The National Association of Scholars (NAS) welcomes the moderate reforms to American higher education enacted by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The bill’s name is a particularly fine example of the ebullient reinvigoration of the American language sparked by President Trump. But the education policy substance deserves Americans’ commendation too.
The Big Beautiful Bill’s education reform substance is cautious improvement to our federal student loan system (capping annual and lifetime loans), improved accountability for Return On Investment (programs whose graduates do not even earn as much as high school graduates lose federal support), increased tax rates on universities (universities with a very high ratio of endowment per student see modest increases in their endowment taxes), and increased flexibility in the use of Pell Grants for vocational education (micro-programs are now eligible for Pell Grant money). The bill also aspires to make it impossible for future administrations to commit illegal bailouts in the future, as the Biden administration did; laws can only be parchment barriers to dedicated criminality, but the intent is good.
Moderate reform: the Trump administration’s critics claim that the bill will bring about the end of the world, and the Trump administration claims that it will bring about the world’s salvation. Inflated claims are the petty change of politics. The bill marginally improves American education. It is, after all, a finance bill: larger change requires dedicated bills and a senate supermajority of 60 votes. So saith the Senate parliamentarian, at any rate. Moderate education policy reform is what one would reasonably expect to emerge from a complicated finance bill of this nature.
Rather, moderate education policy reform is more than one would reasonably expect to emerge from Congress. In 2017-2018, the last time education reformers held the White House, the Senate, and the House, they enacted far less education policy reform. In all circumstances, one can imagine education policy reform getting traded away for other political priorities, such as strengthened border security. Then too, the status quo for federal education policy has been no reform at all. Moderate reform indicates extraordinary efforts by the education policy reformers within the Trump administration and in Congress, both to defeat the do-nothing establishment and to maintain education reform as a priority among all the hosts of policy reform competing to be included in the Big Beautiful Bill. Moderate reform is unprecedented—so NAS commends the education reformers in Washington, who have fought doughtily to achieve this much.
Of course we want more such reform. We have a wish-list of federal policy reform—and the Big Beautiful Bill achieves a significant portion of what we have desired for many years, above all caps to student borrowing from the federal government. Our wish-list goes beyond what the bill achieves. Perhaps most importantly, we have proposed that federal law make colleges co-responsible for student loans, so that colleges have to pay back part of defaulted student loans—and therefore remove their current incentive to admit unqualified students, take their tuition money, and then leave the poor students on the hook for college debt after they inevitably flunk out. The Big Beautiful Bill begins to realign college’s financial incentives away from turning college students into debt slaves—but only begins. Education reformers still have vital work to do.
But the Big Beautiful Bill is a good start—and we have spent decades without even starting to reform American higher education. It is no longer an ivory tower; it is Vanity Fair, and the booths are staffed by Apollyon, Beelzebub, and a Legion of their followers. It can be made to shine again—it can be made beautiful once more—and the Beautiful Bill begins the work.
Photo by The White House on Flickr, United States Governemnt Work
