Trump Is Doing Elite Colleges a Huge Favor

T he nation’s campuses are alive with sounds of optimism again: students reuniting, deans speechifying, parents with Allen wrenches wrestling with Chinese-made dressers. (I speak from experience.) Inside those stately buildings, though, the nation’s elite colleges are in a state of siege. The Trump administration continues to “investigate” dozens of major universities for fostering antisemitism. It’s tried to force at least nine schools to adopt a series of “anti-woke” policies — banning the use of race and sex in admissions, adhering to strict gender definitions, etc. — if they want to continue receiving federal grant money. It’s demanded that Penn turn over the names of its Jewish students, that Harvard hand over records of international kids. The point here isn’t so much to punish a couple of Ivy League schools as to establish a tremors of terror throughout academia. And it’s working.

Let’s be honest: No one who’s spent much time on campus in the last decade can really argue that the administration has no point. There’s an old joke I love about two fish who pass in the ocean. “Water’s beautiful today, isn’t it?” one of them says, to which the other fish replies: “Water? What water?” The joke applies pretty nicely to our most prestigious campuses. There’s an atmospheric lunacy so pervasive that most academics seem not to notice anymore, an abiding cultural fetish with identity and social reengineering. If you don’t believe me, then read Tyler Austin Harper’s amazing Atlantic piece on his teaching career at Bates College, where he was introduced to the terms “mathematics for social justice” and “dildo ring toss.” (Try that one at your next company picnic.)

Even so, we’ve seen enough of Trump’s second term now to understand that the goal here isn’t really free expression or equal opportunity; if it were, masked ICE agents wouldn’t have grabbed up a graduate student at Tufts last year because she signed her name to the wrong op-ed. The goal is, and has always been, sheer repression. Stephen Miller and his minions have declared war on the American intelligentsia — academia, media, law firms, comedians — for the same reason that repressive regimes everywhere do. Educated elites represent modernity, and if you’re looking to reestablish a kind of ethnic supremacy in a society, the first thing you have to do is silence them.

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The costs of this grinding campaign against intellectualism, in terms of competing globally for top talent and scientific breakthroughs, may not be fully known for decades. But there’s another cost, too, which is that Trump has now managed to do something I wound’t have thought possible. He’s made the top level of academia into a noble victim, or even a symbol of principled resistance. For this, they owe him a debt almost as unfathomable as the one they’ve imposed on generations of American kids.

We grew up with the idea that America’s best colleges were conveyor belts to the most prosperous middle and wealthy classes on the planet. But the uncomfortable truth now is that the most elite level of higher education may be our chief enabler of cyclical inequality. (I’m talking here about the 50 or so most in-demand schools; there’s plenty wrong with the rest of higher ed, too, but let’s leave it for another time.) The most prestigious private schools are charging as much as $400,000 for a degree. Public flagships, which increasingly rely on full-paying kids from out of state, aren’t so far behind. Go visit the parking garage at any highly-ranked school, and you’ll find the largest showroom of German sports cars outside of Berlin.

Defenders of the broken status quo love to point out that most schools offer a heavy discount for less affluent kids (as if wage-earning families are supposed to be grateful for a $40,000 bill), and a handful of elite schools now offer free tuition to families with low six-figure incomes, which is great. But good luck snaring a coveted spot in the class when hundreds of them are set aside not just for wealthy foreign students, but for volleyball players and fencers and equestrians, because for some reason every college in America needs to field a competitive team in every sport that no one watches. That means even more opportunities for kids whose families can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars for private lessons and travel leagues. You might as well be reserving spots for kids with second homes.

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Where’s all this tuition money going? We really have no idea, because unlike government, private colleges are under no obligation to tell us, and they take that non-obligation seriously. What we know is that they raise that tuition every year, saddling a lot of kids with decades of debt. And all of this is being subsidized by American families who can’t afford the price of a private college, by way of the massive tax breaks we give universities just for existing. 

It’s not like the wealthiest Americans are being especially well served by this system, either. Any guidance counselor at an affluent high school will tell you that college admissions is driving a full-on mental health crisis, as applications to the top schools soar and admission rates plummet to absurdly low levels. The colleges themselves are constantly bemoaning this state of affairs, as if it has nothing to do with them, but if they believe that, then I worry about their economics departments. Colleges skillfully manipulate their acceptance rates with gimmicks like early decision and by making it as easy as possible to apply to dozens of schools at once. Why? Because for some reason the best colleges in the country are desperate to impress a bunch of data nerds at U.S. News & World Report, who have decided that your school must be better if it accepts fewer students, and whose only special qualification for ranking colleges is having long ago realized that it’s the only thing keeping their publication alive. Kudos to them for being entrepreneurial. Shame on the rest of us for caring.

THERE AREN’T TOO many issues in American life right now that qualify as what Newt Gingrich, the architect of an earlier Republican revolution, used to call “70 percent issues” — as in, issues on which 70 percent of American voters might actually be able to agree. Reforming Big Education is probably one of them. If I were designing a presidential campaign right now, as part of my platform, I’d order up a banner with a simple, four-word slogan: Where does it go?

I’d demand that all parents get a full, transparent accounting of how their tuition money is spent and why. I’d insist that college education be treated like any other four-year contract, with the annual cost locked in your first year. I’d back a hard cap on athletic commitments. (If the Grammy-winning USC marching band can let any student pick up an instrument, then I’m pretty sure MIT can teach a kid to play lacrosse.) I’d call for the elimination of early decision and the common application, which would instantly stem the insane tidal wave of applications, and I’d set a floor for need-based financial aid, perhaps as a percentage of a college’s assets.

The incentive for schools to cooperate is easy, because government controls the most important tool: their charitable tax status. For Trump, of course, this is a tool for cultural bullying; earlier this month, he threatened to strip colleges of their charitable tax status if they continue to factor race into their hiring. He has the right idea when it comes to wielding leverage — but, as usual, he wields it in the service of petty vendettas, when in fact the tax status should be part of a bigger agenda. If American colleges can’t get behind a short list of reforms that would make higher ed fairer and healthier for kids, then American taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize them like they’re churches or foundations. If they’re dug in on operating like for-profit businesses, then they can pay their property taxes like one, too.

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A campaign plank like this would seem to fit neatly into what Democrats say they believe about inequality. (Rahm Emanuel, whom I just visited in Chicago, has already offered the outline of his own reform plan, including a cap on international students and free tuition for families making less than $200,000.) But I doubt you’ll really see much of a debate among other Democrats about how to hold colleges more accountable, and that’s because of Trump and his idiotic culture war. Buried in the details of Trump’s demands for higher ed are some common-sense reforms, like a five-year tuition freeze. But the bulk of his agenda is all about vengeance and xenophobia, and because of that, most Democrats would see a campaign against higher ed as parroting Trump and punishing an ally, rather than championing their own voters.

In a larger sense, it’s all part of the cognitive dissonance that defines Trump’s presidency. The president rose to power on the strength of middle-class white voters — people who feel, justifiably, like they’ve somehow been denied opportunity and blamed for inequality at the same time. Everything Trump does, he does in their name. And yet Trump never really cares about retooling government in way that works for those voters; the only thing that gets his blood pumping is persecuting otherness and brutalizing intellectuals. As with his erratic tariff regime and his spiraling war in Iran, Trump’s harassment of the academy is really just a lashing out, with the consequences disproportionately falling on the people who voted for him. He could have pressed to reform our universities. He’ll end up inoculating them instead.