Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.
A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
In response to what feels like an existential threat, over 600 academic leaders signed the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ public statement calling for a rejection of “the coercive use of public research funding.” The signatories include the presidents of a diverse set of institutions, including the University of Washington, Deep Springs College, Heartland Community College, in Illinois, and Princeton University. But unity across the sector only goes so far: Some types of institutions stand to fare better than others in the face of Trump’s moves. Which colleges face the steepest obstacles? Which could emerge relatively unscathed? And what will our system of higher education look like four years from now?
The answers to these questions can be found in the role the federal government has come to play for higher ed. The federal government drives college enrollment though an array of programs: Pell Grants, subsidized and unsubsidized loans, tax-free investment options through 529 plans, supplemental educational-opportunity grants — and the list goes on. Federal student aid topped $256 billion in the 2023-24 academic year. Federal grants are the foundation of the modern academic research enterprise, with federal support for academic research at roughly $60 billion in 2023.
This time the crisis has been intentionally engineered by the federal government.
Beyond financial support, regulatory advantages such as decentralized quality assurance through accreditation, visa policies that allowed virtually unlimited international student enrollment, and tax-exempt status for most public and private colleges help our institutions flourish. Without the awesome resources and steering power of the federal government, American higher ed as we know it would not be possible.
The Trump administration is now fundamentally remaking the higher ed-federal government partnership. The list of its actions is long: It is demanding that colleges unwind diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; decimating research funding; disrupting international enrollments; and reshaping accreditation to push a right-wing cultural agenda. Congress is pushing for extensive changes to federal financial-aid programs and for increases of the endowment tax that could cost some universities hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Large Research Universities
Research universities face the greatest financial pressure. Grant cancellations and planned cuts to the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health are creating enormous budgetary holes: The budgets for graduate programs and scientific-research staffing were developed on the assumption that federal funding was a constant.
My institution, Michigan State University, estimates $82 million in grant-funding losses and says it will cut over $150 million from the general-fund budget over the next two years. Duke University is offering employee buyouts as part of its cost-cutting efforts. The Johns Hopkins University shed 2,000 staff members after losing $800 million in contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development, and recently announced a hiring freeze and the pause of annual pay increases. At a town hall about the financial fallout associated with Trump’s polices, the University of Washington president, Ana Mari Cauce, put things starkly: “It’s not an exaggeration to say that we are in a budget crisis.” At Princeton, the looming cuts are said to be “permanent,” meaning their budget trajectory has been fundamentally changed and will advance from a lower plane.
The fact that research universities are structurally complex and pursue several missions at once compounds their exposure to Trump’s policies. The administration has been taking advantage of this by leveraging its financial and regulatory influence to pit one aspect of an institution’s mission against another. The administration would unfreeze federal funding to Columbia only if the university puts its department of Mideastern, South Asian, and African studies into “academic receivership,” for instance. (Even after agreeing to many of the government’s conditions, Columbia’s funding hasn’t been restored.) Harvard University finds itself in a similar conundrum, fighting the administration in court, yet also quietly dismantling a religious-studies program accused of anti-Israel bias.
We should expect to see more universities resisting Trump’s targeted cuts, but as Harvard and Columbia have shown, resistance is costly. When the federal government suspended Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, said that the administration’s move should “serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.”
Public Research Universities
In red states like Florida, Indiana, and Texas, Trump-supporting Legislatures are also working to bust up faculty and administrative autonomy as a condition of public funding. The administration’s cultural agenda for higher ed is likely to be advanced most fully in states where MAGA-friendly legislatures have near-total control. This doesn’t mean blue-state public research universities are off the hook. Data shows that state financial support for higher ed has been up over the past couple of years, but we might have reached high tide. Ebbing state funding would pair dangerously with cuts to federal research.
In a follow-up to Cauce’s town hall, the University of Washington explained that the state will decrease core funding and put new strings on how the university spends state money, resulting in “an effective 6.5-percent cut to our state operating budget.” At the University of Minnesota, the president, Rebecca Cunningham, and the executive vice president for finance and operation, Gregg Goldman, wrote in an opinion essay that “the flat state budget this past year and for the next two years represents a $75-million loss in buying power with inflation.” They are eyeing proposals that would slash the budget by 7 percent while raising tuition from 4 to 6.5 percent for Minnesota residents and 7.5 percent for out-of-staters. These steep cuts and difficult decisions all predate a “looming crisis” — federal cuts to Medicaid and SNAP — that might devastate state budgets for years to come.
Small Liberal-Arts Colleges
Small liberal-arts colleges, like other private institutions with small research footprints, are less exposed to federal action. In the short run, some of these colleges — the selective and wealthy ones — might be OK.
