Student financial aid, loan repayment plans and university research funding may soon be on the chopping block under President Donald Trump’s new administration.
Trump’s likely support of Republican-led College Cost Reduction Act (CCRA) would eliminate federal PLUS loans, which financially support graduate students and parents of dependent undergraduate students, and the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant (FSEOG), a program for students with exceptional financial need.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a political initiative authored by several Trump appointees that has backed two-thirds of his executive orders thus far, proposes phasing out former President Joe Biden’s SAVE loan repayment plan. The program has been hailed as the most affordable of its kind, but is currently on hold due to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to temporarily block the program. For the nearly 90% of Florida International University students who receive some form of financial aid, the consequences are costly.
“It’s really just a lot of uncertainty,” said Kaia Hunter, an FIU alumna and former student loan recipient enrolled in the SAVE loan repayment plan. “We don’t know what payment options are still going to be available, we don’t know if interest rates are going to change, we don’t know about loan forgiveness.”
As for university research funding, Project 2025 also proposes a major restructuring of the National Institutes of Health, the largest public funder of biomedical research. Just last fiscal year, FIU received over $39 billion in funding from NIH as an R1 university with high research activity, leaving university officials alert on how the new administration will proceed.
“We will support the Trump administration, as we always have with every administration,” said Dr. Kenneth Jessell, president of FIU. “We are going to support initiatives that help us educate students so that they are going to be at their best to solve the problems facing society today.”