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Scott D. Schneider
Hello and welcome to Campus Docket, a Volt podcast about the legal challenges reshaping higher education. I’m Scott Schneider. I’m an attorney and adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law. And I’m joined by my friend, Eric Kelderman, senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Each week, we’ll unpack the key legal developments that matter to higher ed leaders from student rights and faculty contracts to DEI lawsuits and government oversight. Let’s get into it. Eric, how are you today?
Eric Kelderman
Hey, great to be with you, Scott. This is an exciting new venture we’re going to kick off. Do you think we have enough to talk about?
Scott D. Schneider
No, there’s like nothing going on in the legal world of higher education right now. I just have developed a very gray beard over the last three months for no apparent reason.
Eric Kelderman
No apparent reason, exactly, yeah. It’s amazing to me the amount of developments that have occurred in a matter of weeks. Things that I think, people like you and I that follow this stuff regularly couldn’t even imagine. It’s really astounding.
Scott D. Schneider
Did you come back from a conference in Chicago?
Eric Kelderman
I did. I was at the Higher Learning Commission Conference in Chicago. Big accreditation meeting and even there, politics is intruding on the world of accreditation in ways that I think were not anticipated even six months ago possibly.
Scott D. Schneider
Yeah. Where would you like to start, Eric?
Eric Kelderman
I think today we should just sort of set the table for upcoming episodes. I like to think of this as sort of maybe the things that are keeping college higher ed legal professionals awake at night. What are the top issues? Let’s start with funding cuts. So the Trump administration has cut deeply into higher education budgets. Freezing the amount of administrative money it pays for research. The administration has canceled nearly 800 grants from the NIH. It’s awarding significantly fewer amount of grants in the past. And now we see the attempt of the administration to freeze spending that goes to a bunch of selective colleges over allegations that they’re not adequately addressing anti-Semitism on campus. I guess the word that leaps to mind for me in describing these issues is basically uncertainty. And how do campus leaders plan for the future if they can’t count on the federal government to honor its commitments and contracts and grants?
Scott D. Schneider
Yeah, you know, it’s obviously the issue that has kept me up a lot over the last month and a half. In terms of kind of cutting funding to higher education institutions on a prospective basis, I go back to the financial crash, what was it, 10 or 15 years ago. And at that point, there was discussion about austerity measures. I was certainly part of my fair share of meetings to discuss how do we plan on go forward? The part of this that’s obviously very different than where we were 10 or 15 years ago is what I’ve described as the cutting off of the funding spigot for projects that are already, you have personnel lined up, work that is being done, and then unilaterally the government’s stepping in and saying, we’re going to stop funding. One of the things I think will be interesting in this podcast is we can bring on folks that have a historical perspective on this, but from my vantage point, I just want to point out, this is historically unprecedented. There is no precedent for this. And indeed, sort of the longstanding criticism of, for instance, the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights has been historically that they’ve been unduly deferential to schools and have been reluctant, have failed to ever utilize what has been dubbed that nuclear option, which is the cutting off of federal financial funds. And so this one is unprecedented in two ways. That number one, we are cutting off federal funds and in some cases, a remarkable amount of federal funds. And then the second piece is, doing it without the development of a full-blown investigation, the sort of due process that typically has been afforded to institutions of higher education in this space, sometimes, by the way, criticized by advocates on the other side of the political spectrum of the Trump administration.
Eric Kelderman
Right.
Scott D. Schneider
So it’s remarkable. It’s unprecedented and one of the conversations I’m starting to have with university presidents, and again, it’ll be interesting to get folks on about this. And I know we have some great guests lined up, but how do you approach it? Do you fight back publicly?
Eric Kelderman
Right.
Scott D. Schneider
Do you concede or make concessions to the administration? And then third, once a Pandora’s box like this is opened up, it very rarely closes. And is this going to be the relationship between institutions and the federal government on a go-forward basis? And if so, do institutions really need to start rethinking their relationship with a federal government that may be less of a reliable partner than you’ve had over the last 40 to 50 years? So those are all the kind of big picture conversations I know I’ve been having, I assume you’ve been having, and I can’t wait to get some guests on to discuss it in more detail.
