If higher education is struggling to look ahead in 2025, it’s not hard to understand why: Ascertaining what’s happening in the here and now is a full-time job. In less than two months in office, President Trump’s administration has unleashed a blizzard of executive orders, government cutbacks, and other pronouncements that have cast many of the sector’s basic operating principles into doubt. That the actions are vague, sweeping, and often of questionable legality only compounds the state of flux.
What signals should colleges be tuning in to amid all the noise? Here are six trends Chronicle reporters and editors are watching out for:
Institutional Neutrality’s Big Test
Amid fierce debates about the war in Gaza, many colleges embraced neutrality as a doctrine, pledging to abstain from speaking out on political controversies unless they could identify a “compelling institutional interest” to do so. The logic is clear: An era in which presidents weighed in regularly on current events — like Trump’s first election and the murder of George Floyd — had raised expectations on campuses, compromised institutions’ ability to air dissenting views, provided grist for withering congressional hearings, and arguably contributed to public skepticism of the sector.
But Trump’s attacks on higher education — and the values the sector had embraced under a different set of social pressures — make it hard to assess where political controversy ends and “compelling interest” begins. For the time being, college leaders have largely maintained a low profile. Many have raised objections to the administration’s move to scythe research grants from National Institutes of Health, a matter of pressing financial concern, but far fewer have said anything substantive about the administration’s campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. Can the line leaders seek to draw between pocketbook issues and political ones hold? Expect pressure to mount from within their campuses, particularly if immigration enforcement ramps up.
An Accreditation Crackup
Accreditation is a wonky, unglamorous process. The fact that conservatives have seized it as a pressure point shows how seriously they’ve thought about overhauling higher education. They’ve called accreditors a cartel that snuffs out innovation and imposes DEI groupthink across the sector. The question now: What will they do about it?
Broadly speaking, there are two paths. One is to limit accreditors’ purview — by attempting to permit them only to mandate what is contained in federal law, say, or opening investigations of accreditors said to push DEI policies. The other is to allow new players into the game. Trump has called for the creation of accreditors that would “defend the American tradition and Western civilization,” and House Republicans have proposed allowing states and trade groups to accredit.
Neither path is straightforward. Federal law protects the scope and independence of accreditors’ work. And it’s unclear whether states would want to take on such complex oversight. But expect tinkering, at the very least — and the potential for confusion and Balkanization that comes with it.
The Shrinking of Graduate Education
As colleges brace for cuts to federal research funding that could be painful, even catastrophic, the belt-tightening has begun. One emerging casualty: Ph.D. programs. Deans and program directors across the country have hit pause or imposed caps on graduate admissions, leaving many would-be doctoral students — including some who have already received informal offers — in a state of anxious purgatory.
Retrenchment is a way of buying time. Institutions want to honor the commitments they’ve already made to incoming graduate students, and they hope to gain clarity on how deeply and immediately they’ll be affected by funding losses. But even short-term pauses and precautionary enrollment reductions can cause collateral damage. Think of the ranks of researchers who might drop out of the university pipeline altogether.
Will cutbacks that are now being billed as precautionary become the new baseline? Ph.D. overproduction has been a point of concern for well over a decade. And Project 2025, the policy blueprint written by members of Trump’s inner circle, calls for the elimination of Direct PLUS loans for graduate students — which could limit the tuition revenue colleges stand to gain from graduate programs. Some programs that are shrinking might soon bounce back. It’s reasonable to forecast that many never will.
Town and Gown Join Hands on Research
The Trump administration’s move to cap the indirect-cost allotments that come with NIH grants could lead to sizable job losses in cities, particularly those with university medical centers. Contractions in local economies could spiral beyond the research sector into manufacturing and service industries. One independent analysis projects that the NIH funding cap could deliver a $6.1-billion blow to the United States’ gross domestic product.
So it’s not surprising that 45 cities, counties, and mayors filed a brief in support of lawsuits against the NIH brought by colleges, medical organizations, and state attorneys general. The critical question: Can that moment of common cause lay the groundwork for deeper collaboration? As colleges have faced increasing skepticism that they serve the national good, many have sought to double down on their efforts to serve the local good — emphasizing their role as economic drivers, cultural hubs, and knowledge centers.
Higher education might not be broadly popular. But medical research, local jobs, and extension programs generally are. Colleges and college towns may find a shared interest in mounting a campaign to argue the sector’s civic value.
A Dearth of Data
The fate of Trump’s campaign pledge to shutter the Department of Education remains unclear. While the president has told Linda McMahon, the department’s incoming education secretary, that her first job is to “put herself out of a job,” it would take the approval of a closely divided Congress to do so.
Meantime, the Trump administration can diminish the department without dismantling it altogether. As the Department of Government Efficiency slices its way through the federal sector, some key functions could be moved elsewhere — there’s talk, for example, that enforcement of colleges’ compliance with Title VI and Title IX regulations could migrate to the Department of Justice.
And one of the Department of Education’s quietly pivotal roles might simply be cut out at the root. Most of the $881 million in department contracts that DOGE claimed it has terminated are held by the Institute of Education Sciences, the department’s research-and-statistics arm, which collects data about the education system, who it serves, and how it’s working. Longstanding data-collection processes have been terminated; historical data could vanish.
Repositories like IPEDS, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, aren’t perfect. But they’re widely used — by students and parents making college decisions, and by administrators and institutional researchers benchmarking themselves against peer institutions. Will any alternatives emerge?
Disciples of DOGE
Typically, federal policies are incubated in the states. Here’s a case in which the process might reverse itself. With Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency grabbing headlines and wielding influence, some red-state governors are seeking to seize the moment by establishing their own mini-DOGEs.
Not every state-level DOGE will be created equal. In Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, has said her DOGE task force’s purview will include “further refining our work-force and job-training programs, and leveraging technology, such as artificial intelligence.” In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, also a Republican, has pledged that his task force will review “wasteful spending” at each of the state’s public universities, once again eyeing “programs or departments that are supportive of DEI.”
Regardless of the state-by-state specifics, a rise in ideologically charged, efficiency-minded task forces would create another pressure point for institutional leaders: a new set of ombudsmen to answer to, a new set of audits to fulfill.
