Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for President, is preparing to rollout his plan for higher education. In speaking with Inside Higher Ed, Trump’s campaign co-chair Sam Clovis said that Trump’s plan will include student loan reform and a potential policy that will make it tougher for students to get loans for liberal art degrees.
Trump’s full plan will not be revealed until later this summer or potentially the fall, but he’s already taking hard lines against Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders’ plan to make public college free.
Clovis said that free college isn’t attainable because the country can’t pay for it and beat back talk of Obama’s idea to make community college free. Saying that community college is close to free now, Clovis doesn’t believe in the idea of making community college tuition free.
But remaining with Clovis’ point about community college, he’s not entirely right. A recent report by the Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania detailed how expensive college is for poor Americans.
Poor families in Mississippi making $30,000 or less would have to spend nearly half of their yearly income to send kids in their family to a community college.
That’s not exactly affordable or close to free.
Another aspect of Trump’s plan for higher education is to shift student loans back to private banks and remove the government from the process entirely. Believing that the process should be market driven, Clovis said that students should receive loans from local banks and not the government.
Trump will likely want to alter the way colleges admit students, mainly steering them away from degrees that do not produce worthy jobs and decent incomes.
Clovis touched on many themes of higher education but didn’t detail much as Trump is still putting his plan together. But from what he did say–like his statements on liberal arts and student loans–the plan is sure to cause controversy when it is full available to the public.
