Obama Administration Harms Students in Many Ways

The Obama administration has promoted campus speech codes that take away freedom of speech: It demanded censorship at the University of New Mexico and University of Montana in letters from political appointees in the Justice and Education Departments.

That is not the only way it has harmed students. Its new labor and overtime rules are so extreme that even the left-wing group US PIRG, a group founded by Ralph Nader that mainly hires students to work on progressive causes, has criticized them for wiping out jobs for students. It says “we will be forced to hire fewer staff and limit the hours those staff can work.” As a coalition of groups opposed to the DOL overtime rule notes, “Public colleges and universities fear the added costs will force reductions to student services, cuts to employee benefits, and limit employees’ work hours that could reduce important labor-intensive research.”

The Obama administration discriminated against students by demanding that they pay more in fees under the Freedom of Information Act. 

The Obama administration also has rewritten student financial aid rules by administrative fiat in ways that encourage colleges to increase tuition (effectively harming the majority of students who would otherwise graduate with modest student loan debt, while forcing taxpayers to write off billions in student loans incurred by reckless and irresponsible borrowers).

Obamacare has harmed many graduate students and driven colleges to cut the hours of non-tenured faculty. More than 200 colleges slashed employee work hours to avoid the Obamacare employer mandate.