Before Donald Trump took office a year ago today, higher ed leaders expected that colleges and universities would face more scrutiny and pressure from the federal government. But few expected the pace and force of the changes the Trump administration quickly embarked on.
Within a month, Trump officials had threatened colleges’ research funding, started gutting the Institute for Education Sciences, declared race-based programming illegal and unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on campuses, among other actions.
Then, over the next six months, the administration started dismantling the Education Department, cut thousands of research grants that didn’t align with Trump’s priorities, helped oust the University of Virginia’s president and cracked down on international students—deporting some who criticized Israel and revoking the visas of thousands. It also kicked off a targeted pressure campaign on several universities that included freezing billions in federal funding and landmark settlements. All of these measures were necessary, Trump officials repeatedly said, to shake up a system that’s not working for all students and to hold universities accountable, protect national security, curb campus antisemitism and enforce other federal civil rights laws.
After 12 months of investigations, funding cuts and other disruptions, the administration appears set to build on its efforts to reshape higher ed in 2026. The agenda for the next year so far includes reworking the rules for accreditation, changing who gets grant funding and carrying out sweeping changes to the student loan system and how college programs are held accountable. And officials could always attempt to resurrect the administration’s proposed compact for higher ed, which was resoundingly rejected in the fall.
The events of last year have threatened to upend higher ed, testing universities’ resolve and independence. Leaders say they can’t depend on the federal government under the Trump administration, and they are struggling to grapple with what feels like an ever-shifting political landscape. It remains unclear how lasting the impact will be, though some experts predict that Trump’s first year will go down as a watershed period.
“I think that the year has been one of fear and chaos, and nobody does well in an environment of fear or chaos,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education. “By and large, I think, higher education has suffered. But the suffering is really more emotional than anything else.”
Here’s what sources tell us they’ve learned about higher ed under Trump 2.0 and some key takeaways from the year.
1. The federal government–higher ed relationship is not sacrosanct.
Some higher ed leaders described the past year as a fracturing of the once-strong relationship between the federal government and higher education.
Anne Harris, president of Grinnell College in Iowa, noted that in the decades following World War II, the federal government made major investments in higher education, such as the GI Bill, the Fulbright Program and Pell Grants. Ties between colleges, the government and industry fueled research and innovation.
“The United States government and the United States higher education system really linked arms and committed resources to education,” Harris said.
Now she fears that moment of collaboration could be over.
The government is questioning higher ed’s value and stripping its resources, she said. The question is, “Is this the end of the chapter? … I think that’s still left open.”
Some of the consequences of that shifting relationship may not be permanent. Slashed research funds, for example, could be restored in the future, she said, but colleges’ frayed ties with federal agencies might take longer to repair.
The controversial compact outlined a new relationship between the federal government and higher ed. Most of those invited to sign the document declined.
David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
In contrast, Brian Mueller, president of Grand Canyon University, said his institution’s relationship with the federal government has vastly improved since Trump retook the White House.
Trump’s Education Department lifted a $37.7 million fine levied against the private Christian university by the Biden administration for allegedly misleading doctoral students about program costs and breaking federal law. The Federal Trade Commission also dismissed a complaint against the university accusing it of deceptive advertising related to its nonprofit status. Grand Canyon had been locked in a years-long legal battle with the Biden administration over whether it was sufficiently independent from its for-profit owner to regain nonprofit status.
“We were never worried that stuff wouldn’t go in our favor, regardless of who the president was,” Mueller said.
In November 2024, an appeals court ruled that the Education Department used the wrong legal standard in denying the university’s bid for nonprofit status in 2019. The IRS and other regulators had previously signed off on Grand Canyon’s nonprofit status.
But “we’re grateful that the current department did take care of that” after the university asked ED officials to review the matter. To his chagrin, relief didn’t come until months later, but he’s thankful it ultimately came.
But beyond Grand Canyon’s fight with the Biden administration coming to a close, Mueller said ED is now much more receptive to ideas coming out of the university about higher education writ large. He also feels aligned with the department on prioritizing short-term programs and workforce education.
“We just couldn’t get the previous administration to have an open discussion with us,” he said. “We have been enthused that they’re willing to talk to us, and there’s been a good dialogue there.”