Eric Kelderman
A lot of the conversations that I have with folks are sort of this sort of slack-jawed response, not only to the administration’s actions here, which, as you point out, are stunning in so many ways, but the lack of sort of open resistance from the institutions being targeted. And the question that’s raised that you point out is, tons of people are asking, why didn’t Columbia, in the first place, seek some sort of legal recourse? I think there’s some wide agreement that they would have every right to pursue this in court, but as we know, as you know, that takes time. And in the meantime, there’s no guarantee that you get, a temporary restraining order, an injunction that would preserve that funding while the case plays out over potentially years.
Scott D. Schneider
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. And then, again, a lot of these grants where funding has been paused, I mean, there is work in progress for research and staffing and all of a whole host of practical reasons. That is a powerful tool to cut off funds immediately. And you’re right, I mean, there is certainly an avenue where perhaps the school could seek immediate injunctive relief. We’ve seen that, by the way, play itself out in a variety of different settings. Who knows? Anybody that is sitting here and predicting with certainty how a court is going to resolve these sorts of issues is a lot more sure of themselves than I am. And so is, under this set of circumstances, the most appropriate play for an institution to engage in some sort of concessions. And by the way, if that is the case, we’re enforcing kind of the power of this approach and probably modeling to other institutions about how they need to respond. One of the things I saw, I think it was earlier this week, at Maine, I think you saw the pulling of funds around this Title IX transgender athletics issue. And there, I think earlier this week, I saw the attorney general of Maine say he’s going to file a lawsuit. And it’ll be interesting to see if there becomes a split in the dynamics between the way private institutions handle this and publics which have access to state attorney generals start approaching this and maybe the publics can chart some sort of path which pushes back a little bit on what I view, I think most reasonable people view as number one something that is unprecedented but feels deeply like overreach from the federal government.
Eric Kelderman
Right, right.
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Eric Kelderman
Moving on, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Not surprisingly, the administration has taken a really strong stance. It was openly hostile to these sorts of programs during the campaign. We’ve now seen what, two executive orders, A Dear Colleague letter and maybe for folks who aren’t familiar with that you can describe that in a bit, and then an FAQ document from the Education Department really laying out the administration’s view that any kind of measurement to support racial minorities and even women is illegal. I think a lot of folks view this as sort of an expansive view of the legal landscape coming off of the Supreme Court’s decision banning the use of race in college admissions and applying that to things like, for instance, affinity programs for particular minorities. We’ve seen these engineering clubs for women or leadership programs for black men and scholarships to support those things.
So, most colleges don’t use race in admissions. There’s maybe a couple hundred across the country where that’s an issue. But almost everybody has some sort of program or scholarship meant to improve access and the academic success of particular groups. Neither the EO nor the Dear Colleague letter carry the force of law. So what’s the risk that colleges should consider in weighing whether to conform to this?
Scott D. Schneider
Yeah, and it sort of plays itself out in the context of our previous conversation.
Eric Kelderman
Right.
Scott D. Schneider
I think in the past, what you would say is the Dear Colleague letter doesn’t have the force of law, like you said. And what it triggers or what it suggests is, from a compliance perspective, this is how the Department of Education or various departments of the federal government view an issue. And so it might prompt an investigation and it might prompt some pushback on some practices, but that was always going to be a long process. And again, historically there was no precedent for, and if we find that you are non-compliant, we’ll pull funds.
Eric Kelderman
Right.
Scott D. Schneider
I think the approach on using this nuclear option has changed the calculus considerably and to do it in a way where you don’t get the sense that there’s going to be a fulsome, thoughtful, detailed investigation. So look, I can tell you in reality what’s happened, the combination of the Dear Colleague letter in the approach of the administration around compliance, the aggressive approach. I can tell you, and I’ve lost a lot of sleep over it, clients are going, and boards are going, what have been our diversity practices and is there anything that we need to walk back? Is there anything that we think runs afoul of our obligations under Title VII, Title VI, Title IX, this Dear Colleague letter? So you go back probably three or four years, there were these really robust efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion.
Eric Kelderman
Right.
