Colleges nationwide are scrambling to adjust to the Trump administration’s overhaul of higher education as the fall semester has kicked into gear, and insiders expect many of them to fail in the process.
The trade publication Inside Higher Ed and the market analytics firm Hanover Research last week published a national survey showing that 56% of 478 university provosts reported receiving less federal funding in the first six months after President Trump returned to office in January.
Those funding cuts and the Trump administration’s crackdown on leftist ideology on campuses signal a lean year ahead for higher education: Students will see more empty offices and fewer diversity programs compared to a year ago under the Biden administration.
“The federal policy changes are just another market burden for higher education,” said Gary Stocker, a former private college administrator who founded College Viability to evaluate campuses’ financial health. “We are in a consolidation period. That is mostly showing in the form of closures now and mergers in a few years.”
Recent reports suggest Mr. Trump’s move to yank federal funding from “radical left” campus activities could accelerate a trend of higher education “rightsizing” to serve dwindling numbers of students and a fast-changing employment landscape.
The Huron Consulting Group, a higher education strategy firm, estimates that as many as 370 private nonprofit colleges will shutter or merge in the next decade, reflecting declining U.S. birth rates. There are roughly 1,700 such campuses nationwide.
Huron’s projection is more than three times the 114 private nonprofit two- and four-year colleges that the National Center for Education Statistics reported had closed in the 10 years leading up to fall 2020.
While there is no similar tally of college openings, the overall number of private schools shrank over the same period.
“We will see many more college closures in the next few years,” said Matthew Mayhew, an educational administration professor at the public Ohio State University, referring to the Trump changes. “For those that remain open, many academic departments and co-curricular offerings will be eliminated as well.”
Recent Trump cuts have targeted race-based preferences, gender identity programs, anti-Israel protests, foreign enrollment pipelines, in-state tuition for illegal immigrants and federal student aid for low-paying degrees.
Universities have responded by laying off workers, cutting humanities programs, imposing hiring freezes and renaming or abolishing diversity programs.
“All President Trump wants is for common sense to return to college campuses across America,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in an email. “That’s why the president has held our country’s elite universities accountable, ensuring they prioritize fairness, merit, and American values.”
Added Ms. Huston: “President Trump is committed to protecting all students from harassment, enforcing safe and non-discriminatory campuses, promoting true academic excellence, and keeping men out of women’s sports.”
Vibe shift
Several campus insiders interviewed by The Washington Times said cuts to federal research grants and other education policy changes have prompted an abrupt vibe shift this semester, even though legal challenges have slowed some of the efforts in court.
“Right now, what students are likely to see is that jobs in labs on campus will disappear and graduate school admission in the sciences may be very, very tough this year,” said Dick Startz, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Of course, if the administration carries through on all its proposed cuts, then many universities will have major budget crises and it will slam the brakes on much scientific progress.”
Nir Kshetri, a business management professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, said the public UNC system’s 16 campuses were “moving quickly to comply” with new federal policies.
“The most visible adjustments include removing or renaming diversity and equity requirements in general education, auditing major-specific courses for DEI content, and revising or waiving a small number of courses,” Mr. Kshetri said.
In recent months, the Department of Education has declared artificial intelligence a new federal funding priority and investigated dozens of colleges for evading new prohibitions on race-based admissions and faculty hiring.
Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, said the Education Department’s preference for vocational training tied to good-paying tech jobs will likely hasten the demise of low-enrollment English, history and other liberal arts degrees that long promoted race-based preferences.
“We will see more universities turning away from the humanities and the liberal arts, though this will be partly camouflaged by redefining the liberal arts in the direction of vocational skills and practical applications,” said Mr. Wood, a former associate provost at private Boston University. “What will this year’s freshmen see in that regard? Fewer curricular options than in years past, and perhaps the first stages of weeding out frivolous courses and overtly politicized ones.”
Some insiders also noted a growing pushback against controversial campus speakers and increased fears of violence following the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah college.
In a survey of 68,510 undergraduates at 257 top colleges, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression reported this month that a record high of 1 in 3 supported using violence to stop a campus speaker on at least some occasions.
“With the assassination of Charlie Kirk on a college campus, the president will use various agencies of federal law enforcement to be more assertive when it comes to quashing campus violence,” said Michael Warder, a California-based nonprofit consultant and former vice chancellor of private Pepperdine University.
Others reported a drop in international students on their campuses amid a Trump administration crackdown on illegal immigration pipelines and related campus protests against the war in Gaza.
“The attacks — abductions by [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] in cooperation with campus police — on foreign students and experts will have serious downstream effects,” said Meera Sitharam, a tenured computer sciences professor and president of the University of Florida chapter of United Faculty of Florida, a statewide professors’ union.
The future
Higher education analysts say the Trump administration’s campaign to disrupt longstanding academic trends could reshape academia for years to come.
Steven N. Durlauf, a University of Chicago economist specializing in wealth inequality, said foreign enrollment drops and reduced federal funding for climate change research are only the tip of the spear.
“Efforts to end financial assistance for historically underrepresented groups or even to ban efforts at outreach will change the composition of student bodies for the worse,” Mr. Durlauf said. “Inequalities by ethnicity and gender are a fact, and a true meritocrat should support efforts to uncover talent when it may be obscured because of these inequalities.”
While regional liberal arts colleges and private campuses will struggle the most with the administration’s new outcome-driven student aid policies, it remains to be seen which ones will survive.
“Institutional responses will vary as they await more clarity and have confidence in the implementation approach,” said Melanie Storey, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “If postsecondary institutions are slow to change, it is in part because the system itself … is so complex.”
Dan Godlin, founder of College Commit, a New York City-based tutoring and college admissions services firm, said he has already started counseling families to navigate a speedup in colleges going out of business.
“A generation ago, very few parents asked me whether a college might close before their child graduated,” Mr. Godlin said. “Now it is one of the first questions I get when we talk about small regional schools. That shift in mindset underscores just how much pressure institutions are under and how urgently they need to adapt.”
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.