An early May letter by Robert R. Gaines, Pomona College’s acting president, sought to ease concern that Pomona could go the way of Columbia and Harvard: “While Pomona’s faculty are recipients of some federal grants, the college’s budget does not depend on federal investments like those other institutions.” But Pomona, like Swarthmore College and Grinnell College, is threatened by the endowment tax House Republicans have advanced. At Pomona, such a tax could cost just shy of $50 million in a typical year, per Phillip Levine’s analysis. Pomona’s ability to keep its need-blind admissions policy and its commitment to meeting a student’s full demonstrated need “would be severely compromised” if that tax became law, Gaines told The Chronicle.
In response to the uncertainty — Senate Republicans seem less eager for an endowment tax than their colleagues in the House — Swarthmore College took the unusual step of making a three-month budget, to be revisited after more information about administration policy and international enrollments becomes available. Anxiety about the future has elite colleges like Claremont McKenna ramping up their lobbying efforts, and for good reason. Republican scrutiny of Haverford College at a recent congressional hearing on antisemitism suggests that the political heat on the Ivy League might also be coming their way.
I do not believe Trump will be able to destroy American higher education, but his administration will try, and the sector will suffer.
For nonselective small colleges, Trump’s policies might not be causing much direct harm, but they do add an extra layer of uncertainty. Selective colleges have robust demand from students and can withstand market volatility because many students want to attend them. Less-selective colleges, especially in regions that are experiencing demographic decline like New England, are not so lucky. Compare Bowdoin College to Saint Joseph’s College of Maine, both small institutions in Maine. According to data from the Department of Education, Bowdoin admits only 8 percent of applicants, and 57 percent of those who are admitted enroll. If Bowdoin were to face a budget hole, it could find tuition-paying students to bridge the gap. Finding additional students would be a bigger challenge for Saint Joseph’s, which admits 82 percent of applicants and yields only 15 percent of those it admits. If the policy environment dampens the student market even a bit, places like Saint Joseph’s in regions with chronic shortages of prospective undergraduates could feel acute pain.
Regional Publics and Community Colleges
At first glance these institutions appear to be in an enviable position: They don’t rely heavily on federal research funding, they don’t have big endowments to tax, they don’t enroll lots of international students, and they tend to fly below the political radar. Domestic undergraduate enrollment is unlikely to collapse, and a looming economic downturn could even cause an uptick in demand for these institutions since people look to increase their skills and retrain during recessions. Still, the major financial-aid reform provisions tucked away in the “Big, Beautiful” reconciliation bill recently passed by the House will clearly affect these institutions if enacted, though in mixed ways. For community colleges, their lower tuition prices, shorter program duration, and a vocational orientation might yield comparative advantages in a world with diminished federal student aid. Risk-sharing provisions that put campuses on the hook for portions of unpaid student debt might harm minority-serving institutions and campuses that serve low-income and other students with historically higher rates of loan default. Requiring full-time enrollment for Pell Grant eligibility, as proposed in the House bill, would harm these institutions too. The Senate seems less excited about the risk-sharing and full-time Pell provisions, but the financial-aid outlook remains murky.
Regional universities and community colleges also face enrollment risks. Pennsylvania State University plans to shutter several regional campuses, and federal pressure on research universities will have knock-on effects within state university systems. Looking to secure their own budgets, research universities might employ aggressive tactics to lure students otherwise headed to regional campuses.
And if there is an economic downturn sparked by the administration’s erratic trade policy, or if Congress shifts even more health-care costs onto the states, then state and local funding could dry up. How large an impact would this have for regionals? The University of Maryland at College Park, the state’s flagship campus, gets 29 percent of its budget from state funds. At the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore, a regional public historically Black institution, that figure is 58 percent.
For-Profits
For-profits tend to enjoy more favorable regulation under Republican administrations, something that is likely to continue under Trump, who once owned a shady “university” himself. DOGE-style deregulation is key, and the administration is putting its thumb on the scale in favor of the proprietary sector by advancing policies that would apply Pell Grants to short-term programs, weaken consumer protections, and amend accreditation standards in ways that favor for-profit programs.
As Emily DiVito, an analyst at the progressive Roosevelt Institute, put it, “Trump and Musk’s recent actions are an attempt to … reignite for-profit industries that will take advantage of [students and families] with impunity.” Even if you are less skeptical of the for-profit sector, it’s hard to deny that the administration’s policies are likely good for them: Their stock prices surged after of the election.
We all know of the extraordinary turbulence still roiling the world’s financial markets and the broader economy. The downturn is widely seen as the most serious in decades, and each day’s headlines remind us that heightened volatility and persisting uncertainty have become our new economic reality … We are working with administrative and financial deans from across the university to develop new approaches for generating both savings and new revenue sources.