Scott D. Schneider
I mean, and now there is this sort of sense, some of it being driven by board, some of it being driven by council and leadership of the institution. Do we know what we have been doing in this space? Are we comfortable it’s lawful? And I think you hit the nail on the head when it comes to admissions, where the case law at this point is very clear. Look, there have only been a handful of schools, maybe 100 at most. I don’t know what the number is exactly, who were ever using race as a factor to begin with. I mean clearly, SFFA, the Supreme Court’s decision in that case, said you can’t do that on a go-forward basis. Some of the areas where there is ambiguity and sort of a rethinking, I think, at this point is when it comes to concerns about a lack of diversity within our faculty or our staff, and there were some things that were done to advance diversity in those settings, are we comfortable that that’s legal at this point? And then do we need to maybe walk something back? And what’s clear is that keeping, maintaining robust and diverse pipelines of applicants is fine.
But maybe it’s problematic to have required diversity statements. Are we using that really as a proxy for race? So there have been really interesting conversations around that. Some of the training, you’ve seen criticism of that and sort of a rethink around that..
Eric Kelderman
Right.
Scott D. Schneider
And you’ve seen the department highlight some concerns in that space. What I’ve come back with a number of schools with, and we’ve seen this discussion in the Chronicle, is what are we doing when it comes to diversity training? And is it actually, what are we trying to measure? What are we trying to accomplish? And are we being effective? And if the answer to the latter question is no, then we’re going to walk it back, because now there’s also some risk.
So, really some thoughtful conversations, I think, about what are we doing in this space? What do we hope to accomplish? And are we actually accomplishing that? And if not, we’re going to walk it back. And then, like you said, interesting conversations about affinity groups, scholarships that are directed to historically underrepresented groups. How do you navigate and manage risk in that space?
But, yeah, the pendulum has really swung 180 degrees in like a four to five year period. There was this real push primarily, and this wasn’t coming from compliance people. This was part of the zeitgeist of the culture at the time.
Eric Kelderman
After the George Floyd murder.
Scott D. Schneider
Absolutely. You know, historically we’ve done this dance for about at least 50 years in higher education. You go back to Baki and the dance around affirmative action and the historical legacy of both slavery and systemic de jure racism at a lot of institutions. And how do we address that? I mean, this dance has been going on for 50 years, but certainly there was the big push post George Floyd about we need to have another reckoning, another conversation about race.
And there was a lot of advocacy to push universities to really focus on this. And now the pendulum has swung, you know, 180 degrees.
Eric Kelderman
Let me ask you this, in terms of like the affinity programs and the scholarship programs, are folks on campus discussing the potential that this would be sort of the next thing up through the courts, that eventually we want to push this into the Supreme Court to get some definition? And is there some reticence about doing that because the court’s makeup is extremely conservative right now. And are there concerns that we might get the kind of clarification that we don’t want, which is that these programs are actually illegal? Because SFFA doesn’t really spell that out.
Scott D. Schneider
Yeah, I think for me, the focus has been on the hiring part and the promotion part and knowing that like SFFA doesn’t directly address that. And there’s some very complicated case law over a 40 year period dealing with affirmative action opportunities, diversity opportunities in the Title VII and employment context. But I think the sentiment is, wow, SFFA properly laid out a roadmap that can apply in a variety of different settings, including diversity in hiring and promotion and tenure. I think the other issues, I just think the stakes are considerably lower and there’s some real easy ways to mitigate risk on, for instance, affinity groups.
Just say, hey, the primary aim is to support minority students, underrepresented students, but everybody can participate. That’s easy risk to mitigate. And by the way, we’ve been doing some version of that even under the prior administration. I mean, there was a push under the Biden administration around Title IX and scholarships that were only available to women and whether or not those needed to be revisited and programs along those lines. But all of that, I think, that’s easy to navigate legally. The thing that becomes really interesting, and I can’t wait to get some guests on to talk about this, is the whole use of proxies, neutral proxies. Think of, like, at the University of Texas, the 10% rule, or whatever it is now.
Eric Kelderman
Yeah.
Scott D. Schneider
And the whole idea behind that was, that was a non-race specific way to improve diversity. Is stuff like that at risk? And that’s where there’s a real interesting push and a lot of interesting legal dynamics in courts going a number of different ways. So I can’t wait to get some guests on to talk about that in more detail. But God, the big picture, Eric, is you have an administration that is willing to pull funding, it’s not willing to go through a lengthy investigation process. So it’s gotten people’s attention. I mean, it’s gotten people’s attention in the same way that 2011 Dear Colleague letter around Title IX got people’s attention, which again, that was historically unprecedented as well.
