Crisis in higher education from all sides, but especially by the Trump Administration
The right's hate of higher learning, seen as dominated by progressive politics, is meted out in a multi-pronged campaign under the Trump Administration ("Chris Matthews suggests Trump 'smart' to target Harvard and elite universities," Fox News). From the AP story, "Trump restricts federal research funding, a lifeblood for colleges":
“It looks like much of the playbook is intimidation, more so than actual substantiated legal findings,” said Michael Pillera, director of educational equity issues at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “I think all of this is designed as an attempt to intimidate all universities, not just the institutions under investigation.”
1. Universities with students supporting Palestinians over Israel are attacked for being anti-semitic. This happened after Israel retaliated by attacking the Gaza Strip after Hamas terrorist attacks in October 2023, equating the two acts as equally heinous (which I agree with). Lack of virulent support of Israel has been attacked, with minimal space accorded to the Palestinian position.
.webp)
Students protesting against the war in Gaza, and passersby walking through Harvard Yard, are seen at an encampment at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., on April 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File)
2. Which is used as an excuse to investigate Universities and cut off their federal funds. Columbia was told to give back $400 million because they claim the university is anti-semitic and they caved ("Columbia University caves to demands to restore $400m from Trump administration," Guardian).
.jfif)
A protest calling on Harvard to fight back ("Amid crackdown on elite universities, Cambridge protesters urge Harvard not to concede to Trump demands," Globe). Caption: Signs including "Hey Harvard Alums Say Grow A Spine!" and "Hands Off Free Speech" rise above a crowd at a Cambridge Common rally.Erin Clark/Globe Staff
Harvard was attacked too ("Why Harvard Decided to Fight Trump," New York Times) and hasn't capitulated ("Standing up to Trump was ‘a step on the road back for Harvard’," Boston Globe), so Trump retaliated further ("Trump administration freezes more than $2 billion in funding tied to Harvard," Globe), going as far as threatening the university's tax exempt status ("After Harvard rejects US demands, Trump adds new threat," Reuters).
3. Students espousing pro-Palestinian (or so called "anti-American") opinions are being denied visas and deported ("14 student visas revoked at UW, Seattle University, and Gonzaga," KUOW/NPR, "Trump administration revokes visas for over 25 students in the St. Louis area," St. Louis NPR, "Why are so many students in Mass. losing their visas? The answer lies in a little-known database," Boston Globe,"Nine people affiliated with MIT have had visas revoked, university president says," Globe) starting with Mahmoud Khalil, a student at Columbia University ("US judge rules Mahmoud Khalil can be deported for his views" and "The case against Mahmoud Khalil is meant to silence American dissent" Guardian). From the Globe:
At first it was just a handful of students with some connection to pro-Palestinian activity, then dozens more, many of whom had no link to the protest movement. Now the Trump administration has abruptly terminated the legal status of nearly 5,000 international students and scholars across the country, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, setting off waves of fear on campuses around the country.
4. If it's not "anti-semitism" its DEI or diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Universities and other institutions ("The protectors of Santa Monica Bay are caving to Trump’s dangerous demands," Los Angeles Times) have been told to drop it, or not be grant eligible ("More than 50 universities face federal investigations as part of Trump’s anti-DEI campaign," AP). Many universities have capitulated including the University of Michigan ("University of Michigan shutters its flagship diversity program," Guardian).
Related is the plan to eliminate the cabinet agency the Department of Education ("Trump orders a plan to dismantle the Education Department while keeping some core functions," AP).
5. Separately the Trump Administration is suspending, cutting or threatening to cut grants to universities more generally ("Trump restricts federal research funding, a lifeblood for colleges," AP). Northwestern has been told $750 million--almost all of the money they get from the government--is at risk.
In the interim schools are cutting back programs ("Leading Harvard scientist ordered to halt research in funding freeze," Boston Globe), reducing graduate program enrollments, etc. From the article:
After decades of partnership with the U.S. government, colleges are facing new doubts about the future of their federal funding. President Donald Trump’s administration has been using the funding spigot to seek compliance with his agenda, cutting off money to schools including Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. All the while, universities across the country are navigating cuts to grants for research institutions.
