The longest-lasting effect of the second Trump administration might be the breaking of bonds long thought to be unbreakable.
Certainly this is true in the realm of geopolitics. The United States will never again, or at least will not for the foreseeable future, be seen as a reliable and trustworthy partner by its purported allies. Agreements might be resigned and commitments reasserted, but a country that elected President Trump not once but twice, knowing precisely who he is, cannot be trusted not to do something similar again. Canada and Mexico, France and Germany, know now that economic and military overreliance on the United States creates an unacceptable level of risk.
The same realization is — or should be — beginning to dawn on the world of higher education.
The relationship between the federal government and colleges and universities has never been without its challenges. Most institutions would agree that increasing and shifting governmental regulation has made operations more complex and expensive. Even before the notorious “Dear Colleague” letter sent in February by the Department of Education, such letters were often less than collegial. Oversight of bad actors has been inconsistent, and funding for Pell Grants and other forms of financial aid has not come close to keeping up with inflation.
But at its heart, the relationship between the federal government and higher education has been beneficial to both parties and relatively stable since the middle of the 20th century. The government has been the major source of funding for research in the sciences and a lesser source in the humanities and the arts. While not every investment has borne fruit — such is the nature of research and creativity — we are healthier, safer, more globally competitive, and culturally richer as a result.
The scorched-earth assault on Harvard University is generating all the headlines, but it might in fact be drawing attention away from an even larger story.
The government has also made it relatively easy for students from around the world to study in the United States. Again, the system has not been entirely efficient or entirely fair, but for the most part it has worked well and improved the quality of higher education while enhancing the global influence and reputation of the country.
Support from the federal government has been so consistent and made such good sense that colleges and universities have built their budgets, infrastructure, and programming around the assumption of its permanence. Trump 2.0 has shown what happens when the government does not behave sensibly and has turned an essential lifeline into an existential risk.
The scorched-earth assault on Harvard University is generating all the headlines, but it might in fact be drawing attention away from an even larger story: the tectonic shift in the future activities and financial underpinnings of American higher education and the even greater risk to institutions that have neither Harvard’s resources nor Harvard’s reputation.
Research universities have built enormous and expensive schools, institutes, and medical centers based upon the assumption of ongoing federal funding. Eleven percent of Harvard’s revenue in fiscal 2023 came from federally sponsored research, almost the same amount as came from the tuition paid by all degree-seeking students combined. This percentage is actually small compared to that at many other R1 institutions. At MIT, the total in the same year was 48 percent, and at Duke University it was 30 percent. The reliance on federal grants is not limited to private universities — these grants make up 27 percent of revenue at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and 23 percent at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — or even to the wealthy and highly selective. The figure was 35 percent at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and 24 percent at Montana State University. All these amounts are exclusive of federally funded financial aid.
Most businesses would identify such a heavy reliance on a single source of funding as a major risk. That is now proving to be the case as the government cancels contracts, withdraws grants, and proposes breathtaking cuts to granting agencies. Even if universities manage to muddle through Trump’s vindictive irrationality, can they return to building budget models that assume consistently high levels of federal support? JD Vance is waiting in the wings, and who knows what new Trumps and Vances the future might bring?
Research universities will have limited options moving forward: scale back the amount of research conducted; diversify the sources of funding, with some drawbacks, by looking to the private sector; or make major cuts to programs in other areas. Most will employ some combination of these strategies. We are also likely to see changes to the relationship between universities and major medical centers, whose financial outlook was less than robust even before the proposed cuts to research funding and Medicaid and which might become an unsustainable drain on university financial models. Even before Trump, Harvard Medical School had operated in the red for 12 of the last 17 years.
For some institutions, the threat to restrict or cut off entirely the flow of international students poses an even graver risk. Graduate programs in the STEM disciplines rely heavily on students from outside the United States: More than 5,000 graduate students at Carnegie Mellon are international, as are more than 4,000 at Georgia Tech and more than 3,000 at Washington University in St. Louis. Given the state of science education in the United States, these students are not replaceable by American students with similar levels of preparation and interest. Put simply, without international students, both graduate education and research in the sciences, mathematics, and engineering will shrink.
The more immediate threat is to the bottom line of many American colleges and universities. About 1.1 million international students currently study in the United States, roughly 350,000 as undergraduates. India and China are by far the source of the largest number of students.
What matters most to colleges, however, is that a large number of international undergraduates pay full tuition at a time when a growing majority of domestic students, at both public and private institutions, do not. According to a 2020 article in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, at public universities, “increases in the enrollment of foreign students generate substantial gains in tuition revenues … which partially offset the loss in appropriations and mitigate the need to raise in-state tuition rates or cut expenditures.” A small handful of very wealthy institutions, including Harvard, are need-blind for international applicants, but most are very much need-aware and rely on full-paying international students, mostly from China, to meet tuition-revenue goals. The reality is messy but unmistakable: International students who are willing and able to pay the full cost of attendance make it easier for colleges to enroll domestic students who are not.
New York University enrolled more than 14,000 students from China alone in 2023-24. How many of these were full-fee-paying undergraduates and master’s-degree students is impossible to determine, but “more than a few” seems a reasonable guess. Other universities that enroll very large numbers of international students include Northeastern University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Southern California. The pattern holds even at many small liberal-arts colleges — about 20 percent of the students at Mount Holyoke College are international.
Subtract the full-paying international students from the applicant pool and an already fragile financial structure would begin very quickly to collapse.
The educational benefits of enrolling international students are real. The financial benefits are also real and, for many institutions, essential. Even if the attempts by the federal government to limit the entry of international students are found to be illegal, the message will have been sent: Enter the United States at your own risk.
A small group of the most prestigious and selective universities might be able to substitute affluent domestic students for affluent international students at the undergraduate level, though even those institutions would likely have trouble doing so for master’s-degree programs, where costs are high and return on investment can be questionable. For most colleges, such a substitution would be impossible and tuition revenue would necessarily decline. Subtract the full-paying international students from the applicant pool and an already fragile financial structure would begin very quickly to collapse.
For the ideologues driving the administration’s policies on education and immigration — Linda McMahon and Kristi Noem are not the brains behind this operation — the destructive effects of these various policies are very much the point. None of the consequences we are seeing are unintended.
The bottom line: If you were running a college or university, would you feel comfortable building even a five-year budget model that assumed a traditional level of federal grant support and a steady number of full-paying students from abroad? Given the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed by the House of Representatives — it is still hard to believe that these things are being done by adults — and the proposed Trump budget, would you even feel confident in assuming current levels of support for Pell Grants and work-study?
Devastating scientific research and systematically undermining the preeminence of American universities — like so many of the actions of the Trump administration — represents a triumph of vindictiveness and nihilism over sound public policy. But here we are, about to see how quickly and adroitly the embattled and change-resistant world of higher education can adapt to a future in which the government cannot be trusted.
