GALLOWAY, NJ — President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign has pledged to dismantle the Department of Education (DOE), aiming to shift education regulations and oversight to state governments. This proposal raises significant questions about its potential impact, particularly for institutions like Stockton University.

The DOE, formally established in 1980, has faced opposition from its inception. Early critics, including former President Ronald Reagan, targeted the department as a candidate for federal budget cuts. However, legislative efforts to abolish it consistently failed to garner enough support in Congress.

The DOE’s responsibilities have expanded much more in 2024, and in turn the calls for its dismantlement have grown louder within the GOP. 

Chapter 7 of Trump’s Agenda 47 platform, taken from the President-elect’s website, covers the incoming administration’s plans for the education system, spanning between elementary and secondary schooling to upper education. Within this chapter are plans to abolish tenure for teachers in favor of merit pay, push forward universal school choice, defund schools teaching “leftwing propaganda,” and incorporate bible study and patriotism into schools through the 1776 Commission. Also, Trump lays out his plan to close the DOE in an effort to put control of the educational system in the hands of the state legislators — a move that is controversial for both students and teachers alike. 

In terms of student protections, the DOE has been responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws in universities, such as Title VI and Title IX — both instrumental for students. 

“The Department of Education is critical in providing the basic civil rights that Americans have fought for throughout the course of history,” says Ryan Kilpatrick, president of the Stockton University Democrats. “There will be no oversight, or even enforcement, of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prevents discrimination of students based on their race, color, or national origin. Title IX would also lack enforcement in protecting students from sex-based discrimination in public schools.” 

GOP lawmakers have since introduced bills into Congress — such as the “Returning Education Back to Our States Act” — sending enforcement and oversight of Title VI to the Justice Department. However, these bills are being highly criticized as not being realistic due to the sheer amount of legislation that funnels throughout the DOE, leading to more questions than answers about how a DOE-less education system would look like.

Recently, the main attacks on the DOE from the GOP have come from the perception that the department is “radically left” as outlined in Agenda 47. 

“We agree with the guidelines outlined in Trump’s ‘Agenda 47’ which places the ‘fundamental rights’ into the hands of parents to control their children’s education, as well as defunding schools who are actively pushing predominantly left wing agendas such as critical race theory and LGBTQ+ ideologies,” says public relations officer Sydney Nelson in a joint statement from Stockton University Republicans. 

The big question for students in the wake of recent events is how the dismantling of the DOE would affect federal financial aid. 

For many Stockton students, federal financial aid is indispensable. Programs managed by the DOE, like the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), make higher education accessible. At Stockton University, 84% of its nearly 10,000 students receive some form of financial aid. Without these programs, many students would struggle to afford their education.

17 million individuals applied for the FAFSA since 2021, with 74% of families completing the FAFSA for the 2023-2024 school year. The average federal student loan for the 2022-2023 school year was over $3,800, culminating with over $240.7 billion in aid for students.

“I used federal financial aid when I went to Stockton,” said Lake Forte. Forte was a Political Science major and graduated from Stockton in 2022. “It was massively important to me, because I come from a poor family and I would not have been able to pay for anything out of pocket.” Forte claims that taking federal aid was a double edged sword, however, as they were left in a tremendous amount of debt despite receiving both loans and aid from the FAFSA.

Lucy Buondonno, a junior criminal justice major at Stockton, recieved a full ride from the FAFSA. Without it, Buondonno believes that she wouldn’t have been able to attend Stockton at all. “My family has no money, and my mom cares for my four other siblings. If I was unable to get financial aid, I would have never recieved the education I have now to better myself for my future career.”

For some educators, the dismantlement of the DOE signals a greater attack on the education system as a whole. 

“I think that we are in danger in the coming years of a particularly intense attack against public education and the academic world in the US, even without dismantling the DOE,” says Dr. Raz Segal, program director of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University. “If the incoming Trump administration will move to cut federal funding sources for public education in significant ways, many students will simply find it impossible to enroll in universities like Stockton. This, in turn, would deprive many universities of tuition money – their main source of income today – with disastrous implications.” 

It would take an enormous amount of upheaval for an institution like the DOE to actually be eradicated – almost too much. While this current push for dismantlement has the most traction it’s had in a long time, the support needed in Congress requires a bipartisan agreement that simply doesn’t exist at this time.