After returning to the White House following the 2024 election, the Trump administration quickly placed higher education at the center of its policy storm: massive layoffs at the Department of Education, nationwide tightening or outright termination of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, freezing billions of dollars in research funding at elite universities under the banner of “combating campus antisemitism,” tightening international student visas, and redirecting research funding priorities. By November 2025, the White House and federal agencies had issued or implemented dozens of executive orders and regulatory measures in the areas of civil rights, research, immigration, and student aid. Corresponding lawsuits are queuing up in federal courts across the country, and the American university system is undergoing the most dramatic restructuring seen since the Cold War.
Administrative Storm: From Department of Education Layoffs to DEI Contraction
At the start of Trump’s second term, the federal government launched a broad “rightsizing” plan, with the Department of Education as one of the primary targets for staff cuts. According to personnel announcements and media reports, the department’s workforce will be reduced by approximately 1,300 positions in 2025, affecting the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), federal student aid, and research coordination units, shrinking the overall staff from about 4,000 to just over 3,000. Multiple states and teachers’ unions have sued, arguing that the move “effectively undermines the federal government’s basic guarantees of educational equity and student rights,” but the Supreme Court in the summer of 2025 allowed the layoffs to proceed during appeals, with only lower courts imposing limited restrictions on certain details.
The staff reductions have directly impaired the handling of campus discrimination and sexual assault complaints while paving the way for subsequent policies: OCR case intake has slowed, but processing of a select few “exemplary cases” has become more selective and punitive. Blue-state governments have attempted to backstop the cuts with state funds and state-level civil rights agencies, while some red states have openly welcomed federal “deregulation,” proactively demanding stricter oversight of DEI, human-rights research, and student organizations at their universities. The tension between state and federal authority has thus been concretely manifested on campuses.
On the DEI front, the White House issued multiple executive orders and departmental guidance documents requiring federal agencies to “end race- and identity-based preferences” and establishing “restoring merit-based opportunity” as the governing principle for education and research funding allocation. The Departments of Education and Justice sent so-called “compliance letters” and investigation notices demanding that universities review their DEI offices, mandatory diversity training, and identity-based advantages in admissions, hiring, and promotion, on pain of losing federal funding eligibility.
In March 2025, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced investigations into 45 universities, focusing in part on whether their partnerships with The PhD Project—a nonprofit dedicated to increasing the proportion of minority PhD students in business schools—violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Institutions named included the University of Michigan, Ohio State University, Rice University, the University of Kentucky, the University of Oregon, and other research-intensive universities. Under public and legal pressure, these schools suspended or restructured the relevant programs, redesigning admissions and funding rules to focus on “socioeconomic background rather than race.”
At the grassroots implementation level, “abolishing DEI” has moved from slogan to organizational restructuring: Texas Christian University announced the closure of its Office of Diversity and Inclusion and merged or terminated programs in Women’s & Gender Studies and Comparative Race & Ethnicity Studies; the University of Virginia, University of Michigan, and others cut DEI positions and renamed related courses and administrative units in response to federal and state pressure. According to statistics from The Chronicle of Higher Education and other outlets, since early 2025 hundreds of institutions have rebranded, folded DEI functions into student affairs, or eliminated them entirely.
Admissions structures are also quietly changing. After the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions in 2023, the Trump administration’s anti-DEI policies have further intensified the “de-racialization” of elite-university admissions. Preliminary fall 2025 data show that the proportion of Black and Hispanic first-year students at Harvard and other top schools has fallen noticeably, while White and Asian proportions have risen; at some institutions the Black freshman share has dropped several percentage points from 2023 levels. For public universities—especially those already dependent on state appropriations—these shifts are compounded by rising tuition and tighter in-state scholarships, raising the bar for low-income students to enter four-year institutions.
Antisemitism Investigations: The Collision of Safety Promises and Academic Freedom
Against the backdrop of two years of campus protests following the Israel–Gaza war, the Trump administration elevated “combating campus antisemitism” to a national priority. An executive order signed in January 2025 on “further combating antisemitism” directed the Departments of Justice, Education, and Homeland Security to coordinate tougher enforcement of Title VI (prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, or national origin), bringing certain pro-Palestinian slogans and boycott-Israel actions under heightened scrutiny.
