The Rant Podcast
A bi-weekly podcast focused on pulling back the curtain on the American higher education system and breaking down the people, the policies and the politics. The podcast host, Eloy Ortiz Oakley, is a known innovator and leader in higher education. The podcast will not pull any punches as it delves into tough questions about the culture, politics and policies of our higher education system.
The Rant Podcast
Navigating the Next Four Years with Former Under Secretary James Kvaal
This episode delves into the transformative changes in higher education under the Biden Administration, featuring insights from Undersecretary of Education James Kvaal. Key topics include student loan forgiveness achievements, the simplification of FAFSA, and the future of education amidst emerging technologies and political challenges.
• Highlights the significant accomplishments in student loan forgiveness
• Discusses the ongoing modernization of FAFSA
• Provides advice for future administrations regarding educational equity
• Explores the impact of AI and technology on higher education
• Reflects on criticism faced in leadership positions
Thank you for listening and engaging with our podcast!
eloy@4leggedmedia.com
www.4leggedmedia.com
Hi, this is Eloy Ortiz-Oakley and welcome back to the Rant Podcast, the podcast that pulls back the curtain and breaks down the people, the policies and the politics of our education system. In this episode we begin a series of interviews focused on leading higher education through the Trump administration. To begin the series of conversations, I got a chance to catch up with Undersecretary of Education James Quall. James has served as the Undersecretary for the Biden administration since early on in the administration and is responsible for some significant changes to student loan borrower programs as well as the student financial aid space. I talk with James about the department's successes and its challenges over the last four years and what advice he has for higher education leaders and policymakers on navigating the next four years of the new administration and, with that, enjoy my conversation with Undersecretary of Education James Qual.
Speaker 1:Mr Undersecretary, welcome to the RAND Podcast. Thanks, it's great to be back. It's good to have you, james. Thank you for inviting us into your office here at the US Department of Education. We have a wonderful view bright blue skies out there today. Thanks for coming back.
Speaker 2:We just took your name off the door so it's good to have you.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm sure that name was coming down anyway. So, anyway, thanks for being with us. I know you've got a lot going on today and for the next couple of days got a lot going on today and for the next couple of days, but I wanted to take some time just to sit with you and talk about the last four years. So let's start with you. You came on to the Biden administration early on in the first year. What have the last four years been like for you and what are you most proud of that Ed was able to accomplish under your leadership and Secretary Cardona's leadership?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I mean it's, of course, a privilege to be in public service and we've got a lot done. I think we set out to do two big things, and one was that President Biden is really the first president to face up to the problems of the student loan program. Right, and we've put in place, you know, policies that mean if you can't afford to repay your loan because you're in public service or you have a disability, or maybe you've been making payments on your loan for 25 years already, you can now get that forgiveness you've earned. And that bureaucracy was just not working before. Right, and that's now discharged the loans at 5 million people. So that's a big deal.
Speaker 2:And when you combine that with increases in Pell grants, he's happy in tuition-free community college. He's looked at identifying the places where this unaffordable debt is all coming from. You know, I think you're starting to see a new approach to how we pay for college that doesn't ask young people to go deep into loans they can't afford. And then the second area that's been really important to Secretary Cardona has been talking about a new vision for college excellence that is rooted in how many opportunities you create, not how selective you are in doling them out and in fact he's invited seven leading schools here today to talk about what they do. That has proven so successful.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting to me that the one thing that you all have in common with the incoming administration is this desire to highlight more of the institutions that have much more broad appeal to Americans of all backgrounds, rather than the most rejective colleges and universities in this country. So I'm sure it'll be a different flavor in the next administration about how they support higher education. But you've done a lot, and one of those areas and you hit on it a little bit was financial aid. Financial aid has been a big push here for the department, and particularly the role you had in rolling out the simplified FAFSA, which had gotten done under Congress and then it became the responsibility of the department to roll out. I know you had several bumps in the road on the way, but where are you with the simplification process and what should learners and their families expect going forward?
Speaker 2:Well, there's no question that implementing the FAFSA simplification was a big deal and for us, we had to replace or modernize about 20 different computer systems. Some of them were almost 50 years old and, moreover, they interface with 5,000 colleges and universities, every state, private scholarship entities, high schools and college counselors. It's a very complex project. We did encounter some delays and some errors that were frustrating for students and families, and I know it was a lot of extra work for our partners. We lean on them every year, but this year in particular it was extra work. It was late in the cycle and students needed extra help getting through the process.
Speaker 2:You know, the good news is that we have worked through many of those issues. We actually have more students receiving student aid this year. We have more students enrolled in college this year. The clearinghouse announced yesterday we actually have more first-time college students in college this year than we did last year. So really appreciate our partners lifting us up and we also have launched the FAFSA for students starting next fall. We've already processed about 4 million of those Many people. It's taken about 15 minutes per person and we're processing those within about a business day. So we've really come a long way in turning the FAFSA around relative to where we were in the wintertime.
Speaker 1:Well, that's great news. I'm sure that'll be welcome news for campuses throughout the country and, of course, most importantly, for our lowest income learners who want access to a great post-secondary experience. Now, part of that post-secondary experience also many times involves taking out student loan debt, which you all have been working on quite a bit For the last four years. President Biden campaigned on the issue of student loan debt forgiveness and, as you mentioned, you recently announced that you've surpassed over. You have now more than 5 million borrowers that have had their student loans forgiven. That's a great accomplishment. So where is that process and what should student loan borrowers be thinking about as they move forward in the transition to the next administration?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so look, this was something where Secretary Cardona wanted to use every tool that we have to get relief in the hands of students, and we took student debt relief all the way to the Supreme Court. We created the SAVE repayment plan, which cut payments in half for undergraduates. That is still undergoing litigation and that's part of the process. You know it is the fourth time the department has created a repayment plan. I think our authority here is pretty well established, but that is still playing out in the courts.
Speaker 2:The other changes we made have been to make these existing categorical loan forgiveness programs work, and one of the things that we found when we got here was, even if you were eligible for loan forgiveness, even if we knew you were eligible for loan forgiveness, you typically were not getting through our process and not getting the relief you were entitled to.
Speaker 2:So only 7,000 people had ever gotten public service loan forgiveness. Many spent years in the wrong repayment plan or they needed to consolidate their loans, but no one had told them and that time was just lost. We've now fixed a lot of those tricks and traps and gotten the number of public servants up to 1 million. We've done similar things to simplify the other plans to automate them where we can, to help people with total and permanent disabilities, people who were cheated by for-profit colleges, people who had been making payments for 25 years or longer and were eligible for relief under our repayment plan. None of those people were regularly getting relief before, and now they are, and so those are enduring changes to both policy and to execution that I think are going to continue to benefit people for some time, because these are programs created by Congress that borrowers have a right to.
Speaker 1:Now. You've been in higher-rate policy for some time now. You spent eight years in the Obama administration, four years in the Biden administration. You led the Institute for College Access and Success in between, so you've been doing this for a while. Student loan debt always comes up as a major issue in and out of different administrations, and I'm sure it'll be an issue that comes up again in the Trump administration administrations and I'm sure it'll be an issue that comes up again in Trump administration. Given the consternation around how we have students pay for college, particularly graduate education, the cost of things like graduate education and the value that students are getting from their undergraduate education, what advice would you have for the incoming administration? What do we need to do different in how we ask students to borrow and what is the responsibility of institutions? Yeah well, look.
Speaker 2:For a long time student loans have been an easy answer for everybody, as long as you assume, to that students are going to be able to pay them back. Right, they have no cost for the federal government, obviously no cost to states or colleges, you know. But now we see, as students are borrowing more and more, the idea that college delivers a financial ROI to every student. You know it's just not being borne out. One in three students don't graduate. You see some programs that don't deliver the career that was promised or perhaps are never intended to lead to a high paying career, mm-hmm, I see racial disparities. So the idea that college is just about the financial ROI to the individual student, you know, I think is really missing the big picture.
Speaker 2:And if we ask people to go deep into debt, often with loans they can't afford to repay, that is, you know, not just a handful of highly paid professionals. We're talking about 43 million Americans teachers, nurses, first responders, hairstylists, massage therapists, truck drivers and you know it's an issue for their families. You know the students I meet. You know college is often an investment a whole family is making in trying to lift up the trajectory of their family. And it's an issue for communities, if people can't feel like they go into community service, or even religion or the arts or some of these other low-paid careers. So you know, I think we need to think carefully about whether our heavy reliance on student debt is consistent with our mission as educators, or are these debt burdens standing in the way of the goals we have for our students Right?
Speaker 1:No, I think that is a critical question. It's a question that we're wrestling with at the place where I work, at College Futures Foundation, and I'm sure it's an issue that the next administration will be wrestling with, because, as our partner over at College Futures, michael Hitzkowitz, always says, you know that student loan is, for many learners and their families, is the biggest amount of debt that they're going to take out beyond a mortgage, if they even get a chance to take out a mortgage. And if you default on your student loan debt, well, guess what? You're not going to have the opportunity to take out a mortgage. That's right. So it is a huge issue. It's a huge issue for low-income Americans throughout the country.
Speaker 2:Can I put in one more plug there, which is we are now implementing what we call the financial value transparency, and I know colleges are under the gun as we speak try to get that data in, and I know it's a lot of work to put that data together, especially the first time you do it.
Speaker 2:What we're going to be able to produce for every program in the country, at every type of college and university, is to be able to say to students you know, if you graduate from this program, this is what you can expect to owe and this is what you can expect to earn, and that is going to be able, for the first time, to let students make informed decisions about whether they want to take out those loans. And I think, for those of us who are educators, it's going to let us zero in on those programs, and there may be, you know, a handful, even on campuses that are very well resourced and very prestigious, where people are not paying careful attention to the career outcomes and the student loan outcomes of students. And so my hope is, you know we will follow through on that data and that we can organize around it to really have an actionable agenda about how to address the root causes of student debt problems.
Speaker 1:I don't have a lot of sympathy when it comes to ensuring that this kind of data gets gathered and published, because this is important data for transparency, for learners and their families to be able to make educated and well-reasoned decisions about programs of study that they're going into. I get that my colleagues have a lot of burdens on them. I mean, federal government does have some burdens that even I don't agree with, but this is an important one. Helping learners and their families make better decisions, particularly when it comes to getting into debt, I think is critical. Going forward Now.
Speaker 1:We've been talking about the work of the Department of Education. Certainly, the financial aid system, the federal student loan system All these are part of what the Department of Education does on a daily basis, and it does many more things. We won't even get into the K-12 side of the House. We'll just focus here on the higher education side of the House. It does a lot of things. It administers a lot of programs that were enacted by Congress. There's been a lot of talk about the possibility of dismantling the Department of Education. What do you think the impact of that would be on everyday Americans?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean the department just in the area of higher education. The idea that you know, if the idea is that suddenly you would not have student loans, you would not have Pell Grants, you know that would be immensely disruptive to who goes to college and how they pay for it. You know, I think if the department was not able to invest in proven ways to help more people graduate from college, that would be a loss for all of us. You know, I think legislation to eliminate the Department of Education has been something that has been on some conservatives' wish list since the agency was created 50 years ago. It would take an act of Congress.
Speaker 2:Those are hard to come by. What I would like to see all of us focus on is the continued health of the department. And when there are budget freezes, when there are hiring freezes, freezes, when there are threats to sort of root out career staff or make this an undesirable place to work, you know that has an impact too, and I have learned so much from the career staff here at the department over the years and we are so talented, so fortunate to have such talented and dedicated people making their careers here, and that's something that we really need to appreciate and we need to support them if we want these programs to work the way they should work.
Speaker 1:Well, we should want it to work because that provides the strength to the American workforce, provides the educated workforce that we want in this country, and we want to ensure that everybody, regardless of what background they come with, has the opportunity to participate in the economic mobility that this country provides. So hopefully that will be the case going forward, whatever happens here in the next four years. Let's talk about the impact of technology, particularly AI. Since you became undersecretary, there's been an explosion in technology, particularly generative AI. A lot of talk. You've come to conferences like ASU GSV Summit and others to talk to Summit and others to talk to ed tech executives, venture capitalists, about how to navigate the huge upside of this technology, but also the downside of the technology. How are you thinking about it as you're leaving the office here? What are some of the opportunities that you see for AI in higher education and what are some of the guardrails that you think needs to be put in place?
