The One Big Beautiful Bill Act ushered in a raft of policy reforms on July 1 that will change how students pay for college and how degrees are valued. Future graduate students will likely be more reliant on private lenders to fund their education and find themselves tied to standard repayment plans, and institutions with programs that don’t pass an earnings test could lose access to federal loans.
But a lot is still left to be determined. Sector observers will be watching to see how the Education Department, with half the staff and a mounting number of interagency agreements, implements the new policies. They also expect inevitable legal challenges to the hastily finalized rules. Already, one court ruling has at least temporarily altered the department’s plans to put in place graduate loan limits.
One such observer is Peter Lake, the director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Policy and Law at Stetson University. Taken together, the policies in the One Big Beautiful Bill, he says, will have a more profound impact on higher ed than any other piece of legislation in the last several decades, because they centralize more power under the federal government. This, combined with what he calls the “edupocalypse” of generative artificial intelligence and declining public trust, could force a new form of university in the future. But the sky isn’t falling, he says. Institutions in the future will be more ambitious and rooted in just-in-time education over a student’s lifetime where they’ll keep their skills sharp for new jobs but also invest in their personal growth. His faith in America’s ability to meet the challenge is immovable.