2. Trump followed through on his campaign pledges.
Washington policy experts agreed that the Trump administration has made good on its campaign promises—particularly those related to culture war topics.
Throughout the first year, the administration used executive orders, civil rights investigations and grant cuts to crack down on diversity, equity and inclusion practices and policies that, among other things, allowed the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports.
For some, Trump’s swift follow-through was a relief.
Bob Eitel, president and co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, wanted to see changes to the Biden administration’s Title IX policies in order to prevent transgender women from participating in women’s athletic programs as well as a number of other ideologically driven issues. To him, it wasn’t the government’s action on these issues that came as a surprise but the speed with which they did it.
“There’s been a whirlwind of activity on a number of fronts, from civil rights enforcements to rule making on student lending issues, to efforts to reverse what many believe has been sort of a left-wing drift and campus illiberalism in higher ed over the last many years,” he said. “I think, frankly, one of the reasons for this is because there’s intense interest from the White House and from the Oval Office itself.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who was confirmed in early March 2025, has spearheaded the president’s higher ed agenda.
But for Ted Mitchell at ACE and others, that same interest and the subsequent actions were “incredibly disruptive” and “very destructive.”
Mitchell recalled that he started 2025 with “pretty high hopes.”
“Because there’s a lot that we had been working on that it looked like the Trump administration would be interested in pursuing—accountability, transparency, making higher ed more accessible through Workforce Pell,” Mitchell said. “But what took us all by surprise was that the administration would not give up on the superheated rhetoric of the culture wars that informed the campaign.”
Multiple sources told Inside Higher Ed that they had hoped many of Trump’s campaign promises, particularly related to DEI and gender ideology, would be nothing more than rhetoric. At most, they expected to see news releases about speedy investigations and executive orders that wouldn’t carry significant consequences beyond fearmongering.
But instead, it became a full-fledged attack, as the Trump administration targeted wealthy institutions and used federal funding as leverage to compel changes. While nearly all of the targeted universities have since cut deals with the administration to restore the frozen funds, Harvard University fought and got its money back via a court order.
“They kept finding pretexts to go after higher ed institutions and higher ed as a whole,” Mitchell said.
He pointed to the first major funding freeze at Columbia University as an example.
“It was less about antisemitism and more about finding a vulnerability in elite institutions that could be pursued for political gain, and that’s what I mean by both disruptive and destructive,” he said. “It really has not done anybody any good to fine Columbia a couple hundred million; that doesn’t prove anything to anybody other than the unbridled ability of the administration to use its power to extort money from institutions.”
Columbia University was the first university targeted with funding freezes and the first to reach a broad settlement with the Trump administration. Among other concessions, Columbia agreed to pay $221 million to the federal government.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
3. Colleges have felt the impact of Trump’s policies and reconsidered their approach.
The breakneck speed of Trump’s policy changes shook campuses almost immediately.
“There was no ramp-up,” Harris, of Grinnell, said, noting that the Education Department’s Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter, which threatened to rescind federal funding over race-conscious programming, came out less than a month after Trump’s inauguration.
In the months that followed, many campuses quickly rebranded, retooled or cut diversity-related offices and programs. DEI offices and cultural centers closed. Some universities scrubbed references to diversity, equity and inclusion from their websites. Student affinity groups lost university funding, and traditions like affinity graduations ended on some campuses. Some colleges, however, held fast to their programs and advocated for their legality.
Harris said campus leaders have had to become legal scholars, parsing the language of federal guidance and studying up on academic freedom rights.
“We’ve all become much more studious students of the law,” she said. “We have researched our recourse with much greater detail … We’ve reached out to each other a whole lot more for shared understanding.”
Miriam Feldblum, president and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, said the administration’s barrage of immigration policy decisions also took a toll on campuses, ramping up fear and anxiety among international and immigrant students.
Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk was detained by immigration officials at the start of the administration’s campaign against international students. Öztürk co-wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper criticizing Tufts’s response to the campus pro-Palestinian movement. She was detained for six weeks before a court ordered her release.
Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images
The State Department revoked thousands of international students’ visas. The Department of Justice launched legal battles against states that offer undocumented students in-state tuition, quashing the policies in Texas and Oklahoma. And international and immigrant students have been deported or left the country out of fear. An analysis from the Migration Policy Institute found that the Trump administration took more than 500 actions on immigration in the first year of his second term, compared to 472 during his entire first term.
