Tag: Trumps

  • New Version of Trump’s Higher Ed Compact in the Works

    New Version of Trump’s Higher Ed Compact in the Works

    Trump officials have said that colleges could receive some benefits, such as preferential treatment for grant funding, if they agreed to the compact, which required several policy changes.

    Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

    Apparently emboldened after cutting deals with several universities last year, Trump administration officials are reworking their controversial compact for higher ed that many institutions rejected outright, The New York Times reported.

    Education Secretary Linda McMahon backed up the Times report in an interview with The Daily Signal published Wednesday. She told the conservative outlet that the administration is “working on developing the right kind of compact with some input that we’re already getting.”

    “So I expect that once that’s done, we’ll see a lot more people signing up, a lot more universities signing up for that,” said McMahon, adding that she expected the universities that gave input will be “even more pleased with” the final version. She didn’t give a timeline for when a second version would be released.

    The administration sent a draft of the compact to nine universities—Brown University; Dartmouth College; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Universities of Arizona, Pennsylvania, Southern California and Virginia; Vanderbilt University; and Washington University in St. Louis—on Oct. 1 and asked them for feedback, though McMahon and other officials said the document was “largely in its final form.”

    Of the initial nine, most declined to sign the compact, which would have required signatories to make policy changes to admissions, hiring and other areas in order to receive preferential treatment for grant funding. In her response to the government, MIT president Sally Kornbluth said, “The document also includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution.”

    Vanderbilt University and Arizona State University have said they would provide the requested feedback and haven’t ruled out signing on to the compact. Meanwhile, New College of Florida, Saint Augustine’s University and Valley Forge Military College have indicated interest.

    According to the Times, the administration is looking for ways beyond the compact to bring change to colleges. For instance, the State Department is prioritizing visa requests at universities where undergraduate international students make up 15 percent or less of the student body, the Times reported. (The first draft of the compact required signatories to cap their international student enrollment at 15 percent.)

    Source link

  • Trump’s national school voucher program could mean a boom in Christian education

    Trump’s national school voucher program could mean a boom in Christian education

    by Anya Kamenetz, The Hechinger Report
    January 22, 2026

    LACONIA, N.H. — Three dozen 4- and 5-year-olds trooped out onto the stage of the ornate, century-old Colonial Theatre of Laconia in this central New Hampshire town. Dressed in plaid, red, green and sparkles, some were grinning and waving, some looked a bit shell-shocked; a tiny blonde girl sobbed with stage fright in her teacher’s arms. 

    No sooner did the children open their mouths to sing, “Merry Christmas! … This is the day that the Lord was born!” than the house lights came up and a fire alarm went off. 

    It was an unusually eventful annual Christmas concert for Laconia Christian Academy. Then again, it’s been an unusually eventful year. In a small, aging state, where overall school enrollment has been dropping for more than two decades, Laconia reported a 130 percent increase in enrollment in its elementary school since 2020 — and began a three-quarter-million-dollar campus expansion on its 140 acres outside town.

     “We are in a season of incredible growth,” the school’s website reads. 

    One reason for the season: Almost every student at the academy is enrolled in New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account program, said Head of School Rick Duba. Regardless of their family income, they receive thousands of dollars each in taxpayer money to help pay their tuition.   

    In June, New Hampshire became the 18th state to pass a universal private school choice program. After signing the bill into law, Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte announced, “Giving parents the freedom to choose the education setting that best fits their child’s needs will help every student in our state reach their full potential.” 

    Yet, as these programs proliferate, with significant expansion since the pandemic, Democrats, teachers unions and other public school advocates are raising the alarm about accountability, transparency and funding. And with President Donald Trump passing a federal voucher program to start in 2027, some are concerned about the future of public education as a whole. 

    “I think these programs are the biggest change in K-12 education since Brown v. Board of Ed,” said Douglas Harris, a scholar at Tulane who recently published two papers on the impact of universal private school choice programs. He argues that vouchers were originally introduced in the 1950s in part to resist desegregation by funding white families to attend private schools.

    According to his October 2025 paper, private school choice “allows schools to discriminate against certain students, entwines government with religion, involves a large fiscal cost, and has shown fairly poor, or at best inconclusive, academic results.” Harris said in an interview, “It changes fundamentally all the basic traditions of the education system.” 

    New Hampshire could be a harbinger of that fundamental change. Experts say the state has one of the broadest and least regulated universal school choice programs in the country. “Universal” refers to the fact that families, regardless of income, are eligible for an average $5,200 a year from the government to pay tuition at a private school or supplement the cost of homeschooling. The number of recipients reached 10,510 this year, and it’s likely to grow again next year.

    Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.

    “Universal” also describes the fact that any type of school — or nonschools, such as an unaccredited storefront microschool, an online curriculum provider, a music camp or even a ski slope — can be eligible for these funds. 