The Justice Department subsequently announced a Campus Antisemitism Task Force led by conservative commentator and attorney Leo Terrell, targeting campuses with large protests and “safety controversies” for joint investigations. Meanwhile, the Department of Education’s OCR opened or expanded Title VI investigations at more than 60 universities, ranging from Ivy League schools such as Columbia, Harvard, and Penn to large public institutions like Ohio State.
The core coercive tool has been federal funding. In spring 2025, the Trump administration froze approximately $400 million in federal research funding to Columbia University for “failing to adequately protect Jewish students” and imposed a package of remedial demands, including reform of student disciplinary procedures and adoption of a federally recommended antisemitism definition for reviewing course content. After months of negotiations, Columbia agreed to pay more than $2.2 billion in settlements (including roughly $200 million in federal civil-rights penalties and a compensation fund for faculty and staff) in exchange for the release of most frozen funds.
Harvard, Princeton, and others chose to fight in court. Federal agencies launched a comprehensive review of approximately $8.7 billion in ongoing and future Harvard research contracts and suspended payment of more than $2 billion in existing grants, one condition being the “complete termination of DEI programs and cooperation with law-enforcement investigations of campus protests.” Harvard faculty, together with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), sued, alleging the government was using funding to force universities to surrender academic freedom and campus autonomy. In September 2025, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs in Boston ruled that freezing Harvard’s funds violated the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, finding that the government, lacking sufficient evidence, was engaging in ideological retaliation under the guise of combating antisemitism, and issued a permanent injunction against similar actions.
Numerous lawsuits and investigations are intertwined: joint litigation by the AAUP, unions, and student groups stresses that Title VI enforcement must protect Jewish students from discrimination without equating criticism of Israeli policy with antisemitism. The government insists that certain Israel-related expressions and harassment on campus have created a hostile environment.
The direct consequence has been a chilling effect on campus speech and curriculum design: Middle East studies and Palestinian-studies courses at several universities have been suspended or merged; some professors have been investigated or suspended over social-media posts; student organizations face stricter scrutiny when applying for campus space and funding. Although some data indicate a decline in reported antisemitic incidents, complaints of discrimination and retaliation by Arab and Muslim students have risen, leaving campuses struggling to balance “safety” and “freedom.”
Research and Immigration: Double Squeeze on the Innovation System
In research funding, the Trump administration has made no secret of its strategy of using dollars to steer ideology. An August 2025 executive order on “Improving Oversight of Federal Grants” required agencies to review existing projects and eliminate those deemed to have “no direct relation to national security or economic competitiveness.” The National Science Foundation’s attempt to cap university indirect cost rates at 15% was sued by MIT, Princeton, the University of California system, and others; a Boston federal judge subsequently called the move “arbitrary and capricious” and blocked it temporarily.
More shocking have been targeted funding cuts to individual universities. After Columbia and Penn, Princeton publicly disclosed that multiple Energy Department, NASA, and Defense Department projects—totaling tens of millions of dollars—were abruptly terminated; some climate and environmental projects were defunded by Commerce and other agencies for allegedly “exaggerating risks” or “creating climate anxiety.” Related lawsuits argue that the government has exceeded traditional administrative discretion by using funding conditions to intervene in research topics and campus governance.
On immigration and international students, the administration has both continued and intensified prior visa restrictions on certain Middle Eastern and African countries while strengthening background checks on STEM graduate students and visiting scholars from China and elsewhere. The State Department and DHS have stepped up visa revocations for individuals suspected of “supporting terrorist organizations or engaging in espionage,” including in some cases students who participated in campus protests.
Multiple data sources and university self-reports show that new international enrollments in fall 2025 declined year-on-year by double-digit percentages, with especially sharp drops from China and India; meanwhile, research universities in Canada, the UK, and Australia report significant increases in international applications to STEM graduate programs and certain high-demand majors. This signals a geographic shift in the tuition revenue and human capital that U.S. universities have long relied on to support graduate education and research in the sciences and engineering.