Some of these actions “analysts and legal experts have rightly argued are unlawful,” Feldblum said. But a lesson learned from this past year is that “we can’t rely on the federal government to act lawfully.”
She worries the disruption to students’ studies and barriers to campus will hurt not just them and their institutions but the country for years to come.
“The cumulative impact of all these policies is already starting to translate into a lost generation of immigrant, refugee and international students and scholars,” she said. “The U.S. thrives when we’re able to attract, retain and nurture, for the long term, domestic and international talent. That is what fuels our workforce development, powers our industry, spurs innovation, contributes to entrepreneurship and economic growth … What we know is the loss of a generation of talented students and scholars is our loss.”
As policy changes rained down on institutions, campus leaders had to make difficult choices on if or how to react publicly. Some higher ed leaders argued the age of public statements is over and that presidents did the right thing by keeping quiet to avoid the government targeting their campuses and students.
“In the very beginning, it was, ‘Where’s the op-eds?’ and ‘Why aren’t people speaking out?’ and so forth,” Harris said. And while some presidents were more outspoken, herself included, she appreciates leaders asking themselves, “If I speak out, who bears the burden of that? Is it a student? Is it a faculty member? … In this particular moment, I think that’s very important.”
Some administrators privately lobbied federal, state and local lawmakers or signed on to higher education associations’ statements pushing back on the Trump administration’s higher ed policies. Notably, hundreds of higher ed leaders added their signatures to a letter from the American Association of Colleges and Universities condemning “unprecedented government overreach” in higher education. Higher ed associations also joined ACE’s opposition statement to Trump’s controversial compact. But individual campus presidents, over all, have kept a lower profile.
Feldblum argued that the quiet approach, while justified, hasn’t worked.
College leaders asked themselves, “How can I be most effective? Will it be about being quiet and trying to quietly influence lawmakers and policymakers and others? Do I need to make a public statement?” she said. Many assumed early on, “if we keep our head down, we’re less likely to be targeted. I don’t think that calculus holds true anymore.”
Now, “it is the time for collective action,” she added. “It is not the time to be on the sidelines.”
Universities have faced calls over the last year to publicly resist the Trump administration.
Erin Clark/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
4. Higher ed is bracing for fundamental change.
Now, as the Trump administration enters its second year, the midterm elections loom. Early polling and public approval ratings suggest that the Republicans could lose their majority in the House, raising questions about what that could mean for higher education institutions.
Some sources said they hope that such a shift will further mitigate the ground-shaking blows from Trump’s first year. Mitchell, for example, pointed to Congress’s recent rejection of Trump’s proposed cuts to science and research funding, as well as the recent agreement on how to hold college programs accountable.
“I think that we are going to be moving into a more stable and, from my point of view, sensible environment,” he said, adding that institutions will also be “dealing with the scars for quite some time.”
Harris, of Grinnell, said with the midterms coming up, campus leaders can spend this next year “planning for after”—or at least getting a head start on that process.
“Who are we four years from now as a sector? Who are we four years from now as an institution?” she said. “I think, year two, we should be thinking strategically over the long term.”
President Trump left his mark throughout the federal government in his first year back in office.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
To Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, “there’s no going back” to the way things were for higher education before the MAGA movement entered the political scene.
“When it comes to the next administration, whoever that is, do I think, if it’s a Democrat, that there’s probably gonna be a massive pendulum shift backwards? Probably, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to re-establish the same,” he said. “The prominence of campuses in the culture war has reached such a high temperature that it’s going to be there with this level of intensity for at least the next 10 years—probably longer.”
But others, including Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware, say that reversing what has happened over the last year will take far more than putting Democrats in office.
First and foremost, Baker explained, leaders in Washington and academia have to call a spade a spade.
“This is an unceasing attempt at an authoritarian takeover, a time that will go in textbooks, if we’re still allowed to have them,” she said. “So we could see some potential reversal, but it requires the ability to name what has occurred, repent, apologize and redress the harms that have occurred, and then to do the work to rebuild institutions.”
Katherine Knott contributed to this report.
