Former President Joe Biden ceded the presidency to Donald Trump on Monday and left behind a “mixed” record in higher education policy, law professor Lucas Powe said.
Biden created a student debt relief plan and updated Title IX rules to include sexual orientation, but both initiatives faced opposition from the courts.
In June 2023, the Supreme Court overturned Biden’s initial debt relief plan, which aimed to forgive up to $20,000 of student debt to Pell Grant recipients, who are chosen based on financial need, and up to $10,000 for others with an individual income of less than $125,000.
Powe said he agrees with the ruling against Biden’s debt relief plan.
“It’s not clear to me where the President of the United States gets the authority to forgive billions of dollars in debt,” Powe said. “Congress should be the body that does that.”
After the court’s decision, the Biden administration announced a new income-driven repayment plan called Saving on a Valuable Education, which replaced the Revised Pay as You Earn plan. This cut monthly undergraduate loan payments in half and forgave loan balances after 10 rather than 20 years of payments, according to a press release.
In December 2024, the administration withdrew a student debt relief proposal that — combined with the administration’s other policies — would have provided debt relief to over 30 million Americans, according to a press release. Due to the limited time left in Biden’s term to enact policy, the administration chose to focus on other avenues of debt relief, officials said in a Federal Register notice.
By the end of Biden’s presidency, his administration canceled student debt for more than five million Americans, according to a Jan. 13 press release.
“It was quite troubling to see the way in which any attempts to remediate historical disparities, both economically (and) in terms of civil rights protections for queer people, were met with a very strong backlash,” said Antonio Ingram, senior counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, a nonpartisan civil rights organization.
The Biden administration implemented a Title IX rule that expanded the definition of sexual discrimination to include discrimination based on gender identity and gender orientation in federally funded education programs, but a federal judge overturned the rule on Jan. 9 after multiple states sued the Biden administration for its Title IX expansion. The administration withdrew a proposal to prohibit blanket bans of transgender athletes in student athletics in December 2024, noting the lawsuits as one of the reasons to withdraw.
Ingram said Biden’s initiatives in student aid reform and Title IX guidance reflected his goals to “create more equity and justice for historically marginalized communities.” Ingram said the “ideological demographics” of the court often influence the ruling beyond only legal arguments.
“We live in a current historical moment where any sort of civil rights initiative or agenda is going to be met with backlash,” Ingram said. “That doesn’t mean we’re not successful. … My hope is … in future iterations of governance, there will be leaders that pick up that mantle and continue to promote civil rights for all Americans.”
The administration’s other higher education actions include increasing the Pell Grant, investing in historically black colleges and universities, and requiring universities to report more data on financial costs and benefits to students.
“The legacy that (Biden) has left is one that says change is possible, that there are ways that we can create reductions in the wealth gap,” Ingram said. “I do have hope and trust (that) our society and our country will, as MLK talked about, ‘Bend towards justice in the moral arc of the universe.’”
