Higher education leaders have been quick to speculate what the postsecondary landscape will look like with President-elect Donald Trump a little more than a week away from his second inauguration. However, the fate of transgender athletes, student debt relief and sport unionization may already be decided.
Two days before Christmas, President Joe Biden withdrew two pending regulations aiming to provide student loan forgiveness for up to 40 million Americans. The plans would have cut the time frame in half to forgive longstanding loans and expanded forgiveness to borrowers whose financial hardship impeded their ability to repay their accounts. Both regulations were issued after the Supreme Court struck down his attempt to wipe out more than $400 billion in student debt.
The Department of Education withdrew the proposed rule to focus on helping borrowers re-enter repayment plans following the pandemic, according to an official notice.
However, numerous legal experts warned Republican state attorneys general would likely have challenged Biden’s regulations, The New York Times reports. Without the proper support or defense from a Democrat in the White House, a judicial decision could have overturned the regulations and wiped out the potential for loan forgiveness indefinitely.
Biden has also withdrawn a proposed regulation that would have barred a blanket ban on transgender participation in K12 and college athletics. Administrators would have been granted the flexibility to limit a student’s participation if it undermined “fairness in competition” or could result in sports-related injury, Reuters reports.
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However, the regulation faced broad pushback during the public comment period, and Biden’s recent Title IX regulation, which extended protections to LGBQIA+ students, faced lawsuits by more than half the country’s state legislatures. Trump’s promises to ban transgender athletes from participating also struck a chord on the campaign trail. Ahead of all these factors, the administration has pulled out.
Consequently, House and Senate Republicans have each reintroduced bills that strictly regulate athletic competition based on the biological sex assigned to athletes at birth.
Lastly, the NCAA’s amateur athletics model should remain intact for the foreseeable future after a union withdrew its historic bid to represent Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball team The Ivy League student-athletes were the first in the nation to unionize last March, but they faced a long road of federal litigation.
Any chance the union might win its petition with the National Labor Relations Board appears doomed by Trump’s election. The incoming president will fill two positions on what’s likely to become a more employer-friendly board. If the union lost its bid, it also would have potentially opened up a dangerous legal precedent, AP News reports.
While recent court rulings have allowed student-athletes to profit off their name, image and likeness and participate in revenue-sharing models with Power 5 institutions, no institution has yet recognized their students as employers.
