As the fall 2025 semester approaches, millions of students across the United States are facing a crisis that threatens not just their education, but their livelihoods and futures. The convergence of deep federal workforce cuts, delayed grant applications, and shifting political priorities has put federal financial aid and childcare support in jeopardy for countless college-goers—especially those from low-income backgrounds and student parents.
According to The American Prospect, total student loan debt in the U.S. is now nearing a staggering $1.8 trillion. That’s not just an abstract number: it represents real people—one in six Americans—carrying the weight of loans that often prevent them from buying homes, starting businesses, or even finishing their degrees. The situation has only grown more dire under the current Trump administration, which has implemented the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. This legislation significantly raises the cost of student debt repayment and caps lifetime borrowing limits, making it even harder for poorer students to enroll and stay in school.
But the pain doesn’t stop there. The Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) has seen its workforce slashed, losing 1,315 positions—including 326 from the FSA alone—after a Supreme Court decision in McMahon v. New York gave President Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon the green light to lay off half the department’s staff. The result? According to a survey by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), both students and colleges are now experiencing significant delays when seeking information about financial aid awards. Six in ten colleges, USA Today reports, have faced changes or slowdowns due to these cuts.
For the six million low-income students who rely on Pell grants every year, the consequences are immediate and severe. With fewer FSA employees to process and deliver awards, and fewer oversight staff to monitor private lenders, students are left vulnerable to delays and even outright fraud. The Houston-based Professional Career Training Institute serves as a cautionary tale: in 2019, FSA investigators uncovered that the school had been recruiting homeless people with false promises, then taking out federal grants in their names and plunging them into debt. Such abuses, as The Atlantic detailed, become more likely when regulatory agencies are kneecapped by staff reductions.
These delays and breakdowns ripple out across the higher education landscape. Administrators from 909 colleges and universities told NASFAA that they’re seeing slow response times and sluggish aid processing. Students are struggling to track their FSA IDs—essential for accessing online systems and financial information. Without this, they can’t see how much they’re borrowing or what grants they’re eligible for. Even when the FSA was fully staffed under Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and President Joe Biden, there were still four million unanswered calls to the department. Now, with even fewer hands on deck, the situation has only worsened.
For students with children, the crisis is particularly acute. As USA Today recently reported, applications for millions of dollars in federal childcare funding—including the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) grant—are delayed, leaving student parents in a bind. The CCAMPIS program, created by Congress in 1998, has been a lifeline for parenting students, providing more than $83 million to hundreds of colleges in 2023 alone. The average school received over $317,000 to fund campus-based childcare, after-school programs, and subsidies for student parents.
Yet this fall, many schools will see their CCAMPIS funding dry up. Pima Community College in Arizona and Indiana University of Pennsylvania are both set to lose their grants on September 30, 2025, just weeks after the semester begins. Carmina Garcia, a 29-year-old nursing student at Pima and mother of three, told USA Today, “I don’t know how I could've done it any other way. If I wouldn’t have found this, I don’t think that I would be pursuing the education that I’m pursuing.” Without CCAMPIS, she and thousands of others may have to drop out or scramble for alternative childcare—often an impossible ask.
Hannah Fuller, a 22-year-old at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has relied on CCAMPIS for three years. Now, she’s been told to start applying for state childcare programs instead. But with a full-time job and classes, she wonders how she’ll manage. “He would never see me,” she said of her four-year-old son.
So why the delays and uncertainty? Experts point to the Department of Education’s dramatic workforce cuts in March 2025, which halved the staff and left critical grant programs without enough personnel to process applications. Others, like Eddy Conroy of the think tank New America, suspect the Trump administration’s budget proposal—which suggests eliminating CCAMPIS funding altogether—may also be to blame. The proposal argues, “States, localities, and colleges, not the Federal government, are best suited to determine whether to support the activities authorized under this program.” Congress is still considering the plan ahead of a looming government shutdown deadline—coincidentally, the same day the childcare grants are set to expire.
Meanwhile, some colleges are scrambling for solutions. Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner, Massachusetts, decided not to wait for Washington. When grant applications didn’t open on schedule, CCAMPIS adviser Ann Reynolds approached the college’s foundation board for help. She secured $94,000 to cover two years of childcare support, ensuring students wouldn’t be left in the lurch—at least for now. “We may not get it,” Reynolds said of future federal funding, but she’s “preparing for the best case scenario.”
For many, though, the outlook is bleak. Students are increasingly resorting to GoFundMe campaigns to pay for their education as they wait for delayed awards and navigate mounting barriers. Lawsuits are piling up against the Department of Education, including actions by the American Federation of Teachers over the stalling of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. During the first Trump administration, similar staffing cuts led to the stalling of borrower defense to repayment, leaving over 100,000 borrowers in limbo. The Biden administration later settled $6 billion in loan cancellations for defrauded students, but with the FSA now even more curtailed, such legal battles are likely to become more common.
The FAFSA Simplification Act, which was intended to streamline financial aid applications and expand Pell grants, has instead introduced new headaches: students and parents report trouble accessing tax documents, updating income information, and even verifying citizenship status. With fewer staff to help, these problems are compounded, and the risk is that fewer students will enroll at all.
As Alyson Koerts Meijer, a student at Mount Wachusett, put it to USA Today, “They don’t see the people. They just see the dollar signs.” For now, the promise of higher education—and the chance for a better life—hangs in the balance for millions of Americans, their futures shaped by decisions made far from the classrooms and homes where those dreams are being fought for every day.