Eric Kelderman
Right. Sticking with the Title IX thing, you know, the administration has this sort of, I hate to categorize it this way, but a nearly zealous fixation on transgender rights, and in particular, trans women who are playing intercollegiate athletes. This whole issue seems really tailored almost to be a sort of culture war issue, right? We know from the NCAA that there are maybe a dozen trans women who are playing intercollegiate athletics. So it’s not like a problem that has a huge scope, but the administration has, as you point out, in the state of Maine and in New York, I believe, as well. And it initiated some investigations of individual institutions for allowing transgender women to play in collegiate athletics. So, we have the Supreme Court ruling called Bostock. Maybe you could give us a little overview of what that means. And do you think that applies in this context?
Scott D. Schneider
Yeah, so, Bostock was this really important case and by the way, a decision I believe, Judge Gorsuch wrote.
Eric Kelderman
Yeah, exactly, written by Justice Gorsuch.
Scott D. Schneider
Yeah, and the question in Bostock boiled down to its essentials was, does Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination extend to protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. And Judge Gorsuch, and it was a split decision, it wasn’t unanimous, came back and said yes. In the dissenting opinion, one of which was written by Justice Alito, he sort of refers to, oh my goodness, this has potential implications with respect to Title IX.
And at least under the Biden administration, in some court decisions, the argument was no, Title IX, like Title VII, extends to protect not only on the basis of sex, that extends to orientation and gender identity. And therefore, if I am a trans female and I want to participate in trans sports, in women’s sports, I need to be allowed to, Title IX compels that sort of result. And there’s some cases that say that. And now what you have is first the administration saying, Bostock doesn’t extend to Title IX. And by the way, there’s some court cases that view it that way. But then do the flip of the argument, that Title IX compels you to actually block trans women from participating in women’s sports because they have certain biological advantages. I think legally that’s off, it’s wrong, it’s not supported by the text or a lot of the case law, but it certainly puts some schools where the courts have come in, and think Maine is one of these, where a court has basically said, no, you have an obligation to allow, for instance, trans females to participate in women’s sports.
They’re in an impossible bind now because you have the federal government saying something completely different. So it’ll be interesting to see how that case law plays itself out. I agree with you. Of all the issues that we face both in higher education and the country, this one seems to have gotten way too much attention from this administration in a way that I think it should make people of good conscience feel uncomfortable. So for all of those reasons, there’s some really interesting legal issues there. Again, in Maine, that sort of bind between there’s case law saying you have this obligation and now you have the administration coming back and saying something completely different. And this deep discomfort, at least for me, I’ll only speak for myself, about this feels very disproportionate to the issue. And it feels like an attack on a historically marginalized community of folks that I think I will personally say I’m deeply uncomfortable with.
Eric Kelderman
You know, another interesting aspect of this for me is, President Trump during the campaign said, you know, I’m going to protect women whether they want it or not. And that’s been their rationalization for this, which is we’re protecting women, right, who could be, I guess, fairly disadvantaged in competition or even, I guess, there’s cases where they fear that women will be assaulted or harassed in dressing rooms or locker rooms, things like that. There isn’t really any evidence that that’s widespread. And at the same time, what’s interesting to me is it de-emphasizes some of the larger problems that we know exist on college campuses in terms of dealing with other forms of sexual misconduct, other forms of harassment, and what happens to those cases as the administration narrows its civil rights focus to issues of transgender persons.
Scott D. Schneider
Yeah, look, from my vantage point, and I mentioned the 2011 Dear Colleague letter, the sort of administrative apparatus that was created in the wake of that, which by the way, was only made more bureaucratic by the Trump Title IX regulations.
Eric Kelderman
Right. Which are now in place again.
Scott D. Schneider
Yeah, exactly. There is a pretty robust infrastructure at almost every school in the country to handle those claims, sex assault, sex misconduct, dating violence, stalking, all of those things. And at least in my experience, these folks’ work hasn’t been impacted one way or the other by this. You have really good people at most universities doing this very difficult work.
Now, when compliance priorities of an administration shift, sometimes schools’ priorities internally start to shift. I haven’t seen that in this context. At least for the schools I’ve worked with, there is a genuine commitment, number one, to work on these issues. They realize that college campuses, still have issues around sex assault while at the same time providing robust due process to students accused. So I don’t see that changing.
