The Bipartisan Roots of Trump’s One Good Education Reform

Donald Trump’s only major second term legislative achievement, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is also one of the least popular laws to come out of Washington in years. Composed primarily of deficit-exploding tax cut extensions for corporations and the wealthy, plus effective cuts to health care coverage for middle- and lower-income Americans, the legislation faced nearly 2-to-1 opposition from the public when Trump signed it on July 4, 2025. It also tripled federal spending for ICE, a move that, in the wake of the agency’s killing spree in Minneapolis, has not enhanced the OBBBA’s reputation with voters.

And yet, buried inside the bill is a measure that most Americans regardless of party would almost certainly support—if they knew anything about it. The provision says that any college program whose students earn no more income four years after graduating than someone with only a high school degree in that state will lose eligibility for federal student loans. The rule applies equally to all colleges—two-year and four-year, for-profit and non-profit—and to graduate schools (whose students must go on to earn more than those with only a bachelor’s degree).

This so-called “Do No Harm” standard is hardly draconian. Only 2 to 6 percent of college degree programs—typically majors like cosmetology and media studies—are at risk of failing it, according to estimates. Still, it’s an important advance. It will help tens of thousands of students, primarily from low-income backgrounds, avoid spending time and money (theirs and the taxpayers’) earning credentials that don’t help them make a decent living. It will send a message to hundreds of other colleges with programs only slightly above the cutoff that they’d be wise to up their game. And it might eventually help arrest the public’s declining trust in the value of a college degree.

Indeed, cutting off federal student loan dollars to college programs that produce no measurable financial benefit seems so commonsensical that you might wonder how Washington managed not to impose such a rule until now. The answer isn’t that no one ever thought of it. Public officials in both parties have tried for decades, separately and together, to advance measures like this. Almost all of those efforts were undermined by ideological differences, partisan maneuvering, and lobbying by the higher education sector.

It’s unclear if Trump even knows the rule is part of the law he signed. He has never mentioned it publicly. Nor is there reference to it in any public notice from the White House.

Last year’s rule made it into the OBBBA, on a party line vote, largely because it provided scoreable savings that Republican leaders needed to convince budget hawks in their own caucus to support massive tax giveaways that will add $4.5 trillion to the federal deficit over the next 10 years. House leaders “directed the Education and Workforce Committee to save $330 billion,” Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) who advised the committee, told us. “It didn’t specify how the committee needed to hit that number, just that it needed to find those savings somewhere,” he said.

It’s unclear if Trump even knows the rule is part of the law he signed. He has never mentioned it publicly. Nor is there reference to it in any public notice from the White House. A near total lack of mainstream media coverage has assured that the rule remains under the radar. 

That is likely to change soon, however. The law stipulates that any program that fails the Do No Harm stricture in two out of the next three years will lose eligibility for student loans—a probable death sentence for those programs. Colleges are just beginning to game out which of their programs are vulnerable. As they do, those with poorly rated programs, most of them for-profits and struggling non-profits in rural areas, will start lobbying. They’ll warn their representatives in Washington, who are disproportionately Republicans, that the loss of federal funds, combined with a demographically driven drop in student admissions, could force their institutions to close permanently—and they will be right about that. Meanwhile, centrist and left-leaning think tanks and advocacy groups that have long argued for more accountability in higher education will point out to Democratic lawmakers, who were cut out of negotiations over the OBBBA, that the law’s Do No Harm standard is weaker and perhaps cruder than it ideally should be—and they will be right about that, too. Political pressure to strengthen the standard will meet political pressure to weaken it. Under that strain the rule itself could get scrapped.

Fortunately, that fate is not inevitable. Washington can take actions that would improve and protect the new standard, including helping struggling colleges comply with it. But to understand why that might be necessary, it helps to understand why past federal higher education accountability efforts have routinely fallen apart.

The federal government first entered the business of providing aid for college students in 1944, when Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the GI Bill of Rights. Today, the GI Bill is rightly remembered as one of the most successful federal programs in American history—in just two years it doubled the size of the student population and created the basis for a mass middle class. But it also had a dark side. With few restrictions on how the educational subsidies could be used, the law led to an explosion of for-profit trade schools that used deceptive advertising to lure in veterans for low-quality training programs that rarely led to good jobs.