The squeeze on higher education underscores how much American colleges depend on the federal government — a provider of grants and contracts that have amounted to close to half the total revenue of some research universities, according to an Associated Press analysis.
It adds up to a crisis for universities, and a problem for the country as a whole, say school administrators and advocates for academic freedom. America’s scientific and medical research capabilities are tightly entwined with its universities as part of a compact that started after World War II to develop national expertise and knowledge.
Also see "These 77 Colleges Have the Most to Lose From Trump’s Cuts," Chronicle of Higher Education.
To me, (1), (2), (3) and (4) are a violation of the first amendment ("Under Trump, freedom of speech in universities takes on a new meaning," NPR, "Harvard’s challenge to Trump administration could test limits of government power," AP). Also see "A handful of college presidents emerge as leaders of burgeoning resistance movement against Trump," Globe.
(5) is devastating to research, and by extension the preeminence of US science, and long term economic development. Some professors are decamping to other countries ("Yale professor who studies fascism fleeing US to work in Canada," Guardian), the same thing that happened with Britain after it left the EU and stopped participating in the Horizon research program. If you can't get scientific grants they can't work.
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch puts it like this:
In less than three months, the new Trump regime has gutted spending on scientific research and the humanities, broadly claimed “antisemitism” as a rationale for imposing or threatening massive federal aid cuts to elite universities, and chilled academic freedom with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and canceling student visas for foreigners. This all seems part and parcel with the GOP’s Maoist Cultural Revolution plan for a glorious American future in which the knowledge industry is abandoned for an economy of workers with tiny screwdrivers assembling iPhones.
China is already rapidly gaining on the US in terms of the amount of research, funding, and patents ("‘I think it is actively happening’: Is Boston’s biotech industry doomed?," Boston Globe, "China overtakes the US in scientific research output," Guardian).
Conclusion. Since destruction of higher education is the goal, appeasement won't work, they'll always up the ante ("Appeasing Trump Is Not the Answer," Chronicle of Higher Education). From the article:
These three strategies — to sow dissension, to terrorize the vulnerable, and to suppress disagreement — are meant to work in tandem, to reduce the possibility that Columbia, or any university like it, might serve as a counterweight to the authoritarian, illiberal mode of democracy that the Trump administration is working to bring about, drawing on a playbook developed by Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
... the authoritarian playbook involves reneging even on provisional compromises to achieve its ultimate goal: eliminating any alternative centers of power. That is why it is no surprise that further funding has been pulled.
If we remain in the business of free inquiry, our activities will offend the government in power. Half-measures seem certain to damage our reputation irreparably without any guarantee of future security.
Also see the journal article "Enacting the “Illiberal Playbook” in Hungary and Poland," Perspective on Politics.
.College aged students aren't reading books. ("Young people won’t, or can’t, read a book. Now democracy is dying. Coincidence?," Philadelphia Inquirer).@rosehorowitch tells us about how high school and college education practices have shifted away from full-book reading, leading to a generation of students who lack the concentration to engage in deep reading for more than a few minutes; and @natmalkus talks about the alarming decline in literacy scores among students and adults, and how screens plus education policy shifts have fed a slow-burning crisis in literacy and deep attention
Fewer babies means fewer college students means many colleges will close, affecting the economic well being of many communities, and a shrinking of the knowledge economy ("The reason why dozens of Mass. colleges could close in the next decade," Boston Globe). From the article:
But there is more at stake than the fates of colleges and universities. Massachusetts has disproportionately depended on its celebrated higher education sector to drive its economy. Education is the state’s third-largest industry, based on the most recent figures from the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development. It also fuels the first and second biggest sectors: health care and professional, scientific, and technical services. As enrollment drops in the years to come, those industries are projected to face shortages of workers. There are expected to be 2,200 fewer graduates per year than are needed in life sciences, for instance, according to the Massachusetts Biotechnology Education Foundation.
... One of Massachusetts’ greatest strengths may be on the cusp of becoming a weakness. “There’s this symbiotic relationship between the universities and the knowledge economy in this state that it could be easy to take for granted and assume it would always be there,” says Mark Melnik, director of economic and public policy research at the Donahue Institute at UMass Amherst. “You don’t realize some of the vulnerabilities until they start presenting themselves.”
