President Donald Trump’s administration has fired nearly 1,400 Department of Education employees as part of an effort to dismantle the agency. Some of those staffers had their last day earlier this month. 

There’s already eveidence that the staff reduction is hurting colleges and students, especially low-income and first-generation students, said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations and national engagement at the American Council on Education (ACE).

Financial aid administrators are struggling to get questions answered, as are students who have questions that are too complex to be addressed through the department’s AI chat bot, Fansmith said. 

A particular pain point is the closure of many regional student aid and civil rights offices, Fansmith told me this week. Those are places most colleges would go to get answers to common questions. Things that were once routine, such as renewing agreements that allow institutions to receive and pay out federal financial aid, are now getting backlogged, he said.

“The start of the semester is not very far away. Having these problems now is really concerning,” he said. 

[Read more: Big changes are coming to student loan repayment. Here’s how to prepare. (via our partner WBEZ Chicago)] 

Plus, most colleges don’t have a general counsel on staff, and previously relied on being able to get gut checks about legal compliance from the Education Department, Fansmith said. 

Now colleges are “having to rely on spending more time on outside counsel, more money on outside counsel, trying to develop ways to ensure that they're addressing concerns that they may have in the absence of actual clear help,” Fansmith said. 

The challenges aren’t just at the institution level, either. Students are struggling to get answers to questions they may run into when completing the FAFSA, which can delay their college applications and reduces the amount of time they have to assess financial aid offers and make a decision, Fansmith said. That’s a particular issue for low-income students. 

“If you need to spend an extra week or two weeks in follow-up and you're not getting an answer, the likelihood that you might actually apply to school and follow through with it is a lot less,” he said. “These are real barriers to entry that have a real impact.”

Financial-aid administrators who answered a national survey in May reported seeing an increase in student questions, confusion, and frustration. Students are unsure about how delays will affect their enrollment or eligibility for programs such as Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and in many cases, institutions “are unable to provide clear answers due to a lack of federal updates or functioning support systems,” according to the survey.

Fansmith called the issues “self-inflicted wounds.” Congress should require that the department live up to its statutory obligations, with proper oversight. And, it’s not partisan, he said: “This is just, are the people within the government doing the work they are required to do in a way that supports American citizens?” 

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Elsewhere on Open Campus

From Puerto Rico: Zayira Jordán-Conde, the new president of the University of Puerto Rico, hopes to attract Latino students and second or third generation Puerto Ricans living on the U.S. mainland. 

She spoke of these plans in an exclusive sitdown interview with Víctor Rodríguez Velázquez, our reporter at our partner Centro de Periodismo Investigativo. 

Jordán-Conde takes on the top job at a pivotal time: the university now has half the budget it had a decade ago, and faces the loss of millions of dollars in federal funding, in part due to Trump’s policies. 

From Ohio: Amy Morona, our reporter at Signal Ohio, dug into the promise that  officials from Say Yes to Education— a national scholarship program — made six years ago when starting it up in Cleveland. 

Local foundations and businesses had raised tens of millions of dollars for the scholarships, which were part of a pledge that every qualified student graduating from Cleveland Metropolitan School District would get free tuition to a four- or two-year college. 

Just over 500 of those students — from a district that graduates about 1,930 students a year — have earned a degree or credential since Say Yes began in Cleveland. 

Say Yes Cleveland’s interim executive director, Catherine Tkachyk, said she doesn’t categorize that number of graduates as “good, bad or indifferent.”

“That’s the number that we have,” she said in a recent interview with Signal. “And we’re going to continue to make improvements and continue to try and expand on that number.”

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