Cutting off federal student loan dollars to college programs that produce no measurable financial benefit seems so commonsensical that you might wonder how it is Washington managed not to impose such a rule until now.

As press exposés brought these abuses to light, President Harry S. Truman called on Congress to propose changes to the program. Lawmakers complied, and in 1952 Truman signed bipartisan legislation that curbed proprietary schools’ easy access to GI Bill funds. The number of veterans attending such institutions dropped by three-quarters. In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, also concerned about for-profit colleges, signed legislation that extended low-interest loans to low-income students studying science and math (the better to fight the Cold War) but limited funding to public and non-profit colleges.

Over the next decade and a half, Washington continued to expand federal student aid, primarily through the 1965 Higher Education Act (HEA), signed by President Lyndon Johnson. That legislation, which made needs-based grants and loans available to all Americans, not just veterans and STEM students, initially excluded for-profit schools. But in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, lawmakers in both parties, eager to open vocational opportunities, created new loopholes for for-profits. The number of such institutions again exploded, as did abuses. Press investigations—including a three-part Washington Post series by a young Carl Bernstein—led to more bipartisan calls for reform. But various regulatory tweaks by the Ford and Reagan administrations made little headway against the problem.

In 1989, a different scandal arose. A congressional study requested by Senator Edward Kennedy found that dozens of Division I colleges failed to graduate four out of every five student athletes the schools had recruited. Suddenly, it wasn’t just trade schools screwing students, but brand name universities. “There is no justification for any athlete to be abused by a college sports program and then left without an education,” Kennedy told The New York Times, adding that “disclosure is the best place to start.” Other lawmakers, including Senator Bill Bradley and Representative Tom McMillen, both former professional basketball players and Rhodes Scholars, quickly joined the call for reform.

A year later, Congress passed, and President George H.W. Bush signed, the Student Right-To-Know and Campus Security Act. It mandated graduation rate data for all students (not just athletes)—vital information for consumers as well as policymakers which, amazingly, had never been available. For methodological reasons—and because the gears of federal data collection and dissemination grind slowly—it would take more than a decade for the first such numbers to be released. Meanwhile, in 1992, Bush signed an additional piece of legislation that gave for-profit regulation real teeth by threatening to take away financial aid from schools if too many of their students defaulted. Over the next five years, 860 for-profit schools closed.

Just as Washington was getting serious about higher ed accountability, two confounding events occurred. The first was the deployment of the World Wide Web in 1991. The second was the rise of Newt Gingrich to House Speaker in 1995. A techno-enthusiast contemptuous of both regulation and of moderate Republicans like Bush, Gingrich and his Republican revolutionaries passed legislation in 1998 that stripped away most of the 1992 law’s protections while making it easier for for-profit colleges to roll out new online learning business models. (President Bill Clinton signed the law after negotiating lower rates on student loans and new programs to benefit lower-income students).

Just as Washington was getting serious about higher ed accountability, two confounding events occurred. The first was the deployment of the world wide web in 1991. The second was the rise of Newt Gingrich to House Speaker in 1995.

Predictably, the for-profit college industry came roaring back, bigger than ever. Fueled by online programs, companies like Corinthian Colleges and the University of Phoenix swelled to become bigger than the largest traditional universities, with stocks that traded on Wall Street. Meanwhile, Republicans who had been, if anything, stronger proponents of regulating for-profits than some Democrats now became the sector’s champions. In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed a University of Phoenix lobbyist to a top job at the Department of Education and worked with Republicans in Congress to further loosen restrictions on for-profits.

In 2004, the graduation rate data for all colleges that the elder Bush’s 1990 reform had mandated finally became available. That year, Education Trust, a liberal non-profit that had cut its teeth advocating for K–12 accountability, used the new data to show that colleges with similar student demographics often had radically different graduation rates for women and racial minorities. This suggested that it was the universities with the low graduation rates that were failing their students, and not the other way around.

