Kevin Carey
LightNews LightNews
kevincarey1.bsky.social
Kevin Carey
@kevincarey1.bsky.social
4.2K followers 740 following 710 posts
VP, Education & Work, New America. Writes about education for the New York Times, Atlantic, Vox, etc. I’ve made my mind a sunless space.
Posts Replies Media Videos
kevincarey1.bsky.social
ED has been criticized for not categorizing nursing programs as "professional" under the new student loan limits enacted earlier this year, and their response seems....fine, actually? This all makes sense to me.
www.ed.gov/about/news/p...
November 25, 2025 at 2:28 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
November 22, 2025 at 6:00 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
5/ …subsidy rates, Congressional outreach, etc. etc. In other words, everything that matters.

Doing this will cost more money and function less efficiently than keeping the programs in-house.
More ED functions
November 18, 2025 at 10:36 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
4/ Now look at the list of higher education functions ED will continue to do itself. Nothing much, just management, leadership, budgeting, hiring, audit, regulation….
EDFUNCTIONS
November 18, 2025 at 10:36 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
2/ Here for example is a page from the inter-agency memorandum describing how the Department of Labor (!?!) will administer various higher education programs.
List of ED programs
November 18, 2025 at 10:36 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
According to the interagency agreement, here are some of the things ED still has to do after sending its higher education grant programs to the Department of Labor:
November 18, 2025 at 8:04 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
My statement on McMahon's plan to dismember the U.S. Department of Education.
www.newamerica.org/education-po...
The Trump administration’s latest attempt to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is lawless, wasteful, and bad for students. This deeply unpopular administration lacks the votes in Congress to shut down ED. That’s why Secretary McMahon is creating a bureaucratic Rube Goldberg machine that will waste millions of taxpayer dollars by outsourcing vital programs to other agencies. It’s like paying a contractor double to mow your lawn and then claiming you’ve cut the home maintenance budget. It makes no sense. The American people overwhelmingly oppose shutting down ED. Congress won’t allow it. Nobody wants this, other than a few Heritage Foundation zealots who hate public schools. The Department of Education was created to give all students a fair chance for opportunity. Everything about the Trump-McMahon agenda moves America in the opposite direction—less money for high-poverty schools, fewer protections for students with disabilities, diminished access to college. This action is illegal, inefficient, and wrong. If Secretary McMahon doesn’t believe she can do her job, she and her senior staff should return their paychecks and immediately resign.
November 18, 2025 at 6:02 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
This is your fault
November 12, 2025 at 10:37 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
🤔
November 6, 2025 at 1:10 AM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
Re-reading for the first time in full Absolute Edition glory, still one the greatest single issues ever made.
October 9, 2025 at 9:51 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
4/ It doesn't have to be that way! School district boundaries are just another public policy choice. They can be changed. Iowa's districts could look like this instead:
Improved school district boundaries in Iowa
September 30, 2025 at 4:12 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
3/ Here, for example, is a school district map for the state of Iowa -- lots of rich (dark colored) districts right next to poor (light colored) districts.
Current map of public school districts in Iowa
September 30, 2025 at 4:12 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
This was Robert Redford trying to play a nerdy uncool policy analyst.
Photograph of Robert Redford wearing an upturned coat and sunglasses in Three Days of the Condor
September 16, 2025 at 3:07 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
We're at the point where you need a detailed map of administration and social media influence to guess which of today's deranged tweets will become tomorrow's White House Executive Order
September 13, 2025 at 7:20 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
Making Communicable Childhood Diseases Great Again
September 3, 2025 at 5:32 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
This one is either secretly the hero or secretly the main villain of Alien:Earth; either way it's the breakout star.
Horrible little eye monster
September 3, 2025 at 2:21 AM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
The most powerful form of propaganda is "of course as everyone knows" ground-truth establishing asides in straight news coverage. For example, this is, at best, a highly-contested opinion!
www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
Data shared by OpenAI indicates ChatGPT’s upgrade made it better at many tasks and it is still on track to transform many workplaces as it becomes more widely used by businesses.
August 24, 2025 at 3:18 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
Jetlagged me woken up by the 4:30 AM sunrise on my first morning in Sweden
August 12, 2025 at 8:57 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
Seems to me the attack was *extremely* provoked
thetab.com/2025/08/06/m...
Speaking for Coenraad Vermaak Safaris, Hunter Hans Vermaak said: “It is with deep sadness and heavy hearts we confirm the tragic death of our client and friend Asher Watkins from the USA. On Sunday, while on a hunting safari with us in South Africa’s Limpopo Province, Asher was fatally injured in a sudden and unprovoked attack by an unwounded buffalo. “He was tracking it together with one of our professional hunters and one of our trackers. This is a devastating incident and our hearts go out to his loved ones. We are doing everything we can to support the family members who are here with us and those back in the United States as they navigate this tragic loss.”
August 7, 2025 at 6:51 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
NY Times waits two weeks to cover something lots of people were discussing the minute Columbia settled, proclaims it "widely overlooked"
August 5, 2025 at 5:00 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
uh oh
July 31, 2025 at 7:12 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
Remarkable that this was published *after* the Columbia settlement. Like saying "Putin can't just invade another country, it's against international law" while bomb craters are still smoking in Kiev.
July 31, 2025 at 3:54 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
4/ And this:
In another case, a Florida woman created an independent “sports academy” that, according to fraud investigators, sold young men on the false promise of being recruited by Division I schools. Upon arriving, students and their parents were pressured into taking out federal loans to enroll in a barbering-and-cosmetology program. According to the government, the school falsely claimed that the football players were studying cosmetology for 10 to 12 hours a day, including on weekends. (One student at that school was allegedly told to do something like “curl your hair, take a video, and turn it in.”) The owner received more than $800,000 in federal-loan disbursements before the Education Department shut her down. From 2021 to August 2024, the department sanctioned 85 colleges, levied $61.7 million in fines for misconduct, and cut off 35 schools from receiving federal financial aid.
July 29, 2025 at 3:46 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
3/ And this:
PCTI is not an isolated case. In 2005, fraud inspectors caught a large mid-Atlantic trade school that, according to the department, sold students laptops at a 125 percent markup and handed out credentials in “surgical technology” to a student whose real-world training consisted of working for two weeks in a hospital storage room. A student studying phlebotomy testified that “the practice arms were so filled with holes that the fake blood would spurt out when students attempted to practice their sticks.”
July 29, 2025 at 3:46 PM
kevincarey1.bsky.social
2/ The DOGE-led purge of federal employees was allegedly in the service of cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. But ED's job is to *prevent* fraud in the enormous federal financial aid system. Those people have all been fired. So expect to see a lot more like this in the years ahead:
That conversation led to the unraveling of a years-long scheme designed to steal from the American taxpayer. The trade school, called the Professional Career Training Institute, had been recruiting homeless people from a local nonprofit. Many were high-school dropouts, some of them functionally illiterate with histories of petty crime and drug abuse. Enroll in college, they were told, and we’ll pay your rent while federal grants take care of tuition, books, and all the rest. The school fabricated diplomas from an unaccredited, possibly nonexistent high school, then set up federal financial-aid accounts and passwords for the students before secretly taking out large loans on their behalf.
July 29, 2025 at 3:46 PM