Education Department Cuts Could Impact College Students With Disabilities. Here’s What Worries Experts.
Credit: MANDEL NGAN / AFP / Getty Images- President Donald Trump’s administration has slashed staffing across the Department of Education.
- That includes cutting seven of the 12 regional Office for Civil Rights locations across the U.S.
- Students with disabilities may have to wait significantly longer to receive accommodations due to these cuts.
- Advocates worry this could lead to these students dropping out of college.
Sweeping cuts across the Department of Education (ED) may hamstring students with disabilities’ access to vital accommodations, experts told BestColleges.
President Donald Trump’s administration has cut ED staffing levels by nearly half since taking office, including drastic cuts at ED’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR).
Student advocates and administrators told BestColleges that the Trump administration’s cuts will lengthen the time it takes for the department to conduct investigations and halt discrimination against college students with disabilities.
Sayda Martinez-Alvarado, senior policy analyst on the higher education policy team at Ed Trust, told BestColleges she expects this sudden change to harm students.
“You can imagine having this switch being flipped,” she said. “There’s an opportunity for students not to have the necessary accommodations.”
Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director for the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, said OCR is where students with disabilities report complaints if they have issues accessing necessary accommodations, such as a note-taker for class lectures or extra exam time.
OCR investigates complaints and issues injunctions if it finds that the college discriminated against that student. It also puts out helpful guidance so that institutions can avoid these issues altogether.
However, the Trump administration has gutted OCR in recent weeks.
In a letter to ED’s acting inspector general, Democratic senators laid out just how drastic these cuts have been. The administration has eliminated seven of the 12 regional OCR offices and cut at least 240 out of 568 employees. OCR had 6,000 open investigations at the time of these layoffs, the letter says.
Trump recently signed an executive order to begin the process of dismantling ED completely. His administration has said it intends to transfer the responsibility of overseeing discrimination cases to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), but Ives-Rublee contends that another department likely can’t address college students’ specific needs.
“We’re talking about two very different deals,” she said. “It would be like asking an electrician to do heart surgery; you wouldn’t want to put those two things together.”
Delays in Accessing Relief
In K-12 education, students with a disability automatically get an individualized education program, or IEP. An IEP lays the groundwork for their public education with the aim of ensuring they have access to necessary support.
Once that student enrolls in college, however, those automatic supports evaporate, Martinez-Alvarado explained.
“The student becomes the sole advocate,” she said.
Not all institutions, programs, and faculty have the necessary systems to help students with disabilities. Even when students make specific requests, there may be lapses in actually fulfilling those accommodations.
That’s where OCR would come in.
Jamie Axelrod, Americans With Disabilities Act coordinator and 504 compliance officer at Northern Arizona University, told BestColleges that OCR is often the only entity able to investigate student discrimination claims. Not only that, but OCR has more power than a school’s internal disabilities office to enact change by threatening to withhold federal funding.
“Yes [a disability office] can do some of that, but they don’t have the authority that an outside organization has to make change, and they don’t have the legal authority,” Axelrod said. “They can’t replace an outside enforcement entity.”
Ives-Rublee added that even if university disability offices had greater enforcement power, they often are only staffed by a single person. Piling on new responsibilities onto offices that tend to be underfunded and under-resourced is not the answer, she said.
Slashing OCR staffing levels all but ensures that investigations — and the timeline to issue injunctive relief — will drag on even longer than they already do.
Additionally, Axelrod said regional OCR offices focus on issues in their jurisdiction. Closing field offices means investigators are not only managing a larger workload, but they also have an expanded area of responsibility.
He said the West Coast was previously overseen by three OCR offices in Denver, Seattle, and San Francisco. The San Francisco office is newly shuttered, while the Seattle office is down to just a handful of employees. This means the Denver office is responsible for nearly every college and university in the region.
Catherine Lhamon, former assistant secretary for civil rights at ED under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, told Disability Scoop that she predicts caseloads will grow from 50 per staffer when she left office in January to 120 per staffer
“There’s no civil rights investigator anywhere who could effectively investigate and resolve that high a number of cases,” she said.
Downstream Effects
The ultimate fear of increased caseloads and fewer outlets for relief is that college students with disabilities will be forced to bow out of college altogether — either temporarily or permanently.
Martinez-Alvarado said many students cannot reasonably be expected to succeed in college without certain accommodations. For them, halting their studies may be the only viable path forward.
Some students may try to push through, Axelrod said, even without accommodations.
But this could lead to poor grades or even force students to fail and retake classes, he said. It could also limit future employment or graduate school opportunities and cost students more money in the long run.
Ives-Rublee stressed that there’s also an economic consequence to OCR cuts.
A college education is a proven way to increase future earnings and employment rates for people with disabilities, she said. With fewer people earning degrees, people with disabilities will fall back on public benefits like supplemental security income (SSI).
By the Numbers: Employment rates for people 25 years old and over with a disability in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- Less than a high school diploma: 11.3%
- High school graduate, no college: 17.3%
- Some college or associate degree: 25.2%
- Bachelor’s degree and higher: 31.7%
“Investing in education will mean you have to invest less later on in a person’s life. It helps to also reduce things like crime and homelessness,” Ives-Rublee said. “We need to invest, not divest.”