Eric Kelderman
I think where I think I’m going with this is the cases that rise to the level of sort of federal investigation at the Office of Civil Rights. We have an administration that has slashed the Ed Department staff, including in the Office of Civil Rights. And, so, are we risking or putting aside a large number of cases, not only on Title IX issues, but also say on ADA or IDEA compliance, special ed things, to focus on the antisemitism issue that we’ve identified and then also the transgender issues. Is the shift at the federal level gonna cause the majority of the cases really to be delayed even longer and we know they already take a long time?
Scott D. Schneider
Yeah, well, at the federal level, yes, but right in terms of if I think an institution didn’t handle a Title IX sex assault investigation appropriately, and there’s an open federal investigation of that, those have historically, by the way, taken a long time under every administration. There are still open Department of Education Title IX compliance reviews that were initiated in the Obama administration.
Eric Kelderman
Holy cow!
Scott D. Schneider
Yeah. So historically those have always been really slow to resolve. And certainly when you cut staffing of compliance personnel in, you start saying, hey, we’re going to expand our portfolio or prioritize certain things that historically we didn’t prioritize. Yeah. My hunch is that’s going to impact compliance. I will just say at the school-based level though, having a robust process is now sort of baked into the culture of these schools. And I don’t see the fact that there isn’t robust federal Department of Education enforcement changing that.
Eric Kelderman
Okay.
Scott D. Schneider
At the same time, look, every school has limited resources. And what you want to, from a compliance standpoint, is sort of focus those limited resources on the issues that give rise to the biggest compliance risks. And to the extent a new administration changes that calculus and you see it. mean, in some universities now walking back, for instance, their programs around DEI or revisiting campus protests and things like that. Does that potentially come at the cost of other compliance priorities? I don’t see how it can’t. But the Title IX piece, I think, is pretty baked into the DNA of schools at this point.
Eric Kelderman
Okay.
Scott D. Schneider
Something you did allude to, though, and it’ll be interesting to see if we ever get any pivot on this is, there was a short run in the 90s, the late 90s, which really focused on ADA disability issues and specifically around campus access. You haven’t really seen that prioritized in a long time. And, because of that, I mean, you just don’t see the robust infrastructure around disability issues on college campuses that you do around Title IX or Title VII. It’ll be interesting to see ADA issues don’t really fall within one of the culture war camps.
Eric Kelderman
Right.
Scott D. Schneider
But it’d be interesting to see if there’s ever a pivot around those sorts of issues.
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Eric Kelderman
Let’s stick in the athletics field for just a little bit and talk about something that doesn’t really directly relate to the Trump administration. And that is the influx of what is expected to be billions of dollars into big time college sports, thanks to the House versus NCAA settlement. So I imagine the judge is going to approve something close to what’s been proposed in that settlement and that means that former athletes in the big time, in the top 70 or so athletic programs in the country, football and men’s basketball players are going to get a lot of money because colleges didn’t allow them to profit from their name, image and likeness in the past. We’re going to see the introduction of revenue sharing. Sharing television rights money with athletes as a result of this settlement. And really, when you look at this, is there any way to put the genie back in the bottle here, or are we headed toward a full-scale professionalization of college sports?
Scott D. Schneider
Yeah, and so this is one again where we need to be careful about college sports as in a monolith and certainly for most college programs we’re not making money. I’d also quibble with the initial framing which is now all these billions of dollars there’s going to be a flood of resources. This is reality. There’s been a flood of resources into certain college programs. The question has always been around distribution. And primarily, the benefits of all the revenue that has come from television contracts has been distributed to coaches, has been distributed to athletics department administrators, and by the way, has been used to subsidize non-revenue generating sports.
Eric Kelderman
Exactly.
Scott D. Schneider
Now, and this goes back to all the litigation with O’Bannon.
Eric Kelderman
O’Bannon. Right.
Scott D. Schneider
What was the Supreme Court case?
Eric Kelderman
Alston. Alston versus NCAA.
Scott D. Schneider
Thank you so much. I love you, Eric. Thank you for helping me there. I’m sleep deprived and can’t remember. Yeah, the Alston case basically comes and says, there’s another mouth that needs to be fed here, which is now the student athletes. In employment terms, the people actually providing the surfaces. And so that’s really what the House settlement is focused on is we need to pay them going backwards and we’re going to have to come up with a way to pay them going forward.
Eric Kelderman
Right.