That’s president-speak for “expect cuts.” The university did make some cuts. In September 2009, The Crimson reported that Harvard had eliminated hundreds of jobs over the summer, many in janitorial, clerical, and service-work positions. But the Great Recession did not inflict as much pain on the rest of Harvard. The university’s budget was $3.48 billion in fiscal year 2008 and reached $3.73 billion by fiscal year 2010.
Harvard is not generally a good stand-in for higher ed writ large, yet in this case Harvard’s experience resonated. “The financial meltdown that has caused seismic upheavals in many other corners of the economy hasn’t changed much about how colleges operate,” The Chronicle’s Goldie Blumenstyk wrote in October 2009. How come? The federal government came to the rescue. Direct stimulus funds appeared, and grant and loan programs were preserved, allowing students to enroll in large numbers.
During Covid, a similar pattern emerged. When the pandemic hit, higher-ed observers catastrophized, myself included. In April 2020, I wrote with Barrett J. Taylor that “the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic calamity will reshape higher education for decades — together they could land a devastating blow to the sector.” While students and institutions did suffer during the pandemic, that devastating blow was averted largely because of federal stimulus packages passed during both the first Trump and Biden administrations.
How big of a problem do we now face? Throughout its history, American higher education has weathered storms and proven remarkably resilient. This January, Michigan State University’s president, Kevin M. Guskiewicz, wrapped up a community letter on federal uncertainty with that upbeat history: “I want to acknowledge a milestone that arrives next month with the 170th anniversary of the university’s founding on Feb. 12, 1855. Over the generations and through times of joy and sorrow, we have faced challenges together as Spartans.”
As an early land-grant university, Michigan State was established in part through partnership with the federal government. Over the ensuing 170 years, the higher ed-federal partnership provided stability for the country by persisting through depressions, wars, and pandemics, the federal government fostering growth conditions and ensuring stability for the sector in tough times.
What Guskiewicz’s optimism overlooks is that this time the crisis has been intentionally engineered by the federal government. No federal stimulus package or programs to boost enrollment will be forthcoming. And sure enough, a few months after Guskiewicz’s letter the institution finds itself making deep cuts to our budget. I joined the faculty in 2011 during the mini-boom for higher ed that followed the Great Recession. There have been lean years, including when we all took a salary haircut during the pandemic, but I’ve never seen anything like what’s happening now. It’s hard to believe that the cuts we’re making will not alter the way our university fulfills its mission. This isn’t to rail against the administration, which doesn’t have any good options. It’s to lament what’s being lost.
Yes, Michigan State is a major research university with a multibillion-dollar endowment. It also admits 84 percent of its applicants, brings in around 11,000 new undergraduates a year, mostly from within the state, and graduates about 80 percent of them within six years. We are a prototypical multipurpose university, an exceptional place and, at the same time, an ordinary one.
Rather than forming partnerships with the federal government, colleges will now have to endure the headwinds created by federal policy and, in some cases, engage in direct confrontation with the administration. I do not believe Trump will be able to destroy American higher education, but his administration will try, and the sector will suffer. Research footprints will shrink, the number of programs and activities on offer will be reduced, and the workloads of already-overextended faculty and staff will increase. Senior administrators can’t say so, but in the next few years colleges and universities will become diminished versions of themselves. Those of us who teach or work in higher ed will watch our institutions decline.
What will this look like? It’s hard to make firm predictions about the long-term consequences of a crisis, but if things continue over the next three and a half years as they have gone during the first months of the administration, uncertainty will give way to clear consequences. Campuses will look for revenue to replace federal dollars. Public research universities will increase their enrollments, often at the expense of their regional counterparts. Our wealthiest colleges may quietly roll back their need-blind admissions policies. The steady trickle of emails from university communications announcing exciting new cancer research efforts and new science facilities will slow. Departmental budgets will be slashed to the point where faculty concern is less for vanishing tenure lines than for the survival of the department itself. Teaching course loads will grow, library operational hours will shrink, and students, stung by loan restrictions and red tape, will increasingly rush from class to part-time jobs. In short, the sector will be smaller, poorer, and capable of doing fewer things.
How should leaders respond? Their mission is now to endure the challenge of this downturn while building the foundations for renewing the sector’s compact with the federal government and the American people. To do so, they should lean on their institution’s tradition of continuity and endurance while avoiding the missteps that helped create the current sour political environment. In the past, we have taken our partnership with the federal government for granted, which too often meant that the sector didn’t think about how to engage with the public. If colleges and universities are seen as only looking out for themselves during this trying time, it will be hard to make the case to the public and to politicians to re-establish the higher ed-federal partnership when the next political opportunity arises.
