The country’s most elite universities are panicking over President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against them, but their problems run far deeper than a stand-off with the White House.
Fewer students are applying to top schools. Private donors are closing their checkbooks. Lucrative foreign student visas are in the State Department’s crosshairs.
And the diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies that grew around universities’ desire to pursue liberal social justice not only inflicted reputational damage — they may have exposed the schools to civil rights violations.
“Higher education periodically goes through crises, which sometimes feel more existential than others. By all indications, this is among the more serious crises that we’ve faced in many decades,” Neil Gross, a sociology professor at Colby College, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s been building for some time.”
Conservatives have long criticized academia for its liberal slant. As Republicans and Democrats have become increasingly stratified by education levels, the Right’s disdain for higher education has reflected the broader class warfare brewing between the parties.
However, disruptive anti-Israel protests that sprouted on college campuses after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack dialed up the intensity of the debate. The failure of university presidents to contain chaos that eventually led to the cancellation of in-person classes and even graduation ceremonies exposed what critics saw as both a failure of leadership and the natural consequence of an institutional worldview that assigns value to student groups based on where they rank in a hierarchy of oppression.
Now, universities are facing the threat of government intervention as well.
“I think you’re seeing, in some ways, the culmination of a very long struggle over the direction of higher education,” Gross said.
Applications take a tumble
Politicization and protest drama were already driving some students away from top universities.
Columbia University, home of some of the most destructive protests, saw a small dip in its early decision applications for the coming academic year. The school received 2.28% fewer early decision applications than the previous year, according to data made public in December.
Harvard University refused to share its early admissions numbers for the upcoming school year. The university “marked a shift away from nearly 70 years of precedent of sharing data about the admitted class on decision days” when it declined in December to publish the number of students who had applied to the school for early admission, according to the Harvard Crimson.
However, for the previous year, early admissions applications had already fallen by 17% from the more than 9,500 students who had applied during the early admissions process for the class of 2027.
At Brown University, another Ivy League school targeted by the Trump administration, early decision applications fell more than 19% between the last academic year and the upcoming one, according to data released by the school in December. University officials attributed the drop to Brown’s decision to bring back the requirement that students submit standardized test scores with their applications, which the school removed during the pandemic.
Critics say the application decline stems from reputational damage the schools have sustained after years of embracing DEI over academic excellence.
“They’ve got this enrollment drop and they don’t seem to understand that their brand is suffering,” Stanley Ridgley, a management professor at Drexel University and author of DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education, told the Washington Examiner. “And yet the tuition keeps going up and the quality of the education keeps going down.”
Some state schools have reaped the benefits of the Ivy League’s struggles.
The number of students from northern states attending public universities in the South spiked by 30% between 2018 and 2022, according to a Wall Street Journal data analysis published in September. Colleges in Texas and West Virginia led schools across the Southwest in receiving a 29% increase in applications for the class of 2029.
Falling enrollment doesn’t just affect university budgets, which could take in fewer tuition dollars with a smaller incoming class; it can also affect the perceived prestige of top schools. That’s because colleges receiving fewer applications may be forced to accept a greater number of students, including some who may not have made the cut had they applied in previous years. Doing so can inflate a college’s acceptance rate, a metric often used to gauge a school’s exclusivity.
Ivy League universities saw their acceptance rates rise this year for the class of 2029.
Less money, more problems
Federal funding is not the only source of income presently at risk for elite universities.
Amid the backlash to top schools’ handling of anti-Israel protests and leadership upheaval at several universities, some private donors stopped giving money before the fight with Trump began.
Donations to Harvard fell by 14% in fiscal 2024, according to the Harvard Crimson.
“The $151 million decline marks one of the most significant year-over-year drops in donations in the past decade,” the school paper reported.
Columbia’s donations fell even more sharply on its annual Giving Day in October. The university took in 27.9% fewer donations on its major fundraising day than it did the previous year, the Columbia Spectator reported.
Trump’s proposal to cancel federal funding could further undermine the financial stability of universities. His review of Harvard and other schools’ tax-exempt status could pose an existential threat.
“They have been contemptuous and working at odds against the American people who pay their bills for decades, and they’ve been flagrantly violating the law while they do it for ideological reasons,” Inez Stepman, senior policy and legal analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum, told the Washington Examiner. “This is really going to have to change how they operate, because they’re totally dependent on federal money.”