WRT the economic development impact, it's more about smaller, regional colleges:
... The Harvards and MITs of the world “really don’t have much to worry about,” says Brendan Cantwell, a professor at Michigan State University who studies higher education economics. “But there are a ton of private colleges that are smaller and that have regional draw, that do not have big national markets, and that are really reliant on tuition. As the local market shrinks for those campuses, things are already difficult, and they will only become more difficult.”
Some states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have been consolidating and/or closing regional colleges for some time.
But not just local impact:
The economic impact goes beyond those college towns. It means fewer educated workers, in a state that disproportionately relies on them. “Our leading industries are here in large part because of the talented workforce,” says Edward Lambert Jr., executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. “One of the things that have kept them here is the talent pipeline.” If young people stop coming, and learning skills employers need, he says, “That affects not only the future pipeline, but present workers.”
Trump destroying a major US export, foreign students studying at US higher education institutions. Higher education is/was one of the Countries biggest exports of services ("Trump is killing one of our strongest exports," Washington Post).
President Donald Trump says he wants to reduce our trade deficit. Yet he’s destroying one of our winningest exports: higher education. Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined.
Labels: community economic development, economic development, foreign students, higher education, immigration
posted by Richard Layman @ 8:30 AM&Permanent Link
11 Comments:
Missouri colleges prepare for looming enrollment cliff
https://www.stlpr.org/education/2025-04-15/missouri-institutions-prepare-looming-enrollment-cliff
“The phrase ‘enrollment cliff’ just refers to the idea that we anticipated a decline in the number of young people headed to college because there's been a decline in the number of births,” Grawe said.
A decline in birth rates means the potential pool of college applicants is shrinking.
“With a 17% decline in the number of young people having been born, we would have to see an increase in matriculation rate that is frankly, not realistic,” Grawe said.
This reality presents unique financial challenges for schools. If they can’t recruit enough students, some Missouri schools face significant cuts or closure.
Last March, Fontbonne University leaders announced the school would close, amid budget shortfalls brought on by a more than 70% drop in enrollment in the last 15 years.
Trump can’t fix American universities by breaking them
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/21/universities-columbia-trump-attack
Trump’s war on universities will not end well for him
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/16/trump-harvard-columbia-universities-higher-ed/
WashU halts 2 construction projects, cites federal funding cuts
https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/local/washu-halts-2-construction-projects-cites-federal-funding-cuts/63-cb058a9f-0f8d-40c9-b1cb-175bbe9c279f
The College Conservatives Took Over (New School, Florida)
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-college-that-conservatives-took-over
So have many other things since January of 2023, when Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor, stacked the Board of Trustees at this tiny, sleepy, lefty liberal-arts college with conservatives. New College, his administration believed, had become distracted by dubious social-justice aims. With a hard-charging board majority, however, the institution would reorient toward the classical tradition, attracting more students and eradicating toxic wokeness in the process — or so the thinking went.
The changes March touted in the golf cart that day were physical rather than political, underscoring the breakneck pace at which the campus has evolved thanks to a windfall in state funding. We passed freshly painted facades, sand volleyball courts mid-construction, a greenhouse that replaced what March called a “decrepit” predecessor, and a blank plot of land where a squat building once stood and future dorms might go. Yet we could not avoid markers of the college’s ideological shift. We puttered past a neighborhood whose residents were alarmed at the prospect of a “Freedom Institute,” a multimillion-dollar center to promote civil discourse, being built across the street (the college has said it will go elsewhere). We walked by a room once called the Gender and Diversity Center, which students used to stock with their artwork and a “free store” of donated stuff. The center no longer exists and the room was empty, save for some furniture.
As we headed into the library, March referred to an August controversy that made national news, when books from the center ended up near a dumpster, presumably for disposal. A trustee cheered the move on X, writing, “We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash.” (A student previously told The Chronicle that she and others saved most of the books. A campus police officer and the library dean tried to stop them, but they convinced the dean they were distinct from damaged library books piled inside the dumpster.) Ultimately the center’s books “all got preserved and donated,” March told me, though he acknowledged that they took a “roundabout way of getting there.”