Scott D. Schneider
And what it starts to look like is, these athletes, especially at the SCC, Big 10, Big 12, all these big conferences, start to look less like your everyday student and more like professional athletes, who are being compensated for their services, the day-to-day life is really regimented and controlled by coaches and all that sort of stuff. And is there a way to put that genie back in the bottle? And I don’t see it.
Eric Kelderman
No.
Scott D. Schneider
You know, this was a decision, it’s really interesting. We had this conversation before, but there’s a case that goes back to the 1980s, and I can’t remember the attorney’s name, but he said, I’m the guy who screwed all of this up.
Eric Kelderman
No.
Scott D. Schneider
And the argument was at the University of Oklahoma that they wanted to be able to negotiate their own television deals outside of the NCAA, and they won, they won on antitrust grounds. And then all this flood of money starts coming in And, you know, again, it was really being distributed to coaches, both to coach and to not coach. I mean, there are hundreds of millions of dollars of exposure or money that is being paid to fired coaches at big schools around the country. But once that money started flowing in, it fundamentally changed what college sports was all about. Now, with that said, I mean, there’s still something unique about the pageantry and all of that sort of stuff of big college sports that doesn’t translate in an NFL game or an NBA game. And there’s still going to be pockets at smaller conferences that look like kind of historically what we’re used to. But no, I don’t see how you put this genie back in the bottle unless you say we’re not taking any more revenue in from television contracts, which strikes me as implausible.
The direction we’re going to is we want now money from private equity, which I think would be a tremendously big mistake, but that’s sort of the direction we’re going in, which is even more in the way of professionalization.
Eric Kelderman
Right. I wonder, do you think it’s inevitable that we at some point get some ruling either from the NLRB or from a court that college athletes do in fact qualify as employees of the institution?
Scott D. Schneider
Yeah, well, we’ve sort of gotten that from a circuit court case, and that’s the Johnson case, which is assessing whether or not college athletes are FLSA employees. And the Court of Appeals came back and said, yeah, maybe so, depending on degree of control. When you start adding direct compensation, I go, man, it’s really hard to make the argument with the degree of control and direct compensation that some of our student athletes aren’t employees. You also under the previous administration, and this was walked back by the new administration, the National Labor Relations Board coming back and saying, yeah, they’re employees for purposes of union organizing. That’s been walked back. I think there’s been this push now for four or five years by the NCAA and some conferences to have the legislature, Congress, step in and pass some legislation that basically says they can’t be employees. I’m of the mind, and we kind of see this playing itself out in real time, is we live in a world right now in a country where we don’t have much of a legislative branch.
Eric Kelderman
Right.
Scott D. Schneider
And it’s the sort of legislation that if you want it to be bipartisan, which we rarely see anymore, they’re just concessions that would need to be made that I’m not sure anybody would be comfortable with. It’s a long way of saying, I’m deeply skeptical at this point and have dubbed it magical thinking to think we’re going to get federal legislation in this space. And so now we’re just going to watch the case law develop.
Eric Kelderman
Yep.
Scott D. Schneider
And at least one circuit court of appeals has come back and said, yeah, maybe so. These look like employee styles.
Eric Kelderman
Yeah, and I think as you point out, yes, I agree. The House versus NCAA settlement primarily affects the 70 or so colleges that we think of in the power four conferences now, right? So a relatively small proportion of college athletics.
It will be interesting to see how this develops. My own thinking is that, you know, we’ve seen the reconfiguration of a number of athletic conferences and eventually I think we’re headed towards either sort of one big mega conference and potentially also with big time college football no longer being under NCAA auspices but under the college football championship entity. And that has huge implications for the finances of college sports and I’m sure plenty of folks right now are very concerned about the future of the Olympic sports, right? Which are, as you pointed out, are subsidized almost entirely by what we think of as the revenue sports, which is football, men’s basketball, and increasingly women’s basketball, so…
Scott D. Schneider
I think your prediction is probably spot on, but we’ll see.
Eric Kelderman
We’ll see. We’ve seen this collapse of the conferences and this realignment. I think we’re headed towards something like that.
So maybe last on our docket for today, before the Trump administration took office, colleges were already dealing with major financial challenges, declining enrollment, demographic challenges and all the issues that arise from that. We’ve seen closures, mergers, acquisitions. And I’d like to hear your thoughts about what are college administrators missing by spending so much time dealing with the concerns of the federal government’s actions at this point?
