Trump's White House return raises uncertainty for Massachusetts higher education officials

As Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House for another four-year term, this week the UMass Board of Trustees is meeting to plan the future.

Trustees will discuss a five-year financial forecast for the university system. But also likely on their mind: federal leadership changes.

Carrie Healy, NEPM: Could UMass be concerned about Trump's planned immigration crackdown and cuts to federal funding for universities that advance diversity initiatives?

Colin Young, State House News Service: Sure, absolutely. I think they sort of have to be, right?

The big thing that I hear from a lot of people as they prepare for this second Donald Trump administration is still that — despite having four years of experience with him in the White House and running things — no one really knows what to expect. No one knows exactly how seriously to take the things he has said he will do when he's back in office.

So, for UMass, you know the trustees are going to be looking at a five-year financial outlook. We now know that four of those five years will be with Donald Trump in the White House. So I think that has to be a big factor that they consider when they look at where is UMass as a system going to go.

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You know, curiously, adjacent to this, Massachusetts' presidential electors are meeting officially to cast the state's 11 electoral college votes for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz this week.

Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education is considering allowing colleges and universities to offer three-year bachelor degrees with fewer credits needed. This could represent not only a lower cost education for students, but also a decrease in revenue for schools?

Right, I would think so. Exactly. If it's going to be cheaper for students, that means that the schools are going to be taking in less revenue.

I think the tradeoff that some schools see is that if they can graduate students in three years and get those students connected into jobs, get them working right away in these really high-demand fields around Massachusetts and the country, that it may be a good thing for the institution, because they can show that they are graduating the kind of student that the economy really is in tremendous need of right now.

So there are a couple of schools around the country doing this already, but it would be a new thing for Massachusetts.

Finally, college students across the state may be excitedly looking forward to winter break, but it is crunch time for another set of freshmen. Those are the newly elected lawmakers. They gathered last week at UMass Amherst for "new legislator academy." What did they learn?

That's a fantastic question, Carrie! And I would love to to learn exactly what they learned last week. You know, it really is pitched as sort of an orientation session for the 19 representatives-elect and the three senators-elect who will be taking office on January 1st.

We know that they go through simulated House and Senate sessions. They go through simulated committee hearings. So, they sort of get a flavor of the type of work they'll be doing at the statehouse.

But then they also have these sessions where the [public relations] people who work for the House speaker and the Senate president sort of sit everyone down and sort of give them the lay of the land and the rules of the road, as it were, telling them how they should plan to deal with the media, how they should plan to get their message out to voters in their local media once they're in office.

It's those panels and those sessions that, of course, the legislative leaders are not very eager to go into great detail on with us.

Oh, I'm sure! “Avoid Colin Young at all costs.”

I'm a nice guy!