How Trump’s win could reshape UC research, LGBTQ+ rights and student loan forgiveness

California’s schools, colleges and universities are girding for potentially sweeping changes under a new Trump administration, based on his starkly different vision for education gleaned from campaign pledges, the GOP platform and his past actions.

Trump and conservative allies could reduce federal financial aid, privatize student loans and end student loan forgiveness.

They could revise, again, enforcement of the Title IX civil rights law to eliminate protections for LGBTQ+ students and strengthen rights for those accused of sexual misconduct. Teacher job protections in K-12 schools could come under scrutiny, and Head Start preschools could be threatened.

In what would be a blow to the research prowess of the University of California, a Trump White House could reduce federal funding in areas of ideological disdain — climate change, for instance — or tie funding to political goals such as reining in teaching about race. International and undocumented students could be targets.

“Under Trump, higher education in the US will face a difficult future, featuring an aggressive and intrusive federal government, erosion in funding with no alternatives, a cavalcade of political litmus tests and a decline in the US’s science and technology capability,” wrote John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow and research professor of public policy and higher education at the UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education.

To Rick Hess of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, however, a Trump administration would seek long-needed measures to hold educational institutions more accountable for student success in graduating and getting jobs, providing more ideological diversity in curriculum and faculty and justifying the billions in taxpayer dollars they receive.

“Surveys tell us that the colleges have lost the public trust,” Hess said. “They have spent public funds in troubling ways, adopted lax standards and allowed rigor to decline and have allowed the research enterprise to become politicized and ideological.”

How far Trump can go to realize his rhetoric on education — including revamping colleges and universities he sees as being under the control of “Marxist maniacs” — is unclear.

His call to eliminate the federal Department of Education, for instance, is probably unrealistic, Hess and others said. Republicans won’t have 60 votes to break a likely Democratic filibuster, and some conservatives want to keep the department in place but redirect it toward their goals. A 2024 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court restricted the executive branch’s ability to interpret congressional laws, limiting the scope of potential Trump actions.

Some of Trump’s biggest attempts at an education overhaul during his first term fell flat. In 2018, for instance, his administration proposed $200 billion in student aid funding cuts over a decade, targeting some types of loans, the federal work-study program and loan forgiveness for borrowers who work in public service. But he reined in some of those proposed cuts after a congressional budget deal increased higher education funding.

Still, analysts on both sides of the political divide expect a more robust effort to reshape education in Trump’s second administration, with greater experience, preparation and a willingness to act aggressively among his policy leaders.

Leaders of California’s three public university systems, recognizing the postelection tension, issued a statement of reassurance Wednesday. UC President Michael V. Drake, California State University Chancellor Mildred García and California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian said their institutions “remain steadfast and committed to our values of diversity and inclusivity.”

“Following the presidential election results, we understand that there is a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety within California’s higher education community,” their statement said. “We are proud to welcome students, faculty, and staff from all backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and we will continue to support and protect all members of our communities.”

Federal financial aid could be slashed under Trump. Educators are nervous about cuts to the federal work-study program, which is a key piece of financial aid packages, and a supplemental grant program for students with exceptional need.

However, increasing federal Pell Grants for low-income students has drawn bipartisan support. Rep. Virginia Foxx, the North Carolina Republican who chaired the House committee that grilled university presidents this year on their campus efforts to combat antisemitism, has proposed doubling the Pell Grant for third- and fourth-year students on track to graduate.

Trump is almost certain to end the Biden administration’s efforts to forgive student loan debt, which has amounted to more than $175 billion for more than 4.8 million Americans in payments owed.

Look for changes, again, in how the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights operates in enforcing Title IX, the federal law that bars sex-based discrimination by educational institutions that receive federal funding; and Title VI, which prohibits bias based on race, color or national origin.

The Trump administration is expected to reverse the Biden administration’s stance that Title IX covers gender and sexual identity, which secured new protections for LGBTQ+ people.

During his campaign, Trump also made references to his desire to ban transgender student athletes from competing on sports teams that match their gender identity.

He did not specify how he would do that. But, soon after inauguration, “I would expect Trump to make a move on anti-transgender issues about transgender girls in sports,” USC education professor Morgan Polikoff said.

Conservative positions on “parental notification” could also come into play, especially in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law this year banning rules that mandate school districts to alert parents when students come out as transgender or ask to go by names and pronouns different than what is on their school records.

Proponents in several school districts, including Chino Valley Unified in San Bernardino County, say notification policies are about informing parents about all aspects of their children’s lives. Opponents deride the policies as “forced outing” that make schools less safe for LGBTQ+ people.

