From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is the Daily.

Today, as the cost of higher education has soared in recent decades, universities have attracted more scrutiny about the value of a four-year degree.

Now, the Trump administration is taking those questions to the next level

with a new set of policies that scale back the federal government student loan program.

Today, I talked to my colleague Ron Lieber, who writes about personal finance,

about what these new changes are and how they might reshape higher education in America.

So, Ron, we have talked a lot on the show about how the administration has really focused on higher education.

There have been concerns about anti-Semitism on campus.

The administration has accused a lot of different schools of being, as it describes, too, woke.

But you cover personal finance, and you have been following a very different set of developments when it comes to higher education, which go into effect today, July 1st.

So tell us what has been going on.

Sure.

So the federal government put into place some changes to the way it lends money for higher education. I mean, there's $1.7 trillion in student loan dead, and that's more than credit card debt, it's more than auto loans. And you'll probably

remember that there was this giant pause in the repayment of student loans.

It happened at the beginning of the pandemic, but it went on for years.

And since then, the Trump administration has been trying to revise the federal government's

repayment plans to make them a bit stricter.

And some of those changes went into effect today.

So that's going to be a big change for families who are in the process of paying off student loans. But there's an even

bigger change that the administration also put into place, which is that instead of focusing solely

on canceling student debt or changing up the repayment

plans, they are also trying to reduce the amount of loans that are given out in the first

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