    These schools and organizations don’t have to abide by state or federal laws, like those requiring accommodation for students with disabilities or other antidiscrimination laws. A 2022 Supreme Court decision, Carson v. Makin, affirmed the right of parents to use public money, in the form of voucher and education savings account funds, specifically for religious schools. 

    And indeed, it seems that in New Hampshire, as nationally, a disproportionate amount of the funding is going to small Christian schools, particularly to evangelical Protestant schools like Laconia. The Concord Monitor found that in the past four years, 90 percent of the revenue from the previous, income-capped EFA program went to Christian schools. This was true even though most of the state’s private schools are not religious. The Concord Monitor found in the first five years of the program, the top 10 recipients grew in enrollment by 32 percent. With the exception of Laconia, none of these schools responded to repeated requests for comment from The Hechinger Report. 

    But state officials have stopped releasing data on exactly where recipients of the Education Freedom Accounts are using those dollars. They told the Concord Monitor that the data is not subject to public record requests because it’s held by the nonprofit that administers the funds, the Children’s Scholarship Fund of New Hampshire. State officials did not respond to Hechinger queries. The Children’s Scholarship Fund directed The Hechinger Report to its website, which features a partial accounting of less than 10 percent of 2025-26 student. This accounting, which may or may not be representative, showed 671 of these students currently attend Christian schools, 64 attend non-Christian private schools and 50 are homeschooled. 

    A national analysis released in September by Tulane’s Harris of publicly available data showed that in New Hampshire and ten other states with similar policies, vouchers have boosted private school enrollment by up to 4 percent. The increases were concentrated at small Protestant religious schools like Laconia. The federal tax credit scholarship program will allow even more funds in additional states to be directed to these schools. 

    One reason that Christian schools are coming out on top, Harris said, is that this type of school tends to have lower tuition than independent private schools, meaning a $5,000 subsidy can make the difference for more families. The schools do this in part by paying teachers less.

    “ Typically, Christian school teachers see their work as a ministry and are willing to work for significantly less than their public counterparts,” said Duba, Laconia’s leader. He added that he is working with his board to try to pay a “living wage” of $55,000. 

    Related: The new reality with universal school vouchers: Homeschoolers, marketing, pupil churn

    At the Christmas concert in Laconia, after the fire department gave the all clear and the performance resumed, the little ones were tuckered out from the extra excitement. In the theater lobby, Nick Ballentine cradled his kindergartner, Perna, who wore two big red bows in her hair and a dress that read “Merry” on the front in cursive. 

    Ballentine said his family chose Laconia because “it was local and it wasn’t a public school.” He also liked that it was Christian and had small class sizes, but his opposition to public school is staunch: “I don’t like public schools, nor the policies that guide them, because they come from the government.” 

    Duba said that families come to Laconia for the small class sizes, the TimberNook outdoor program that has elementary school students spending five hours each week of class time in the woods, and “ for faith.”

    “They don’t want their kids in public schools where their kids are being taught by people who don’t express faith in Christ,” he said. While the school doesn’t require students to have a “profession of faith” to attend, there are lessons about the life of Jesus in preschool, daily prayers and service mission trips for the high school students as far away as Rwanda. 

    Duba said the biggest “social issue” that drives families away from public schools and toward schools like his is “ sexuality and gender identity.” The Concord Monitor previously reported that many of the schools that are the top recipients of aid in New Hampshire won’t admit students who have anyone in their family who is openly LGBTQ+ or supports gay or trans rights. Laconia Christian Academy’s nondiscrimination policy says it does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin, but it doesn’t mention sexual orientation or gender identity. Asked about the policy, Duba declined to comment. 

    Like other private schools, these schools also aren’t required by law to serve students who have disabilities. The state says 8.47 percent of EFA recipients are in special education, compared to 20 percent in the state’s public schools. 

    Adam Laats, an education historian at Binghamton University, said these universal school choice programs are part of a long history of conservative evangelical Protestants seeking to make existing public schools more Christian in character on the one hand and divert public money to explicitly Christian schools on the other. 

    “For 100 years, public schools have been the sort of litmus test of whether the U.S. is a Christian nation,” he said, citing battles over teaching evolution, sex education, prayer in schools and more recently climate change, the treatment of race and American history, LGBTQIA rights and book banning. 

    Alongside the culture wars in public schools, said Laats, there have been successive waves of founding and expansion of Christian private schools: “There’s a burst in the 1920s, the next big bump comes in the ’50s and a huge spike in the 1970s, during the height of busing, when for a while there was one new school opening a day in the U.S. of these conservative evangelical schools.” 