Two years in, New College’s transformation has followed a similarly roundabout path. The staunchest supporters of DeSantis’s maneuver saw it as monumental. In their narrative, liberal academe was being recaptured, with New College, an unmitigated progressive fiasco, as the beachhead. The most ardent critics told a different story — that conservative interlopers would callously destroy an educational institution that was doing perfectly fine before they arrived.
But New College today resembles neither the conservative dream nor the liberal nightmare. Part everyday small college and part proxy battle in the culture war, it is plagued by ordinary questions over how to boost enrollment amid extraordinary levels of outside scrutiny. While some professors still resist what they see as an intolerable intrusion of politics onto campus, others have embraced the shift. The larger political significance is never far away, but leaders’ ambitions for the college have not been fully realized.
At least, not yet. Whether New College will become a playbook for reformation of higher ed writ large, as its president hopes it will, carries greater stakes than it did in 2023. The Trump administration is wielding the power of the federal government against colleges on a scale never before seen, seeking to achieve a vision not dissimilar from the one that preoccupies the Florida politician who set his sights on Sarasota.
... But New College did not work well for everyone. Before the board overhaul, it had just 690 students, and its second-year retention rate was middling or at the lower end of Florida’s public universities. Its four-year graduation rate for full-time, first-time-in-college students, which hovers at around 55 percent, has long lagged behind liberal-arts colleges elsewhere. In the 2010s, when trying to answer why undergraduates dropped out, college leaders identified student culture as a factor. While students welcomed some ideas and identities, according to the leaders, they could be dismissive and punitive toward others, particularly on an email forum where disputes erupted and spiraled. In a 2017 survey of students, faculty, and staff, a third of participating students said they’d seriously considered leaving due to campus-climate issues, including the feeling that the college was an echo chamber, according to the report. “New College is not an accepting atmosphere,” one survey respondent said. “It is accepting of those who accept their views.”
... Days after DeSantis appointed six new members to the New College board, Michelle Goldberg, a left-leaning Times opinion columnist, wrote in an essay that the governor wanted to “demolish” Florida’s “most progressive public college,” at least in its current form. The most prominent appointee of the bunch, Christopher F. Rufo, an influential polemicist against critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, told Goldberg, “We want to provide an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values.” (Rufo did not reply to The Chronicle’s interview request. The Florida Senate rejected one of DeSantis’s original six trustees. The governor appointed a replacement, who was approved. A seventh new member was also appointed by the university system’s governing board, establishing a majority.)
Book: Storming the Ivory Tower: How a Florida College Became Ground Zero in the Struggle to Take Back Our Campuses
... The complex problem Abramson and others at New College are trying to solve vexes small liberal-arts colleges across the country: How do you attract more students when interest in the humanities is on the decline and career readiness is often their parents’ ultimate concern? To Abramson, part of the answer is promoting what New College already does well, like giving students plenty of individual attention. Though he’s critical of what he calls the “woke-and-trans-friendly” branding niche that the “old” New College occupied, Abramson is not as strident as the college’s harshest detractors. The place has an “incredible skeleton,” he told me. This is an irony that pervades the “new” New College — its current leaders have criticized progressive excesses in academe, in some cases portraying New College as the exemplar, but now they have to sell that same college to potential applicants.
... And what professors feared the most — mass firings and meddling in classroom instruction — has not happened. In February of 2023, Rufo, the most vocal trustee, wrote on X that “we will be shutting down low-performing, ideologically-captured academic departments.” So far, just one program, gender studies, has been killed off. In April of 2023, the board at Corcoran’s request voted to deny tenure to five professors who had sought it early, which was not uncommon at New College. Many worried the move was a portent. But a year later, the board granted four of those five professors tenure. (The professor who was denied tenure filed a lawsuit against New College’s board in 2023, which is ongoing.) As one faculty member told me, “We do not live in the absolute worst-case scenario.”
Yet there’s no question the balance of power has shifted. Professors complain of decisions being made without them, without explanation. Hiring — a major priority of Corcoran’s — is a major source of frustration. In May, two faculty leaders expressed concern about a process that had “replaced faculty expertise with administrative fiat.” According to a letter they wrote, in 43 instances that academic year, New College’s leaders either shoehorned candidates into on-campus interviews, rejected job offers that’d been recommended by search committees, or made divisions extend offers to candidates who were “unqualified or did not fill the needs of the discipline,” by and large without explaining why.