The next year, the Washington Monthly published its first annual college rankings using the new grad rate data as a key component. Those rankings showed that many public universities that scored poorly on the U.S. News & World Best Colleges ranking did a better job graduating students of modest means than the private elite schools that dominated the top of the U.S. News list. The Monthly’s rankings garnered national media attention and sparked a conversation in higher education policy circles about the need to hold all colleges, not just for-profits, accountable for the taxpayer dollars they take in.

Indeed, in 2006, even as the Bush administration was gutting regulations on for-profits, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings released a commission report that came to many of the same conclusions as the Monthly, including recommending more and better data on student learning and employment outcomes. Thanks to opposition by trade groups representing public and non-profit colleges, Congress largely ignored Spellings’s report. But it received wide media coverage and underscored a key idea: Public disclosure of college performance data, in and of itself, can be a potent form of accountability. 

It would take another administration to put that idea to the test.

In the summer of 2010, Senator Tom Harkin, who had just taken over as the Democratic chairman of the committee overseeing higher education after Kennedy’s passing, began a series of investigations into for-profit colleges spurred by press exposés, including one in the Washington Monthly. Two years and six hearings later, the committee released a damning report documenting the industry’s practices. These included high-pressure recruitment tactics, poor quality instruction, low job placement rates, and students left with mountains of debt they could never pay off, most of it funded by taxpayers in the form of federal student aid.

Republicans on the committee complained that the report was partisan and unfairly targeted for-profit schools. Still, its findings provided political momentum for efforts already underway in the Obama administration to craft a new regulatory mechanism to curb the abuses of vocational schools. The answer it came up with was the “gainful employment rule.” First announced in 2010 and (after a court setback) published in 2014, the rule proposed to cut off federal student financial aid to career-oriented schools whose students earn so little after graduation that they can’t pay back their loans.

Republicans also objected that the gainful employment rule was unfair because it left public and non-profit four-year colleges largely untouched. But even as they said that Obama proposed to discipline precisely those sectors. In 2013, he announced that his administration would create a new rating system that would measure colleges on the average tuition they charge, the share of low-income students they enroll, and the debt burdens with which their students graduate. He also said he would ask Congress for authority to provide greater funding to colleges that scored higher on the government’s ratings.

It was the boldest accountability regime on colleges and universities any president had ever proposed. Not surprisingly, college presidents, lobbyists, and members of Congress—especially Republicans—expressed outrage at the rating plan, and the administration was forced to back off. But in 2015, it launched the College Scorecard, a database where the public could access the same numbers for individual colleges in unranked form—data the previous administration had called for but never delivered.

Similarly, court challenges by the for-profit industry forced the Obama administration to delay releasing its gainful employment results until the president’s last days in office—after which the Trump administration promptly repealed the regulation, claiming as ever that it unfairly targeted for-profit colleges. Yet even though student aid for the 800 vocational programs that failed the gainful employment test continued to flow, 500 of those programs got shut down or reformed anyway. Just being “named and shamed” turned out to be motivation enough for vocational college administrators to clean up their act—or for investors to pull the plug. 

Under Joe Biden, the Education Department crafted a fresh version of the gainful employment rule, this time broadening it to include additional programs at public and non-profit institutions to make it more acceptable to conservatives. That didn’t keep for-profit schools and Republican officials from denouncing it. In 2023, Virginia Foxx, then the top GOP member on the House  Education and Workforce Committee, decried Biden’s proposed rules as “simply the same witch hunt.” After the 2024 presidential elections, most observers expected the second Trump administration to again repeal the gainful employment rules.

That’s not quite what happened, however. Instead, Republicans passed the OBBBA. Suddenly the government had two sets of accountability standards, each with different requirements and penalties. Do No Harm covers only college degree programs. Gainful employment covers nondegree certificates as well as vocational degrees. Do No Harm only measures income. Gainful employment includes not just an income measure but also a debt-to-earnings metric to make sure programs don’t leave graduates owing more in student loans than they can reasonably repay. Under Do No Harm, failing programs lose access to government-subsidized student loans. Under gainful employment, they become ineligible for federal student loans and Pell Grants. The gainful employment standards, in other words, are stricter.

