Make Education Unaffordable and Unwelcoming:
Our public schools are foundational to our democracy. When special interests undermine public schools, they undermine the ability of students from all backgrounds to learn, feel safe in their community, and develop skills and knowledge that enable students to thrive. If Project 2025 has their way, our public schools could be stripped of funding, protections for students, and high-quality curricula.
How they’d do it:
Cut federal loan programs that help parents of college students, graduate students, and immigrants afford higher education.
Project 2025 would roll back federal student loan programs that are critical to ensuring higher education is not reserved for only the wealthy and well-connected.
Read More 1As the cost of higher education soars in the country, accessible and stable student loans are a critical way to ensure that people from all backgrounds can access higher education.
The special interests behind Project 2025 want to kneecap the federal government’s provision of student loans — taking away the ability of parents of college students to take out Parent PLUS loans, graduate students to take out Graduate PLUS loans, and undocumented immigrants to take out federal loans entirely. This would devastate the futures of millions of college students.
They would also deny loan access to students at schools that provide in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants. That means students in 25 states and Washington D.C. will not be able to access student loans.
From pages 167 and 354 of the Mandate for Leadership.
Make public schools even more dangerous for LGBTQ+ students.
Project 2025 would have the Secretary of Education remove a host of protections for LGBTQ+ students in schools.
Read More 2Public schools are already dangerous for LGBTQ+ students across the nation, especially LGBTQ+ students of color. Project 2025 would make matters even worse by directing a future Secretary of Education to rescind the Biden administration’s expanded Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students, and reinstate the regressive rules previously imposed by the Trump administration. Project 2025 emphasizes that any definition of ‘sex’ under Title IX should mean only biological sex assigned at birth.
These actions threaten to put transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming students at risk, particularly when their gender identity doesn’t correspond with their sex assigned at birth.
From pages 333 and 334 of the Mandate for Leadership:
Push ideology onto funding for international business programs.
Project 2025 wants to dictate what students learn in higher education by disproportionately funding programs that push an ideological agenda that they agree with.
Read More 3In trying to dictate what people can and cannot learn, the special interest authors behind Project 2025 want to direct funding to international business programs that teach their preferred subjects, with nearly half (at minimum) of Department of Education funding going to these programs. These programs are geared towards providing students a better understanding of markets across the world, in all different forms.
From page 356 of the Mandate for Leadership.
Make it easier for charter schools to discriminate against LGBTQ+ students.
Project 2025 would loosen data collection requirements for charter schools, undoing recent progress made by the Biden administration which has ensured that data collection better includes transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming students.
Read More 4Data collection that better includes people across gender identities and sexual orientations is important for ensuring LGBTQ+ students’ civil rights are protected.
During the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has required all charter schools to enhance the accuracy of student demographic data collection by requiring that schools provide “nonbinary” as an option for self-selection.
Additionally, in 2021 OCR instructed charter schools to retire collection of data that presents purely binary depictions of the composition of school sports teams — meaning that data demographics of these teams were relegated to strictly male and female — at the exclusion of nonbinary and gender nonconforming students.
Project 2025 would advise the Department of Education to rescind these changes and issue a new Civil Rights Data Collection instructive that “will collect data directly relevant to OCR’s [authority].” In other words, that would mean only the data that Project 2025’s authors think are valid — which excludes LGBTQ+ students. Without this data, it will be harder to know where LGBTQ+ students are experiencing discrimination, allowing it to fester and harm people across the country.
From page 332 of the Mandate for Leadership:
