In 2009, then-President Obama made a bold proposal: “By 2020, this nation will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” His administration then pursued a slew of policies to boost college attendance, including fatter tuition tax credits, a larger Pell Grant, and free tuition at community colleges.
Echoing Obama, over the next several years, Democrats endorsed sending more kids to college.
Hillary Clinton proposed free college tuition for most, stating that “every student should have the option to graduate from a public college or university in their state without taking on any student debt.” At the beginning of his administration, President Biden once again pushed free community college. Some congressional Democrats wanted to go even further, with independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’s “College For All Act.”
One might expect Kamala Harris, airdropped into the top of the Democratic ticket with little time to build a distinctive political identity, to simply copy-paste previous Democrats’ positions on higher education. That was my expectation when I opened the Harris campaign’s new policy blueprint. Instead, the document reveals what seems to be a remarkable shift in messaging from the party of “college for all.”
There are 19 mentions of “college” in the 82-page blueprint. Here are a few representative examples.
“For too long, our nation has recognized only one path to success: a four-year college degree,” it states. “Vice President Harris and Governor Walz believe that anyone with the skills to do a job should be able to get it regardless of their degree status.”
“Some of the greatest beneficiaries of this revitalization [under the Harris administration] will be those Americans without college degrees, as the vast majority of jobs won’t require a degree,” it says.
“Workers should have many paths to success, not just a four-year college degree. Too many qualified workers have career opportunities blocked by unnecessary degree requirements,” it states.
The document makes no mention of college for all, or even college for most. The single paragraph devoted to traditional higher education policy highlights Biden administration accomplishments such as the modest increase to the Pell Grant and boosting funding for historically black colleges and universities.
But the document makes no mention of most items on Democrats’ usual higher education wish list.
Doubling the Pell Grant, a higher-education lobby priority Biden endorsed early on in his presidency, isn’t mentioned. Free college proposals are out — even free community college fails to make an appearance. There is a mention of student loan cancellation efforts under the Biden administration, but the blueprint makes no promises to forgive more beyond a vague call to “end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt and fight to make higher education more affordable.”
But as the above excerpts hint, the blueprint spends plenty of ink on expanding opportunities for workers without college degrees. There’s as much space devoted to apprenticeships as to college. The document includes calls to “expand programs like Registered Apprenticeships that lead to nationally recognized credentials.” And it promises that a President Harris “will get rid of unnecessary degree requirements for hundreds of thousands of federal jobs and will challenge the private sector and state and local governments to take similar action.”
Conservatives rightly worry about the far-left positions Harris has staked out in the past. But on higher education policy, her campaign’s policy blueprint strikes many notes that conservatives have been playing for years.
Those on the right have long supported expanding opportunities for people who choose non-college pathways after high school. Back in 2020, then-President Trump issued an executive order dropping unnecessary college degree requirements for federal jobs. The Republican governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, later kick-started a movement among state governments to do the same.
Only time will tell whether Democrats have truly evolved on higher education policy. Even if Harris wins November’s election, we’ll need to wait and see what she actually does in office. Conservatives have been burned before in similar circumstances. Before taking office, Biden said he was “unlikely” to cancel student debt by executive order — only to turn around and do exactly that once in the White House.
Harris’s past left-wing positions on higher education, including her co-sponsorship of Sanders’s College For All Act, should give conservatives pause. But at least in her stated positions, the vice president seems to have embraced traditionally conservative rhetoric on higher education and abandoned Democrats’ wildest big-spending fantasies.
November’s election might be a tossup, but on higher education policy, conservatives may be headed for a victory in the battle of ideas.
Preston Cooper is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.