The higher education landscape could shift in major ways this year, including through changes brought by court decisions. Several of the Biden administration’s policies are under legal fire, though it’s so far unclear how the Trump administration will handle those cases.
Meanwhile, major academic publishers are facing a class-action lawsuit accusing them of violating antitrust law. And the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — which prevents the deportation of immigrants brought illegally to the U.S. as children — could land on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Below, we’re rounding up five major lawsuits that we’re keeping an eye on in 2025.
DACA’s future remains uncertain
DACA has faced numerous legal challenges since its inception via executive action in 2012, including a recent appellate court order that declared the program illegal but kept it running for current recipients.
The latest order keeps DACA in legal limbo, where it has languished since the Trump administration attempted to end the program in 2017. However, the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the Trump administration didn’t provide sufficient reasoning to end the program. The justices did not weigh the legality of the program, giving an opening for further legal challenges.
In 2022, the Biden administration released a 453-page rule on the DACA program in an attempt to firm up its legal footing. Those efforts failed the following year, however, when a Texas court found the regulations unlawful. However, the ruling did not call for the program to immediately end
This month's ruling similarly found DACA to be illegal, though it likewise didn’t end the program, citing the significance it has for current recipients.
That means DACA can continue operating as it has for years — recipients can renew their authorizations but U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will not review any first-time applications.
The fate of the program could ultimately be up to the Supreme Court.
However, it also depends on how the second Trump administration decides to proceed. In a turnabout from his first term, President Donald Trump recently said he’d like to find a way to protect undocumented immigrants covered by DACA.
Trump administration signals new approach to borrower defense
The Biden administration’s borrower defense to repayment regulations were headed to the Supreme Court after an appellate panel temporarily blocked them in April. However, earlier this month, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to hold off from considering the case while it reviews the U.S. Department of Education's regulations.
“After the change in Administration, the Acting Secretary of Education has determined that the Department should reassess the basis for and soundness of the Department’s borrower-defense regulations,” Sarah Harris, the acting U.S. solicitor general, said in court documents.
The borrower defense program allows students to have their loans forgiven if their colleges misled or defrauded them. The Biden administration’s regulations aimed to make it easier for students to have their debts cleared, including by allowing the Education Department to consider claims as a group and expanding the types of institutional misconduct that could warrant loan forgiveness.
The rule, released in 2022, came after the first Trump administration released its own borrower defense regulations that made it harder for students to get debt relief, including by requiring them to prove they couldn’t find employment as a result of being misled by their colleges.
An alleged academic publishing cartel
In September, a neuroscience professor at the University of California, Los Angeles launched a full-frontal assault on the academic publishing system through an antitrust lawsuit against six of the sector’s largest scientific publishers.
The complaint alleges the publishers — Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley, Sage Publications, Taylor & Francis, and Springer Nature — of running a three-pronged scheme on the researchers who write and review the papers they publish.
First, the publishers conspired to fix compensation for peer reviewers at zero dollars, plaintiff Lucina Uddin alleged.
Through the practice of not paying reviewers, the publishers “coerce scholars into providing their labor for nothing by expressly linking their unpaid labor with their ability to get their manuscripts published” in major journals, the lawsuit said.
It also calls out publishers for not competing over individual manuscripts, through what’s known as the “single submission rule.” which requires authors to only submit a paper to one journal at a time.
The complaint also takes issue with publishers barring scholars from discussing results publicly while a manuscript is under review, which can take over a year.
“From the moment scholars submit manuscripts for publication, the Publisher Defendants behave as though the scientific advancements set forth in the manuscripts are their property, to be shared only if the Publisher Defendants grant permission,” the complaint alleges.
The lawsuit describes longstanding practices as violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, an 1890 law designed to prevent unfair monopolies and collusion among economic players. Uddin alleges the publishers have formed a “cartel” through the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers, of which they are all influential members. The trade association sets policies that all members adhere to, effectively slowing the pace of scientific research, the lawsuit argues.