Trump is also likely to revert back to rules enacted during his first term — which were effectively overturned by President Biden this year — that tightened the definition of sexual harassment, raised the standard of proof for successful claims and allowed advisers for accused students to cross-examine their accusers in a live hearing.

Trump’s first-term Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said those changes were needed to provide stronger due-process protections for accused students. Critics said it would weaken the fight against campus sexual assault.

The civil rights office is also expected to more vigorously investigate complaints of antisemitism and discrimination alleged by students who claim they were denied access to programs designed to help Latino, Black, and other underserved demographic groups, for instance.

Trump and his allies have long criticized “DEI” programs — those that aim to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, which opponents see as perpetuating an erroneous and unpatriotic view that U.S. institutions are inherently racist with white people as the oppressors.

Aside from investigations, funding is another tool the Trump administration could potentially use to rein in programs or curriculum, including “critical race theory,” which they cast as anti-American, misguided “woke” efforts because they delve into systemic racism. In late 2020, Trump issued an executive order barring recipients of federal grants and contracts from engaging in “race and sex scapegoating” — specifically calling out workplace diversity trainings that linked racism to white people. The order was challenged by civil rights groups as an unprecedented effort at censorship before Biden reversed the order after taking office in 2021.

“The radical left are using the public school system to push their perverse sexual, racial, and political material on our youth,” according to Trump’s issue statement on education. “President Trump will cut federal funding for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory or gender ideology on our children.”

Critical race theory is typically a university-level examination of how racial inequality and racism are systemically embedded in American institutions, though Trump and other conservatives have used the phrase as a catchall term to describe racially focused subject matter in K-12 public schools.

Stephanie Hall, senior director of higher ed policy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said it would be difficult to mandate curriculum. Under a federal law enacted in the 1960s, state and local authorities are responsible for educational standards, such as curriculum and staffing. An Obama-era law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, also prohibits federal involvement in curriculum or teacher evaluation.

But that won’t necessarily prevent Trump’s efforts to intervene, she said.

“You can expect to see a potential weaponization of the [Office of Civil Rights] to go after DEI initiatives, she said.

One of the biggest stakes for the University of California is research funding. The UC system is the largest recipient of federally sponsored research — $3.8 billion last year — among U.S. higher education institutions. Congress cut funding last year to the National Science Foundation by almost half a billion dollars, and some Republican lawmakers have proposed tying federal research grants to unrelated issues, such as campus action against antisemitism.

Trump threatened to cut off federal funding to UC Berkeley in 2017 after protesters prevented far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking there.

And this year, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), now the vice president-elect, co-sponsored a bill that would eliminate federal funding to universities that hire undocumented people — and he specifically called out UC, which was then weighing a proposal to hire students without legal status for campus jobs.

George Blumenthal, UC Santa Cruz chancellor emeritus and UC Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education faculty member, said he expected other areas favored by Trump, such as space research, to be safe. Douglass said some of Trump’s proposals in his earlier term to cut federal funds failed in part because some Republican lawmakers backed university research in science to give corporations spinoff benefits — “corporate welfare,” in Douglass’ view — and strengthen the nation’s technological and scientific competitiveness.

Trump’s victory could hit undocumented and international students especially hard. The president-elect has repeatedly vowed to deport all undocumented people, and many Republicans lawmakers are opposed to an Obama-era program that gave certain students brought to the country illegally as children protection from deportation and work permits.

Immigration advocates have pressed UC, CSU and California community colleges to hire students who missed out on qualifying for the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. But a new Trump administration is almost certain to keep them from doing so.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning think tank, said any action to deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally raised myriad questions and concerns.

“It’s hard to imagine that going well or without an immense amount of hardship on behalf of families and their children. Will migrant children be put in camps? Will they be educated while there?” Petrilli said. “Who is going to stand up such schools? Pay for them?”

Trump also narrowed the door to international students during his first term, increasing visa denials and slowing processing of requests. UC particularly relies on international students — especially from China and India — in its graduate and research programs; last year they made up 43% of those enrolled in master’s programs and 34.5% in doctorate programs.

During his first term, Trump cracked down on Chinese scholars in what he called an effort to protect national security as UC campuses from San Diego to Berkeley reported visa delays, federal scrutiny over research activities and new restrictions on collaboration with China and Chinese companies. UC scholars said then they feared the crackdown would drive away top Chinese scholars and jeopardize the kind of open international collaboration that has been a hallmark of higher education in the U.S., contributing to world-class research and scientific progress. Trump’s election has reignited those fears.

