
- The bill involved “seismic cuts.”
- The American Dream “is being suffocated,” and “this law will only put it further out of reach.”
- The bill “sends a message to future students that only familial wealth will bring college opportunities, and it won’t matter how much hard work they put in or determination they have.”
- The bill “will reshape federal student aid in ways that transform access to higher education and shut everyday Americans out.”
Sounds bad. There must be some really devastating critiques to justify such an assessment, right? Nope.
[RELATED: The Big Beautiful Bill Gives Some of Higher Ed’s Ugliest Problems a Makeover]
Fishman dings the bill for cutting Pell Grants, but also for expanding them. This isn’t quite as contradictory as it sounds, as there are reasonable objections to the cuts, which affect middle-income families, and to the expansion, which will cover short-term programs. But it does take an impressive amount of cognitive dissonance to put them in the same paragraph without even trying to explain the apparent contradiction. But whether you agree with each of the changes or not, they are very minor tweaks to the Pell program, and certainly wouldn’t justify the overwrought language above.
While praising the new accountability system the bill implemented, Fishman laments that it “exclude[s] all undergraduate short-term certificate programs, which tend to have the worst outcomes.” However, these programs are already covered by the Gainful Employment regulations implemented by the Biden administration. I, too, wish the bill explicitly covered these certificate programs because I recommend ditching the Gainful Employment regulations, but as things stand, certificate programs will be subject to more accountability than degree programs, not less.
The next supposed problem with the bill is changes to student loans, which include limits for Parent PLUS loans, the elimination of Grad PLUS, a new repayment plan, and the closing of old repayment plans.
These are indeed big changes. But many of them are also changes that many on the left agree with. For example, the bill put limits on how much parents could borrow through Parent PLUS, but Fishman was a co-author of the best paper in the last decade on Parent PLUS, which argued for… putting limits on how much parents could borrow through Parent PLUS. While the bill didn’t adopt their exact recommended limits, it moved policy much closer to their recommendations than the status quo, so it’s odd that this was presented as a flaw with the bill. Similarly, for Grad PLUS, I don’t know of anyone of any political orientation who thought the status quo on Grad PLUS was worth maintaining, other than those who were getting rich from it. Meanwhile, the new repayment plan is basically the old REPAYE plan, which, whether that is good or bad, is not a revolutionary departure that forecloses the American Dream.
That leaves the closing of many of the existing student loan repayment plans. Fishman focuses on the money here: “amount to a massive cut of close to $300 billion in critical funds that ensure students have access to a quality education after high school.” Essentially all of that is from ending the SAVE repayment plan. It’s no secret that I didn’t like the SAVE plan, which was really a student loan forgiveness scheme disguised as a repayment plan. Not so widely known is that many on the left didn’t like SAVE either as they thought that rather than throw indiscriminate subsidies at all student lending, that money could be much better used to increase Pell Grants, make community college free, etc.
So, it’s interesting that Fishman critiques the $300 billion cut in student funding, almost all of which comes from eliminating SAVE, but doesn’t come out and say that SAVE shouldn’t have been eliminated.
To combat informational bubbles, I’ll keep an eye out for more pieces critical of the higher education parts of the OBBBA. But so far, I haven’t seen anything that changes my largely positive view of the higher education portions of the bill.
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Image by James Steidl on Adobe Stock; Asset ID#: 4121331 — grad caps added by Jared Gould