Speaker 2:Well, obviously we're as amazing as AI is and the things it can already do. You know we're just in the early stages and things are changing so quickly that it can be hard to keep up with what's already happening. Much less you know what might be possible in three years or five years. I think there's already really exciting potential for AI to help students learn more quickly at lower cost. Ai has a lot of potential to help colleges and universities with their back office operations in ways that could also lower costs. And you know, I also think we need to be very careful in how we think about the impact that AI will have on the workforce. And you know some of the skills that even a few years ago we thought everyone should learn computer programming.
Speaker 2:You know that may be helpful for other reasons, but it's not going to be. It doesn't appear like it's going to be careers for a lot of people going forward. So we need to think carefully as educators. What are those enduring human skills? And especially if AI, as it's starting to appear, becomes capable of doing similar work that people do early in their careers, that we often hire young people and they learn and grow into more seasoned professionals or other workers we may need to think about how do we support people for a longer period of time prior to their careers so that they're in a position to make the most use of AI? So there's some really big questions there for us to grapple with.
Speaker 1:So part of this job entails having to make a lot of decisions about how to interpret congressional actions and how to promulgate regulations and how to enforce regulations, how to think about compliance. The Undersecretary at times gets its share of criticism as well as, every now and then, a little bit of praise. You've endured a lot of criticism about some of the decisions you've made, sometimes from folks on the right, sometimes particularly recently with some of the decisions you did make from folks on the left. How do you navigate all that and what would be your advice to the next undersecretary that's walking in here?
Speaker 2:Oh, I mean it's tough.
Speaker 2:I think it's probably tough for people in all manner of positions that have a public profile now, and it can be hard, you know. I think it's hard, in particular for me when people sort of question motivations. I'm sure we do make mistakes, but it's not due to a lack of conscientious effort to do the right thing thing and at the same time, you know it comes with the territory. It's fair game and you know, here we are, here in our last days, and we're talking about what we're proud of, what we've accomplished, and other people are also giving their take on what we've done and what we should have done and what we never should have done. Take on what we've done and what we should have done and what we never should have done, and that's, you know, that's part of it too. I think it's healthy that these kinds of assessments are taking place, that there's a change in leadership that will come in with fresh eyes, and I think we should all participate in this conversation about what's working and what, what the next team should do Right.
Speaker 1:Well, let me ask you one last question as we begin to wrap up, because I know you've got a lot on your plate today. What's next for Undersecretary James Quall? I mean, you've spent a considerable amount of time here in DC working on the issues that we've just touched on. What are you looking forward to as you leave the administration, and what are some of the things you're thinking about doing?
Speaker 2:Well, short term, I don't know. I'm going to visit some family. I'm looking forward to picking up my four-year-old from school. For a little while it feels controversial, but I still really believe in higher ed and I think that colleges and universities have to be a part of solving our country's biggest problems, and I think there's a lot of good work to do there. So I hope to find a way to make a contribution in that area.
Speaker 1:Well, I have a feeling that you will and I know many of the folks who are watching this podcast, I'm sure will have the opportunity to work with you in the years to come. There's lots of work left to do and I just want to say that on behalf of myself and all of us in this business. I just want to thank you for your service, james, you and your team. I mean. This is sometimes a thankless job. It's a tough job. I've had the opportunity to witness it, sometimes close by, sometimes from afar, but anybody who steps in this role, whether Republican, democrat or everything in between, it is a tough job to try to continue to move higher education policy forward. At the same time, try to make everybody happy, which never happens. So thank you for your service. It's been a pleasure to work with you over the last four years. I look forward to working with you for many, many more years.
Speaker 2:Thanks, eloy. You know I've been a big admirer of your leadership through several roles now, so that means a lot coming from you, thank you All right.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being on the podcast.