Many educators agree that the effort by Trump and his Republican allies to increase accountability for student success, as more people question the value of a college degree, is an appropriate and welcome goal. Some Republicans have proposed tying funding to the success of institutions that help students graduate and land good jobs. And calls for increased funding for workforce training are widely embraced.

“A lot of people are seeing this election as a reflection point on what we are doing, how are we being understood,” said Jon Fansmith of the American Council on Education. “It’s a moment to ... think about ways to respond to the criticism and work through the challenges. That in itself is a pretty healthy thing.”

UC Berkeley’s Douglass said some of the criticisms of higher education are “self-inflicted wounds.”

“Political activism has sometimes replaced scholarly inquiry and reflection in the classroom and in academic research,” he wrote. “These institutions need to reflect on the appropriate balance of academic freedom with free speech and redefine diversity to include differing and legitimate viewpoints.”

Trump has also framed accountability as an issue around teachers unions and teacher job protections. According to his campaign platform: “President Trump will reward states and school districts that abolish teacher tenure for grades K-12 and adopt Merit Pay, cut the number of school administrators.”

Trump has said he would abolish the department — a vow that has been an unsuccessful rallying cry of Republican politicians since Ronald Reagan.

For a sense of what this eradication would mean under Trump — his platform is thin on details — a key source is Project 2025, a conservative blueprint pulled together by the Heritage Foundation. Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but many former members of his first administration helped craft it.

Underpinning the goal to eliminate the department is the belief that education policy and practice should be almost entirely up to local officials.

But eliminating the department would require an act of Congress, which is one reason why it has never happened. Even if election results show Republicans are likely to maintain control of the House — they have already won the Senate — the idea is a hard sell.

In recent weeks, Trump has floated the idea of a national “school choice” policy.

The first Trump administration, under DeVos, was best known for supporting wide-ranging school choice policies. Supporters of the idea said parents should be able to use their share of public education funds toward tuition at any school of their choice — public or private, including religious schools — regardless of family income. Some of these choice programs rely at least in part for funding on donations offset by tax credits or philanthropy rather than a direct state subsidy.

The Trump team made limited progress at the federal level although the programs have gradually spread in different forms, passed into law in dozens of states by Republican-controlled legislatures. This year, voters rejected school choice proposals in Colorado and Kentucky. In Nebraska, voters also chose to repeal a school voucher program that the Legislature had passed.

If Project 2025 is adopted by the Trump administration, it could mean painful cuts to the child-care sector: The plan proposes eliminating Head Start, a federal program that funds child care, meals and wraparound services for more than 800,000 low-income children across the country.

In his 2018 presidential budget, Trump proposed to cut funding to the Head Start program by $85 million in 2018 and by $29 billion in 2019; neither proposal passed. Instead, Congress increased funding to the program in both budget years.

Head Start enrollment has fallen dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic and has not yet recovered. In California, enrollment collapsed by half, from 94,952 in 2018 to 46,370 in 2023, according to a UC Berkeley analysis. Some families may have found alternative child-care arrangements, while others have probably enrolled in other publicly funded programs, including transitional kindergarten.

During Trump’s first term, he signed a historic $2.37-billion increase in funding for federal child-care grants to states in 2018. But generally, child care was not a major part of his agenda. Vance suggested that an increase in child-care funding was a possibility in a second term, however, agreeing with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, in a campaign debate that the government needs to spend more money on the nation’s children.

“If past is prologue, I would expect that there’s room for some modest improvements in this area,” said Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow at Capita, a family policy think tank. “Relative to other social issues, child care is one where we may see more openness to more spending for the sake of making things easier for American families.”

But a major overhaul of the child-care sector is unlikely.

“I think we can expect to see no federal leadership on child care in the next 4 years,” Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist and policy consultant who studies the child-care market, said in a written comment. “Whatever slow demise of the private market we’re seeing now will continue unabated.”

Many conservatives see child care as “a private family issue that should be paid for and dealt with privately by families,” said Hailey Gibbs, senior analyst for early-childhood policy at the Center for American Progress think tank. “I think everyone agrees investing in the next generation is important. But when it comes to who does the care work and who pays for it, I think that’s really when we start to see a departure in alignment.”

Vance has suggested that extended families should be providing care to young children instead of the child-care industry. Project 2025 calls for funding to go “to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home childcare.”

Times staff writer Howard Blume contributed to this report.