President Donald Trump finally made good on his long-standing pledge to go after the Department of Education. On March 20, he issued an executive order instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to, to “the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
The order included several explicit desires: restoring local control where possible, reducing bureaucratic red tape, and combating DEI — in his words, “illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or similar terms and programs promoting gender ideology.”
These are laudable goals, putting aside whether or not shuttering the department is an effective way of achieving them or if such a circumstance will ultimately come to pass. Regardless, department or not, additional reforms will be needed to achieve an educational environment that allows for subsidiarity, flexibility, innovation, and freedom of ideas and purpose — and not all can be accomplished from the federal side of the equation.
The Trump administration, to its credit, has already begun to aim at some of the right targets. In February, in conjunction with his newly declared “Career and Technical Education Month,” Trump’s Department of Education renounced some last-minute regulatory reporting requirements on career and technical education programs enacted by the Biden-Harris administration. The information collection imposed in late December by the outgoing administration under the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006 “would have piled on thousands of hours in additional reporting compliance requirements on states, high schools, and community colleges that can be better spent on equipping the American workforce with the skills necessary to rebuild our economy,” the department stated. The move was praised by industry organizations, who had loudly protested the burdensome and duplicative regulatory imposition.
Such a move goes hand in hand with Trump’s overall goals: a reduction in bureaucracy, an increase in the flexibility and freedom available to local entities and systems, and an end-around of the leftist ideology peddled by the traditional academy.
Many of the points raised by Trump and much of the broader right-wing critique of the current educational regime revolve around the stranglehold college-going has on our educational system. Going to college, at least in theory, aids greatly in obtaining well-paying employment; thus, it’s important to go to college. But college is expensive; thus, student loans. Student loans are floated by the taxpayer, thus requiring oversight. Oversight requires bureaucrats and regulation. Bureaucrats and regulation make it extremely difficult for new competitors in the space to arise, buoying the monopoly colleges maintain on the employment pipeline. Risk-averse employers rely on standard indicators of baseline quality and competence when seeking applicants, the most universal of which is the college degree. Thus, college aids greatly in obtaining well-paying employment. K-12 schools thus tailor educational programs toward college-going. Meanwhile, of course, leftist faculty and issue-obsessed administrators out for themselves peddle their dogma to captive undergraduates on the backs of the taxpayer, creating an insidious feedback loop within a system-reinforced monopoly.
A great way to avoid this nexus of circular problems, then, is to go around it entirely. By promoting pathways to employment other than the traditional higher education system, the Trump administration can help ameliorate some of the worst excesses of the federal bureaucracy, the worst excesses of leftist ideological propaganda, and the worst excesses of misspent taxpayer dollars.
Reducing barriers to employment, as well as reducing barriers to those who offer competing postsecondary education and preparation programs, will not only land a blow in the ideological battle but aid in the social mobility of everyday Americans. While college can be a fantastic vehicle for social mobility, it can also serve as a tremendous barrier, both for individuals and the education-to-workforce system at large. As I argued with Rick Hess in National Affairs in 2019, “For too many Americans, the truth is that postsecondary education is principally a toll: an ever-more-expensive, increasingly mandatory, two-, four-, or, more accurately, six-year pit stop on the way to remuneration.”
“Constitutional doctrine holds that employment practices that disproportionately affect members of a protected group are prohibited, unless the practice can be shown to be directly related to job performance and consistent with business need. Nonetheless, thousands of employers now casually flout this standard by screening applicants based on postsecondary credentials and by factoring degrees into hiring decisions, even where degree requirements have a disproportionate effect and bear no obvious relation to job duties or performance.” The college degree is treated differently than other employment tests simply because it is the college degree, and rampant degree inflation has only served to make this problem worse. (Indiscriminate degree requirements by employers, we argued, are possibly in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act as maintained by the standard the Supreme Court instituted in Griggs v. Duke Power Company in 1971.)
To his credit, shortly after in 2020, Trump issued an executive order in his first term directing the federal government to reduce the emphasis on college degrees in federal hiring — instructing that federal agencies may prescribe a minimum educational requirement “only when a minimum educational qualification is legally required to perform the duties of the position in the state or locality where those duties are to be performed.” Govs. Larry Hogan of Maryland and Jared Polis of Colorado each went on to adopt similar measures in their respective state hiring.
Nevertheless, as my friend Preston Cooper recently found, state governments, in particular, have a disproportionate preponderance for degree requirements. In a new report for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity examining the extent of degree inflation in state and local governments, he found that across a number of measures, state and local governments impose more questionable college degree requirements than private sector employers. For workers in the middle of the income distribution, for example, those earning between $45,000 and $65,000 per year, 31% of these workers have a bachelor’s degree or higher in the private sector compared to a whopping 68% among state and local government workers.
Credentialism is far from a college-exclusive issue, of course. Occupational licensing requirements are frequently onerous, inconsistent between states, and inexplicably necessary for a wide swath of quotidian occupations such as florists and nail technicians. As Dr. Kihwan Bae and Dr. Darwyyn Deyo of West Virginia University surveyed in July 2024, “Over 800 occupations are licensed in at least one state, and today about 22% of U.S. workers need an occupational license to do their job, up significantly since the 1950s. Common licensing requirements include mandating that aspiring workers complete months or years of education and training, pass practical and written exams set by the licensing board, pay nonrefundable fees to the licensing board, and meet citizenship requirements. States also often prevent workers with criminal records from obtaining any occupational license, regardless of the severity of the offense, the amount of time since the offense took place, or whether the offense was related to the occupation. … Although some states have delicensed some occupations in recent years, the trend in most states is to retain or increase licensing requirements.”
Occupational licensing reform might seem afield from the issues of student loans and federally subsidized DEI, but such obstacles create another pressure point that serves to feed into the college monopoly. The more difficult it is to pursue other avenues after high school, the more college, loans, and all that comes with it seems like the “default” option. Especially if applicants are consistently turned away for want of a college degree or industry-controlled credential.
While reducing the federal, top-down bureaucracy shackling education is good and necessary, reformers at the state and local levels will have to play a role in opening up new avenues to take advantage of what newfound freedom might become available. One way the Trump administration and Congress can aid state and local efforts in alternative pathways is through K-12 funding streams, such as permitting blanket block grants, to allow for the creation of more nontraditional charter, technical, and magnet schools associated with trades and workforce development. Another would be through accreditation reform to allow new competitors in the postsecondary market that offer more value to students and the taxpayer.
WILL TRUMP’S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION STRATEGY ACTUALLY CUT THE BUREAUCRACY?
Ultimately, however, the college bubble that is the primary driver of the Trump administration’s education complaints is predicated on the existence of taxpayer-backed student loans. And the higher education bubble — that creates the administrative bloat, that sinks the taxpayers’ money, and that funds the DEI agenda and produces its prophets — will continue for as long as the federal teet is there to be suckled. Abolishing the department with its K-12 functionaries and program managers is all well and good — terrific, even, if it allows for more freedom in states and systems around school choice and saves some money at the same time — but if the student loan portfolios simply shift over to the Treasury Department, then the higher education institutions and the system that props them up keep on as they have. Freshly credentialed teachers matriculating from woke educational graduate schools return to the K-12 pipeline to peddle whatever the latest gender identity dysmorphia of the day is to students who are conditioned to view loan-taking and college-going as the default way to satisfactory employment.
Abolishing the Department of Education can be a first step toward education reform, but it cannot be the last step if the Trump administration wishes to accomplish its goals. Time will tell.
J. Grant Addison is deputy editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