The case is still early in the going. Court filings indicate that the defendants plan to oppose the case and will move to have it dismissed. A spokesperson for one of the defendants, Wiley, told Higher Ed Dive in September that the allegations were without merit but declined to comment further.
Gainful employment under attack
In September 2023, the Biden administration’s Education Department released long-awaited gainful employment regulations. The rule requires career programs to prove graduates make enough to repay their loans and that at least half of them outearn high school graduates without postsecondary degrees in their state.
The agency at the time predicted the rule would prevent about 700,000 students nationwide from enrolling in low-performing programs.
That December, the American Association of Cosmetology Schools, a trade organization for beauty colleges, sued the department. The organization argued the rule was arbitrary, the Education Department overstepped its authority, and that a key metric used in the regulation — debt-to-earnings ratio — fails to fully track income for tipped workers.
The reporting deadline for the rule, along with financial value transparency regulations, has been pushed back multiple times by the department. Higher education groups asked in December for another extension. On Jan. 17, the department said institutions would have an extra month, until Feb. 18, to report certain data under the rule
Last year’s Supreme Court decision to overturn the Chevron doctrine significantly shifted the power to interpret regulatory mandates from government agencies to the courts.
The decision could further influence the gainful employment rule, according to Moody’s Investor Service analysts.
“The department’s Gainful Employment Rule meant to protect students from predatory programs may be harder to enforce, affecting education quality and student debt levels,” the analysts wrote in July.
The other question, of course, is how the Education Department under Trump will approach the case and gainful employment regulations more broadly.
During Trump’s first term, the department rescinded a gainful employment rule instituted by the Obama administration. The Trump administration also delayed implementation of borrower defense rules aimed at the for-profit college industry, a move itself that sparked a lawsuit from at least 18 states against the administration’s Education Department.
The FTC’s battle with Grand Canyon Education
When the Federal Trade Commission sued Grand Canyon University and Grand Canyon Education in 2023, the agency fired a legal shot at the arrangement between the two entities.
Once joined as a single for-profit organization, the university and education company split from each other in 2018, with the latter continuing to provide marketing, recruitment, counseling and other services for the former. Grand Canyon University reformed as a nonprofit after the split.
But the FTC noted that GCE receives most of the Christian university’s revenue and that one person, Brian Mueller, serves as both CEO of the company and president of the university.
“Despite operating the school for the profit of GCE and its investors, Defendants have deceptively advertised Grand Canyon University as a nonprofit to prospective students,” the FTC argued in its complaint.
The agency further alleged that GCE staff made “millions of abusive telemarketing calls” to consumers on the Do Not Call Registry and that the university’s marketing falsely advertised the time required to complete its "accelerated" doctoral programs.
At the time of filing, GCE said it believed “the claims to be baseless and without merit.” A judge dismissed the claims against Grand Canyon University last year, determining that the higher education institution fell outside the agency’s enforcement authority. The reason being that GCU is organized as a nonprofit that doesn’t list GCE — the alleged beneficiary of its profits — as a member or owner.
The FTC is still pursuing its claims against GCE with its underlying arguments intact.
Separately, Grand Canyon University had been feuding over its nonprofit status with the Education Department, which decided in 2019 to continue treating it as a for-profit institution for federal financial aid purposes. But the institution scored a victory when a federal appeals court ruled in November that the department applied the wrong legal standard in treating Grand Canyon University as a for profit.
The day after Trump’s electoral victory, Mueller sounded an optimistic note generally about operating under the Trump administration.
“I believe that we’re going to have a voice in what’s going to happen in this next administration in terms of what the future of higher education should be,” Mueller told analysts in November.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly described how DACA was created. It was set up through a memo from the Homeland Security Department.
Disclosure: Informa, which owns a controlling stake in Informa TechTarget, the publisher behind Higher Ed Dive, also owns Taylor & Francis. Informa has no influence over Higher Ed Dive's coverage.