    Laats agrees with Harris that the 1950s and 1970s booms were in part responses to desegregation efforts. But, he said, previous enrollment booms have eventually faded, because “it’s expensive” to educate students and offer amenities like sports and arts education. “That’s why the Christians have pushed hard for vouchers.” 

    Related: Arizona gave families public money for private school. Then private schools raised tuition 

    Funding fairness is a hot-button issue right now in New Hampshire. 

    In the summer of 2025, the State Supreme Court found that New Hampshire’s schools are officially inadequately funded. School funding in the low-tax, live-free-or-die state depends heavily on local property taxes, which vary radically area to area. The state spends an average of 4,182 per head; the court found it should spend at least $7,356. 

    So far, the overall percentage of New Hampshire students enrolled in public schools has remained steady at 90 percent. That implies most of the ESA money, so far, is subsidizing families who already were choosing private schools or homeschooling, rather than fueling a mass exodus from public schools. 

    Yet some districts are feeling the bite. According to recently released data from the state, in the small town of Rindge, 29 percent of students are EFA recipients — the highest of any community in the state. 

    “It is taking money away from public education,” said Megan Tuttle, president of New Hampshire’s state teacher union. “If you have a couple kids that are leaving the classroom to take the money, that doesn’t change the staffing that we have at the schools, heat, oil, electricity, all those types of things. And so, what’s happening is the money’s leaving, but the bills aren’t.”

    Duba looks at the math differently, pointing out that the EFA doesn’t equal the full cost of educating a student. “Let’s say I took 30 kids from Laconia. I did not, but for the sake of argument,” he said. “ They don’t have to do anything with those 30 kids anymore. They’re gone.”  

    This year, the advocacy group Reaching Higher NH calculated that the education savings account program will siphon $50 million from the state’s $2.61 billion education trust fund, and it will grow from there. “We’re functionally trying to fund two systems,” said Alex Tilsley, the group’s policy director. “And we couldn’t even fund one system fully.” 

    As the program grows in New Hampshire, the opposition is growing too. 

    “There’s broad opposition to EFAs from the teacher unions, from public school groups and from voters,” sums up Tilsley.* “It’s not generally speaking a highly favored policy across the state.” But with a Republican trifecta in control of state government, school choice in New Hampshire is not going anywhere. And with a national education tax credit program in the offing, more states will soon face these debates. As in New Hampshire, the federal money will be able to be used for private schools, homeschooling costs or anything in between. 

    *Correction: This sentence has been updated to correct the spelling of Alex Tilsley’s last name.

    Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].

    This story about Christian schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/trumps-national-school-voucher-program-could-mean-a-boom-in-christian-education/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=114348&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/trumps-national-school-voucher-program-could-mean-a-boom-in-christian-education/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • OPINION: Colleges need to recruit more men, but Trump’s policies are making it difficult

    OPINION: Colleges need to recruit more men, but Trump’s policies are making it difficult

    by Catharine Hill, The Hechinger Report
    January 20, 2026

    While attending a gathering of Ivy League women years ago, I upset the audience by commenting that a real challenge for U.S. higher education was the declining participation of men in higher education, not just the glass ceiling and unequal pay faced by women.  

    At the time, I was president of Vassar College (which did not become co-ed until 1969). We surveyed newly admitted students as well as first-year students and learned that the majority expressed a preference for a gender-balanced student body, with as co-educational an environment as possible.  

    With fewer men applying, that meant admitting them at a higher rate, something some other selective colleges and universities were already doing. While, historically, men were much more likely to attain a college degree than women, that changed by 1980. For more than four decades now, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men.  

    Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter. 

    These days, 27 percent more women than men age 25 to 34 have earned a bachelor’s degree, according to the Pew Research Center. Aiming for greater gender balance, some colleges and universities have put a “thumb on the scale” to admit and matriculate more men.  

    But the end of affirmative action, along with the Trump administration’s statements warning schools against considering gender identity (or race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation and religious associations) in admissions, could end this preference. 

    To be clear, I believe that the goal of admissions preferences, including for men, should be to increase overall educational attainment, not to advantage one group over another. Economic and workforce development should be a top higher education priority, because many high-demand and well-paying jobs require a college degree. America should therefore be focused on increasing educational attainment because it is important to our global competitiveness. And the selective schools that have high graduation rates should give a preference to students who are underrepresented in higher education — including men — because it will get more Americans to and through college and benefit our economy and society.  

    Preferencing students from groups with lower overall educational attainment also helps colleges meet their own goals.  

    For schools that admit just about all comers, attracting more men — through changes in recruitment strategies, adjustments in curricula and programs to support retention — is part of a strategy to sustain enrollment in the face of the demographic cliff (the declining number of American 18-year-olds resulting from the drop in the birth rate during the Great Recession) and declining international applicants due to the administration’s policies.  