Scott D. Schneider
Look, I think what you said initially is exactly right. And again, it’s always hard to talk about higher ed as a monolith because there are different schools with remarkably different financial situations, endowments, all that sort of stuff. Look, I think at the public university level, there are stresses primarily in the red states because higher education has been sort of viewed as a player in the culture war and we don’t see much public good in continuing to fund. There’s been a long, decades long kind of walking back of state level commitments to public institutions. I don’t see that trend changing. And if anything, maybe accelerating just given sort of the political dynamics of where we are.
For the smaller, I’m not as up to speed on whatever the cliff, the demographic cliff that everybody talks about. It’s not in my area of expertise, but I work with a lot of small institutions and they all have the same compliance obligations of the very well-heeled institutions and don’t have the resources to keep up with that. And so that challenge is evergreen.
I think, the kind of one of the big practical concerns I have about what we’re doing in this space around like arresting kids and deporting them and sort of a global trade war is, a lot of those schools historically have relied on bringing in students from other countries. My big takeaway has always been when you think of higher education in this country, it’s one of the few things that we are a global leader in. And that attracts people from all over the world to be students in that process. Will what has happened over the last six months and what may happen going forward change that dynamic? And such that, and whether you want to be really cynical and say foreign students are a source of revenue or whatever you want to frame it, students start saying that’s not where I’m going to study anymore. There’s too much instability, too many concerns, too many red flags, we’re not going to go there. So that poses, I think, to schools that are already maybe on the financial precipice a new set of challenges.
Eric Kelderman
Right, we’ve seen the Chinese government tell its, what, 200,000 national students in the U.S. that they should consider not being here anymore. That would have a huge impact on the revenue of a number of institutions, most of them large, but there are smaller colleges, smaller private colleges that have a significant portion of their population that come from foreign governments. And if Chinese students leave, that might mean that say Indian students leave, and universities in England and Australia and other parts of the world would be happy to have them come and pay tuition there.
Scott D. Schneider
And I think that to me, that’s to me an overarching concern in addition to what’s already been baked in. And I know we’ll have guests on here to talk about the demographic cliff or whatever. But yeah, it’s another stressor.
Eric Kelderman Right. Well, that’s all on my list today. Let’s wrap with something fun, Scott. Tell me after all this doom and gloom, tell me one good thing that’s going on with you right now.
Scott D. Schneider
Holy moly, so I’m in Austin. And Monday, probably one of my favorite artists of the moment, did a pop-up show at Stubbs. And that is the great, the one and only Sturgill Simpson. And he played for three and a half hours straight, including one of my little favorite songs that he does, which is Mint Tea, which I am drinking. So that’s what’s really good going on for me. I’m going to go see, I’m a big live music maniac. I get to go see one of my other favorite artists tomorrow at the Continental Club, who is Barfield the Tyrant. I’m sure you have all of his albums at your house, Eric. How about you?
Eric Kelderman
Well, for me, the good news is that it’s baseball season. Huge, huge baseball fan. Washington Nationals fan. They haven’t been very good since really 2019 when they won the World Series. But they’ve got a lot of young talent and I’m looking forward to catching some games. And I also play on an old guy baseball team and it’s a ridiculous amount of fun. So it’s baseball, man.
Scott D. Schneider
I’m on an old guy, old person, it’s bowling team and sand volleyball team. Yeah, so I’ve got that going on. And let me just say one last thing about sports and then we can close it out. I’m a big Saints fan. I wish I would have quit after we won the Super Bowl. You should have done the same thing with your baseball team, because all I’ve experienced is pain since then, Eric.
Eric Kelderman
My takeaway from the Nationals World Series win is that the greatest moment for any sports fan is not when the team wins, but those moments right before they win. When you know the victory is in hand and you can sort of enjoy the competition, that’s it. That’s the apex.
Scott D. Schneider
There you go. Well, look, thanks for tuning into Campus Docket. You’ll find links to everything we discussed today, including related cases, articles, and a full transcript, and the show notes, and on voltedu.com. Be sure to follow Campus Docket wherever you get your podcast. And while you’re there, check out Trusted Voices and Higher Voltage, two more podcasts in the Volt lineup that look at higher ed through different lenses. On behalf of the Volt team and my friend, Eric Kelderman, thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next time.