To deal with these differences, a committee empaneled by the Department of Education recommended “harmonizing” the two standards. The Do No Harm requirements should apply to all programs, said the committee, including those that the gainful employment rule covers. The additional requirements of gainful employment should be eliminated.  

This compromise has the virtue of simplicity: It holds all programs to the same easy-to-understand earnings standard. The downside is that the stricter requirements in gainful employment were put there for a reason. The debt-to-earning measure, for instance, factors in how much a program costs. Take that measure away, as the “harmonized” new standard does, and colleges that charge extremely high tuition and fees and leave graduates deep in debt, with incomes only slightly above what high school graduates make, will continue to get federal student loans. And even if they fail that test—meaning that even if a program’s graduates earn no more than high school graduates, or even less—they still receive Pell Grants.

As it happens, for-profit colleges have the highest debt default rates and disproportionately depend on Pell Grants. So, the new “harmonized” standards are considerably easier on for-profits than is the gainful employment standard that Trump inherited from Biden.

Even with that erosion of strictness, however, Do No Harm represents an overall advance. For the first time in American history, every college program that takes federal money will be held accountable for some level of performance. And so far, most of the D.C. insider groups that influence higher education policy—trade associations like the American Council on Education as well as think tanks and advocacy groups on both sides of the aisle—have been cautiously supportive of the new standard. Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers have largely avoided criticizing Do No Harm even though they had no direct hand in shaping it and have openly disparaged a related provision in the OBBBA that limits access to graduate loans. 

Still, history shows that agreed-upon efforts in Washington to hold higher education to account tend to fall apart, and there are many ways this one might. One is if the Trump administration, which hasn’t given final approval to the new “harmonized” standard, decides to provide exemptions for for-profit colleges. For-profit lobbyists are already working behind the scenes to that end, despite the favorable treatment their industry already won.

For all its compromises, the Do No Harm statute represents an overall advance. For the first time in American history, every college program that takes federal money will be held accountable for some level of performance.

If the administration imposes such carveouts, granting the college sector most in need of accountability the least, it would not only be a policy travesty: It would also sabotage the bipartisan political support that the Do No Harm standard currently enjoys. After all, Democratic lawmakers and liberal activists tend to be on friendly terms with the non-profit and public higher education sectors. They are unlikely to defend accountability mechanisms for those sectors that don’t also apply to for-profits. (The administration similarly risks alienating Democrats by tying reform of the college accreditation system, an accountability improvement both parties have long supported, to its crusade to further crush Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts at universities.)

Do No Harm will face other challenges if and when Democrats get back into power. Democratic lawmakers will want to strengthen the standard—by, for instance, adding a debt-to-earnings test. Progressive members have also voiced concern that the new standard will punish programs that train graduates for socially useful but low-paying professions like early childhood development. These are legitimate issues. But the harder they press them, the more Democrats risk losing support across the aisle. While there are certainly many Republicans who care deeply about higher ed accountability, others supported Do No Harm just to pave the way for tax cuts, and its usefulness for that purpose has expired now that the tax cuts have passed.

Another challenge to Do No Harm is that it could accelerate the closure of programs at colleges and universities that are already in a financially precarious position. Because of falling birth rates, the number of 18-year-olds graduating from high school and headed to college is set to fall by 13 percent by 2041. This will put a strain on the higher education system generally and especially on smaller private colleges that depend on tuition for a high percentage of their revenue. Scores or even hundreds of these schools could shutter over the next decade-plus. Many, especially those in small towns, are pillars of the economic and civic life of their regions.

If Do No Harm is seen as increasing the risk of such closures, there will be pressure on lawmakers in both parties—and especially on Republicans, who disproportionately represent rural areas—to weaken or even abandon the law. To relieve that pressure, policymakers in both parties should consider ideas, such as one this magazine has proposed, for the federal government to financially aid struggling colleges in return for improving their teaching and business models to better serve students (and avoid going out of business in the first place).

Most of all, Democrats and Republicans need to recognize that Do No Harm is a crucial beachhead in the drive to bring accountability to higher education that both parties have contributed to for three-quarters of a century. The fact that there is more to be done should not be an excuse to undo it.

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