New Heritage Report Shows Tension in Federal Role in Higher Ed

In its latest guidance on higher education reform, the conservative Heritage Foundation endorses the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to leverage executive power to overhaul the American higher education system by pushing colleges to comply with right-wing priorities and demanding accountability. At the same time, it urges the White House to minimize federal oversight and focus instead on dismantling the Education Department and shifting its duties to the states.

Released Jan. 26, the Heritage Foundation’s new report, “Themes of Higher Education Reform,” builds upon the higher ed groundwork laid by Project 2025, the far more detailed governing blueprint that the Trump administration adopted when it cracked down on DEI practices, deported international students and gutted the department’s staff. Key areas of the new brief focus on how to strengthen the administration’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” and use an upcoming rulemaking session to reconstruct the accreditation system. In both instances, Heritage suggests state leaders could take over some of the responsibility.

Overall, the guidance urges lawmakers and department officials—including former Heritage staffer Lindsey Burke, who now serves as deputy chief of staff for policy—to stay the course in reforming the liberal bastion of higher ed while also avoiding “expanding the federal government’s role … in pursuit of these vital goals.”

One policy professor told Inside Higher Ed the report’s equivocal tone reflects the Foundation’s efforts to solidify the changes that have already been enacted rather than expand or reinvent them, adding that it could be seen as challenging the Trump administration’s tendency to lean on executive actions.

But Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow at Heritage and co-author of the report, said the strategies outlined support the Trump administration’s goals of shuttering the Education Department while also recognizing that it won’t happen overnight. In the meantime, he said, the government needs to keep the pressure on higher ed within the bounds of the law.

“There’s a plan A and a plan B,” he said. “Plan A is to return education to the states, dismantle the department, privatize everything, or at least have block grants. But that’s politically infeasible today, so while we’re waiting for plan A to happen, we’re not against Plan B, which is to use the tools available to us.”

“I think that’s the same thing that the department would probably say—that it’s going to use the tools available to them,” Kissel added.

Inside Higher Ed reached out to the department for comment on the report but did not receive an answer prior to publication as a result of the partial government shutdown which began Saturday.

What Does the Report Say?

The Heritage Foundation has long advocated for a significant education overhaul and so far it has largely succeeded in making that goal a reality. An Inside Higher Ed analysis conducted just three months into Trump 2.0 showed that nearly one-third of the 50 or so higher ed policy recommendations laid out in Project 2025 had been fully or partially executed. Several more have moved into that category in the months since.

Now, the foundation appears to be focusing specifically on action items that it believes can be completed in partnership with or entirely by state leaders—including decoupling accreditation from federal funding.

Currently, it’s up to accreditors—independent, government-recognized agencies—to determine which institutions demonstrate sufficient quality standards and should have access to federal student aid. But the new Heritage Foundation report suggests that lawmakers should “break the link,” and allow state and private quality-assurance groups to evaluate colleges instead.

The current set-up “has turned accreditors into ideological gatekeepers of federal dollars rather than guarantors of quality,” the report reads. And while the department is slated to begin a rulemaking session in April that could allow new agencies to gain the power to decide who gets access to federal funds, entirely separating accreditors from their role as guarantors would take Congressional action.

The report also proposes strengthening the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” the sweeping set of concessions that the Trump administration pitched to higher ed institutions in exchange for preferential treatment, which all but a handful rejected. Overall, Heritage’s latest report affirms the compact and its focus on:

• Addressing so-called discriminatory practices in admissions, hiring and student programming
• Ensuring intellectual diversity and free speech
• Promoting institutional neutrality on issues of public policy
• Preventing “foreign entanglements”
• Lowering college cost

But Heritage also suggests that many of these core reforms could be handled at the state level. For example, Kissel and his co-authors say that federal regulations regarding free speech “should avoid overreach.” They also note that any reforms related to skyrocketing tuition rates “may be best handled … directly at the state level and indirectly through reform of federal student loan programs that incentivize tuition increases.”

If Trump officials choose to continue addressing these issues at the federal level in the form of a compact, Heritage recommends they offer more clarity in how institutions will be punished or rewarded with regard to compliance. One way to do so, the report says, is by more explicitly and uniformly tying compliance with the compact’s standards to eligibility for discretionary grants. Developing such a system of bonus points in grant review would allow the department to direct funds toward institutions that align with Trump’s priorities, the report suggests.

Limits of Federal Power

To Kissel and the foundation, the report is a slightly updated reiteration of the same calls for reform that conservative policy experts have been seeking for years to recenter colleges and universities on merit rather than access.

Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, a libertarian think tank, believes that what Heritage wants to see from higher ed institutions hasn’t changed since Project 2025. What’s different this time around, if anything, he said, is that the foundation identifies states rather than the federal government as the most effective way to accomplish those goals.

He added that much of the work that could be performed at the federal level without further Congressional action has been completed. Congress and the department reformed federal student aid through the One Big Beautiful Bill and rulemaking sessions, and Trump downsized the Education Department through reductions in force. The president also sought to cut research funding through grant freezes and budget proposals, though some of those attempts have faced pushback in court and on Capitol Hill.

“So there’s really not much more to do at the federal level even if you think the administration is open to policies that you’ve wanted to see implemented because they’ve either already done it or they’re trying to do so,” Gillen said. “At that point, your best bet is actually to move to state level policy where there are a lot more levers that states can use.”

But to Robert Kelchen, head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, there’s a bit more to the foundation’s shift of focus than just what levers have yet to be pulled.

“There’s a lot of tension on the [political] right about what the role of the federal government should be playing—a greatly limited role or a role that transforms what higher education looks like,” he said. “The Trump administration has tried to do both at the same time and by reducing the capacity of the Department of Education so much, they face challenges in implementing parts of their agenda.”

As the Trump administration enters year two and Republicans know they could lose control of Congress in the midterms, he said, they will need to make adjustments if they want to get things done.

“It’s about moving from trying to make massive policy gains to working on solidifying what they have so it can survive going forward,” Kelchen explained. “And that’s what this Heritage document feels like as well.”