Although elite schools such as Harvard have enormous endowments — at more than $50 billion, Harvard’s is the largest academic endowment in the world — fed in part by donations from wealthy alumni, universities can’t easily access the money in times of trouble. Republicans have also floated going after endowments, proposing a higher tax on endowments that currently enjoy a tax rate under 2%.
The financial stress could push top colleges further into crisis.
Harvard has warned that the $2 billion funding freeze Trump has already initiated could force it to lay off staff and even euthanize research animals absent a reversal. The university has refused to accede to Trump’s demands for changes at the school, which could lead to additional cuts. Brown University, also facing funding threats from the Trump administration, has said the cuts could imperil research on semiconductors and computing that is vital to national security.
“I think that the endowment tax, the idea of increasing that and the move to pull tax-exempt status from schools like Harvard, that’s the existential threat,” Gross said. “I think the money piece is really the biggest issue right now.”
Much of academia and top Democrats have rushed to defend Harvard from Trump’s most aggressive attacks, framing the fight as a First Amendment struggle between an overreaching government and a private institution. Harvard’s allies, including former President Barack Obama, have encouraged the school not to back down.
However, others see the current moment as an opportunity for an overdue course correction after years of drifting from the core values of higher education.
“This is a comeuppance that has been long coming,” Ridgley said. “The bar tab that Harvard ran up over the last 20 years, well, that tab is coming due.”
A civil rights reckoning
Trump’s threats against taxpayer funding at Harvard included allegations that the university has run afoul of Title VI, which protects civil rights at schools that receive federal money.
“Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment,” Trump administration officials wrote in a letter to Harvard on April 11. Among other demands, the Trump administration required the university to close all DEI offices and end racial preferences in hiring and promotion practices.
Harvard was on the losing end of a Supreme Court decision, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in 2023 that outlawed the consideration of race in college admissions. But critics say top universities such as Harvard still engage in discriminatory practices, such as enforcing student conduct violations unevenly and holding graduation ceremonies that are separated by race.
“What this comes down to is that universities have been, frankly, allowed and have become used to operating in ways that are completely contrary to the civil rights statutes and their obligations under those statutes,” Stepman said. “Trump has an obligation under law, actually, to withhold federal funds from schools that are in violation of civil rights statutes.”
Trump’s scrutiny of college diversity practices marks a dramatic shift from how Democratic administrations have sought to enforce civil rights laws. While Democrats have viewed civil rights laws only as tools to prevent discrimination against racial minorities, the Trump administration appears to be targeting programs that allow discrimination against anyone, including white or Jewish students and staff.
“It’s always been illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or even to take race into consideration at all in decisions about hiring, firing, and promotion,” Stepman said. “That was always illegal; it was not enforced by the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission],” she added.
DEI programming has ballooned at many colleges over the past several years, from individual diversity offices to networks of bureaucracies that hold sway over everything from faculty decisions to classroom instruction.
Some schools invested heavily in DEI at the height of the craze over the now-controversial ideology. The University of Michigan, for example, has spent more than $250 million since 2016 on DEI programs and hiring 241 DEI staffers. A few years after implementing DEI policies campus-wide, students and staff reported feeling less positive about the state of race relations at the university.
“It’s the biggest con of the century and it almost toppled higher education,” Ridgley said of DEI. “To say it’s extreme is kind of an understatement. There’s no academic justification for any of this … It is basic pseudoscience.”
Ridgley said widespread DEI policies have placed DEI officers in positions of influence over aspects of academia for which they have no expertise.
“You have unqualified, mediocre people who are educated in basically nothing except this worldview of good versus evil,” he said. “They demand to be involved in individual hiring of faculty. They demand to be involved in what the curriculum consists of.”
DEI has grown so influential on college campuses despite being divisive in the rest of the country, in part because of the ideological uniformity of university leaders and administrators. For example, over 99% of Harvard’s top officials donate to Democrats, the Washington Examiner reported this week.
Critics say federal funding meant to support the public good of higher education should not continue subsidizing institutions that stifle intellectual diversity in favor of one side.
REPORT SHOWS HOW SCHOOLS ARE EVADING TRUMP’S ANTI-DEI EXECUTIVE ORDERS
That level of bias is at the heart of academia’s current crisis, Gross said.
“As a social scientist, I think that it’s very hard to maintain an institution that is supposed to serve the public interest when it’s the case that most of the people who are running the institution — faculty, administrators — are all kind of on one side of the political aisle,” he said. “I think that is just a difficult position, and probably not a very tenable position, for an institution in the public interest to be in.”