"Stronger together"
UW, other WA universities decry Trump’s ‘political interference’
4/22/25
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/uw-other-wa-universities-decry-trump-admins-political-interference
The University of Washington and Seattle University presidents are among at least 150 institution leaders around the country to decry what they call “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” from the Trump administration.
“We must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses,” the leaders wrote in a signed statement released Tuesday morning by the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “We will always seek effective and fair financial practices, but we must reject the coercive use of public research funding.”
The statement is the strongest sign yet of an emerging front against the Trump administration’s threats to pull billions in federal grants and contracts from universities. Several elite colleges, most of them Ivy League schools, have already been impacted and dozens more are also in danger of losing federal funding.
https://www.governing.com/policy/international-students-have-been-a-bonanza-for-u-s-communities
4/22/25
International Students Have Been a Bonanza for U.S. Communities
More than 1.1 million college students from other countries inject billions of dollars into local economies and support hundreds of thousands of jobs. Losing them over fears of federal immigration policies would be a blow for cities and towns across the country.
... Higher education is America’s 10th-largest export, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. (Yes, even though students are coming into the U.S. for their education, economists consider it an export.)
... The average international student brings a wallet stuffed with about $29,000 to spend on everything from tuition to pizza. As these students rent apartments, buy books and order DoorDash delivery to fuel all-nighters, they’re pumping money into the local community.
This money translates into American jobs. On average, a new job is created for every four international students enrolled in a U.S. college or university. In the 2023-24 academic year, about 378,175 jobs were created. And that’s just counting jobs that are directly supported by international students, such as local business hiring to staff retail shops and restaurants. If you count those jobs indirectly supported by international students, such as employees at a distribution center, the number is even higher.
... In the top three of those public institutions alone — Arizona State University, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the University of California, Berkeley — international students contributed nearly $1.7 billion, supporting over 16,800 jobs. Expand that to the top 10 — the University of California system takes four of those spots — and the numbers pop up to $4.68 billion and 47,136 jobs.
Yet international students aren’t just boosting the economies of major university towns. Consider Mankato, a small city of 45,000 about 80 miles from Minneapolis that hosts a Minnesota State University campus. In the 2023-24 academic year, more than 1,700 international students called Mankato their home away from home.
Those students brought an infusion of $45.9 million into that community, supporting around 190 jobs. There are dozens of similar campuses in cities and towns like Mankato across the country. It adds up quickly.
In addition to private and public universities, community colleges attract thousands of global scholars. Although their international enrollment declined during COVID-19, community colleges are resurgent, attracting some 59,315 international students in 2024, with China, Vietnam and Nepal leading the countries-of-origin list.
As Trump’s Cuts Loom Large, Colleges Are Under Pressure to Punish Anti-Israel Speech
https://archive.ph/vR30l
chronicle of higher education
4/18/25
https://archive.ph/BMyFg
Chronicle of Higher Education
4/16/25
Can Colleges Survive Trump’s Cuts?
There are a handful of viable financial strategies. They all have downsides.
While only a few universities have had the bulk of their federal research funding frozen, their ranks are likely to swell as the Trump administration looks to force elite private colleges into compliance with its vision for the sector. Blue-state public flagship universities are likely the next target, and even institutions that avoid such politicized attention are likely to suffer from structural cuts in federal grants and contracts. These cuts have happened so suddenly that some universities began to take action immediately in order to preserve cash flow, a key lesson from the pandemic. But this is also a longer-term financial issue as 45 months remain in the Trump administration, and there is no guarantee that federal funding returns to normal in 2029.
= Increase the endowment draw and increase fund raising
= issue bonds
= Conduct layoffs and hiring and spending freezes
= Increase tuition revenue
https://www.inquirer.com/news/trump-student-visas-penn-temple-restored-20250425.html
Trump administration drops effort to revoke student visas, attorneys say, restoring study permission in Philly and elsewhere
More than 1,800 international students have had their permission to study here revoked in the past several weeks, according to a tracker maintained by Insider Higher Ed. More than a million students from around the globe attend American colleges and universities, with half coming from China and India.
Post a Comment
<< Home