We will see if free college tuition for the middle class, or student loan relief, all higher ed issues brought up by Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, are even remembered by President-elect Donald Trump in the coming months.
Trump made passing mention to vague ideas of helping students out of debt during the GOP convention, mostly to counter Clinton. But like everything on the Trump agenda from the wall to banning Muslims, no one knows how Trump will go from sloganeering to real action.
Since the election, I’ve mentioned somewhat satirically that our political circumstance of having the least experienced, least qualified person elected to the presidency was a grand example of affirmative action—for Whites.
It brings to the forefront an issue that was never really addressed in the campaign but is always lurking as a concern in higher ed.
Despite the Supreme Court weighing in on the Texas case, affirmative action remains a conservative rallying call, and, with a pending case on fair admissions at Harvard, it could become a more contentious issue again.
Coincidentally, it comes up during the Trump transition as the name of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, 35, husband of Ivanka Trump, pops up in the headlines as one of Trump’s consiglieres.
Award-winning journalist Daniel Golden, the editor of ProPublica, an independent nonprofit investigative news organization, is also the author of the 2006 book “The Price of Admission.”
