2 weeks Ago By Kate Linderman, The Charlotte Observer
President Donald Trump is weighing the idea of signing an executive order to start the dissolution of the Department of Education, officials told The Wall Street Journal. The executive order discussed in the White House would aim to shut down parts of the Education Department that are not written into a statute, according to the Journal. It would take an act of Congress to fully dismantle the department, but action from the White House could disrupt some of the department’s functions.
If grants and loans to people seeking higher education were to experience even a small disruption, experts told McClatchy News, there could be long-term consequences. “Even though the executive branch cannot legally dissolve the Department on its own, they certainly can ‘diminish’ the functions of the Department by forcing out staff, interfering with essential databases, and sowing general chaos and uncertainty that undermine civil servants’ ability to do their everyday jobs supporting students, schools, and families,” Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University, said in an email to McClatchy News. Grants and borrowing A disruption created by a Trump executive order could delay the process of the Department of Education telling colleges if a student qualifies for financial aid, whether that be a grant or a federal loan, Dominique Baker, a public policy and education professor at the University of Delaware, told McClatchy News in a phone interview.
“Any sorts of delays that could potentially happen in actually giving the money to institutions would irreparably damage the ability of low-income students to attend college in the United States,” she said. The Department of Education already saw a disruption in the federal financial aid process in 2023 and 2024 when there were technical issues rolling out the 2024-25 Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which led to a significant drop in applications submitted, according to the Government Accountability Office. If the FAFSA is not filled out, students can’t qualify for aid such as the Pell Grant, which many rely on to help pay for their education.
During the 2019-20 academic year, 72% of undergraduate students in the U.S. received some sort of financial aid, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Forty percent of students received Pell Grants. Even a brief delay could deter students worried about paying for college from attending, Daniel Collier, a professor of higher and adult education at the University of Memphis, told McClatchy News in a phone interview. “That puts a lot of uncertainty in the system, and then that will help crater potential future enrollments as well,” he said.
Beyond attendance, uncertainty in the federal aid system could change students’ plans, Baker said. “We can see that in a lot of ways,” she said. “We could imagine a world where low-income students choose that instead of attending .
.. the regional public university that’s near them, they potentially instead go to the community college that’s nearby so we can imagine that they make different decisions about where they enroll, or students choosing to opt entirely of higher education because of their concerns about the finances.
” Scott-Clayton notes that a disruption like this could lead “some students to forgo college or to default on their loans,” she told McClatchy News in an email. Loan repayment Even if there are disruptions in the Department of Education if Trump carries out executive orders to dissolve portions of it, experts say borrowers will still be on the hook for their federal student loans. Any interference could upset the income-based repayment programs or the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
Federal student loan repayment is regulated by the Department of Education under the Higher Education Act, student financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz told McClatchy News in an email. The act, he said, would prohibit another federal department from taking over the responsibility without Congress allowing them to do so. “The biggest concern that I would have is that people in public service loan forgiveness and income-driven repayment may not get the forgiveness that they’re legally entitled to, because it’s possible that the Department of Education just decides not to confirm anything,” Collier said.
Portions of income-based repayment are already stalled due to a lawsuit against the SAVE repayment plan, but an internal disruption could further affect those on income-based repayment plans, Baker said. “(Borrowers) certify their income and get it approved, and that’s what adjusts their monthly payments,” Baker said. “The Department of Education is responsible for that certification.
They often work with contractors, but the contractors have to report to the Department of Education.” Preparing for disruption There is nothing borrowers or soon-to-be-borrowers can do now to prepare for any disruptions in the Department of Education, according to experts that spoke with McClatchy News. However, they say that there is a chance of disruption in the near future.
“I think the chances of a legal dissolution of the Department are slim to none, but the chances of disruptive interference appear to be increasing by the day,” Scott-Clayton said..
