Harris presidency could bring loan forgiveness and access focus

Kamala Harris’ focus on the youth vote could be good news for universities, according to experts, but she faces an “opportunist” new rival in the shape of JD Vance whose anti-intellectualism rhetoric could prove to be highly influential.

Ms Harris, the most likely Democratic presidential nominee after Joe Biden withdrew from the race, would not offer anything “radically different” in her policies from the outgoing president, according to Mark Shanahan, associate professor of political engagement at the University of Surrey, but she was making a much more “overt play for younger voters”.

Dr Shanahan said her past record as California’s attorney general showed a focus on value-for-money in higher education, and an opposition to unregulated for-profit providers.

During her time in the senate she displayed support for free community college, and as vice-president she has backed the Biden administration student loan forgiveness plan.

As president, she could propose a “pretty radical overhaul of the whole student loan model”, as well as greater support for both state institutions and for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Dr Shanahan said.

“If she differs at all from Biden it will be in this laser-focus on the young, on minorities and on women. If higher education can position in the centre of that particular Venn diagram, it will do well from a Harris presidency.”

The Biden administration has been a vocal backer of HBCUs, and Ms Harris’ degree from Howard University means she would become the first to sit in the Oval Office as a HBCU graduate.

With historically little to separate them on the issue of higher education, the two parties have diverged as a result of the Republicans’ attempts to roll back financial access, close the Department of Education and control the curricula, said Jennifer Steele, a professor in the school of education at American University.

Dr Steele expected a Harris presidency would continue to support loan forgiveness and look to expand Pell Grants to low-income families.

She said the US sector should be excited by a Harris candidacy because her “biography is very compelling” for those who work in education – with her parents meeting after immigrating to the US to pursue doctoral degrees.

Her father became an economist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, while her mother was a molecular biologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Dr Steele said JD Vance, a senator, author and Donald Trump’s choice as vice-president, also has a life story that shows the “deep value of education and what it makes possible”. In Mr Vance’s breakthrough memoir Hillbilly Elegy, he described how his experience at Ohio State University and Yale University helped transform his working-class upbringing in the Midwest.

But since then, Mr Vance has become a vocal critic of higher education, labelling colleges “the enemy” in speeches and proudly championing “anti-intellectualism”, according to Benjamin Hett, a history professor at Hunter College and the City University of New York.

But Professor Hett said his actual ability to impact higher education as vice-president would be limited by the country’s federal system, and that as an “opportunist” he was less dangerous than a “sincere fire-breathing ideologue”.

Where Mr Vance could make a difference, Professor Hett said, was in influencing the policies of state governments “who really do have levers of power over higher education to take measures, as they are already doing.”

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com