After serving multiple terms as chairwoman of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Education and the Workforce subcommittee on higher education, Representative Virginia Foxx is poised to assume leadership of the full committee in the next Congress. And the longtime critic of the Obama administration’s higher education policies says she and other Republicans are ready to reverse course on many of those policies.
Foxx said she has spoken with New York Representative Chris Collins, a Republican who is the congressional liaison for President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team. But Foxx otherwise has not yet communicated with the incoming administration or shared her preferences for an education secretary.
However, she holds a similar philosophy to Trump and his advisers, most notably on regulations issued by the Obama administration’s Education Department that target the for-profit college industry. Foxx said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed this week that Republicans will do everything they can to roll back those rules. The department wrote its regulations on gainful employment and borrower defense in response to what high-ranking administration officials and consumer advocates saw as fraud and abuse within an industry that experienced a boom after the Great Recession.
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/11/17/virginia-foxx-weighs-gops-higher-education-priorities