These two policy lines are converging on elite institutions: Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and others face billions in frozen or reduced federal research dollars while the international graduate and postdoctoral cohorts they have traditionally depended on confront visa uncertainty. Silicon Valley, Greater Boston, and other innovation hubs have repeatedly warned in congressional testimony and the media that America’s edge in AI, quantum technology, and biomedicine is being eroded by the twin tightening of research funding and talent flows.
The Legal Battlefield and the Global Landscape: Where Are American Universities Headed?
Nearly every major initiative has been challenged in court. From Department of Education layoffs and the NSF indirect-cost cap to antisemitism investigations, research funding freezes, and student-loan forgiveness rules, federal courts have become the “second chamber” for Trump’s higher-education agenda. Boston District Judge Myong Joun, reviewing the layoffs, stressed that the executive branch may not restructure agencies in ways that circumvent congressional authorization; in the Harvard case, Judge Burroughs treated funding freezes as an unconstitutional threat to academic freedom and institutional autonomy.
Controversy in student aid has centered on the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program. A March 2025 executive order titled “Restoring Public Service Loan Forgiveness” directed the Department of Education to revise the definition of qualifying employers by excluding organizations found to have “substantially unlawful purposes.” The final rule published in October listed examples such as “supporting terrorism, assisting illegal immigration, performing medical procedures defined as causing irreversible harm to minors (including certain gender-affirming care for minors), or engaging in systemic unlawful discrimination.” Employees of such organizations will no longer have time worked there counted toward the required PSLF service years.
Multi-state attorneys general, nonprofits, and medical groups have sued, arguing that the rule grants the Department excessive discretionary authority and could be weaponized to punish public-interest workers who provide legal services to immigrants, transgender youth, or DEI-related programs. The Department insists the changes prevent taxpayer dollars from subsidizing illegal activity and estimates that only a “two-digit” number of employers will be affected annually.
At the macro level, the map of American higher education is being redrawn. Wealthy private research universities, cushioned by massive endowments and global prestige, can absorb federal funding shocks through internal reallocations, overseas campuses, and private donations. Regional public universities, community colleges, small liberal-arts colleges, and historically Black institutions, however, are simultaneously hit by enrollment declines, state-budget austerity, and federal regulatory uncertainty—more than 80 private nonprofit institutions closed or merged between 2020 and 2025, with many more on “high-risk” watchlists.
Globally, the United States still occupies the most spots in the top 100 of major rankings, but mainland Chinese universities have markedly increased their overall representation and are rapidly closing the gap in research-output-focused rankings such as ARWU. Combined with visa policies and the funding environment, America’s traditional combination of “research superpower + talent magnet” is being eroded, while research and higher-education centers outside the U.S.—especially in East Asia and the Anglosphere—are ramping up investment and attracting talent.
On tuition and family burden, the latest figures show that average family spending on undergraduate education continued to rise in the 2024–25 academic year, with family income and savings remaining the primary payment source. For lower-income families, although Pell Grant coverage has expanded and some colleges have raised income thresholds for “free tuition,” persistently rising tuition and living costs still pose significant barriers to completing a four-year degree.
Negotiating the Future Amid Division
Rather than merely “adjusting” higher-education policy, the Trump administration is attempting a systematic overhaul—via executive orders, selective enforcement, and funding leverage—of universities’ functional role, governance mechanisms, and global position: shifting from “diversity and inclusion” to “merit and neutrality,” and from loose autonomy to strong intervention in the name of civil rights and safety.
In the coming years, the trajectory of American higher education will depend on the interplay of three forces. The first is final court rulings on layoffs, DEI bans, research-funding freezes, and the new PSLF rules, which will set the legal boundaries of executive power over universities. The second is the increasingly divergent red- and blue-state policies on funding, curriculum, and campus speech, which will further split the American university system into two parallel subsystems with different values and rules. The last is the ongoing debates among faculty, students, and the broader public over “whom universities should serve and how the public interest should be defined,” which will determine whether, after this political cycle, American universities can find a new equilibrium between global competition and domestic division.