    Colleges that don’t admit nearly all applicants have a different goal: balancing the share of men and women because it helps them compete for students.  

    Selective schools don’t really try to admit more men to serve the public good of increasing overall educational attainment. They believe the students they are trying to attract prefer a co-educational experience. 

    We are living in a global economy that rewards talent. When selective colleges take more veterans, lower-income students and students from rural areas and underrepresented groups, the chance of these students graduating increases. That increases the talent pool, helping to meet employer demand for workers with bachelor’s degrees.  

    The U.S. has been slipping backward in education compared to our peers for several decades. To reverse this trend, we need to get more of our population through college. The best way to do this is by targeting populations with lower educational attainment, including men. But by adding gender to the list of characteristics that should not be considered in admissions decisions, the Trump administration is telling colleges and universities to take the thumb off the scale for men.  

    I suspect this was unintended or resulted from a misunderstanding of who has actually been getting a preference in the admissions process, and in assuming incorrectly that women and/or nonbinary applicants have benefited.  

    Over the last 15 years or more, some attributes, including academic performance, have likely been traded off in order to admit more men. How big these trade-offs have been has differed from college to college and will be hard to calculate, given all the student characteristics that are considered in making admissions decisions.  

    I’m in favor of making these trade-offs to contribute to improved overall educational attainment in America.  

    But given the Trump administration’s lumping of gender with race, college and university policies intended to attract men will now face the same legal challenges that affirmative action policies aimed at improving educational attainment and fairness face.  

    Differential admit rates will be scrutinized. Even if the administration doesn’t challenge these trade-offs, rejected women applicants may seek changes through the courts and otherwise, just as happened with regard to race.  

    Related: Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission  

    Admitting male athletes could also unintentionally be at risk. If low-income has become a “proxy” for race, then athletic admits could become “proxies” for men. (Some schools have publicly stated that they were primarily introducing football to attract male applicants.) 

    Colleges and universities, including selective ones, are heavily subsidized by federal, state and local governments because they have historically been perceived as serving the public good, contributing to equal opportunity and strengthening our economy.  

    Admissions decisions should be evaluated on these grounds, with seats at the selective schools allocated according to what will most contribute to the public good, including improving our nation’s talent pool.  

    Targeting populations with lower-than-average college-going rates will help accomplish this. That includes improving access and success for all underserved groups, including men.  

    Unfortunately, the current administration’s policies are working directly against this and are likely to worsen educational attainment in America and our global competitiveness.  

    Catharine “Cappy” Hill is the former managing director of Ithaka S+R and former president of Vassar College. 

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected]. 

    This story about men and college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter. 

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-men-trump-new-policies-disadvantage/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=114387&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-men-trump-new-policies-disadvantage/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • Trump’s admissions data collection strains college administrators

    Trump’s admissions data collection strains college administrators

    by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report
    January 19, 2026

    Lynette Duncan didn’t expect to spend 20 hours over the past two weeks digging through a mothballed computer system, trying to retrieve admissions data from 2019.

    Duncan is the director of institutional research at John Brown University, a small Christian university in northwest Arkansas, an hour’s drive from Walmart’s headquarters. She runs a one-person office that handles university data collections and analyses, both for internal use and to meet government mandates. Just last year, she spent months collecting and crunching new data to comply with a new federal rule requiring that colleges show that their graduates are prepared for good jobs.

    Then, in mid-December, another mandate abruptly arrived — this one at the request of President Donald Trump. Colleges were ordered to compile seven years of admissions data, broken down by race, sex, grades, SAT or ACT scores, and family income.

    “It’s like one more weight on our backs,” Duncan said. “The workload – it’s not fun.”

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    John Brown University is one of almost 2,200 colleges and universities nationwide now scrambling to comply by March 18 with the new federal reporting requirement, formally known as the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, or ACTS. By all accounts, it’s a ton of work, and at small institutions, the task falls largely on a single administrator or even the registrar. Failure to submit the data can bring steep fines and, ultimately, the loss of access to federal aid for students.

    After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning affirmative action in college admissions, the Trump administration suspected that colleges might covertly continue to give racial preferences. To police compliance, the White House directed the Department of Education to collect detailed admissions data from colleges nationwide.

    The data collection was unusual not only in its scope, but also in its speed. Federal education data collections typically take years to design, with multiple rounds of analysis, technical review panels, and revisions. This one moved from announcement to launch in a matter of months.

    A rush job

    One tiny indication that this was a rush job is in the Federal Register notice. Both enforce and admissions are misspelled in a proposal that’s all about admissions enforcement. Those words are spelled “admssions” and “enforece.” 

    A December filing with the Office of Management and Budget incorrectly lists the number of institutions that are subject to the new data collection. It is nearly 2,200, not 1,660, according to the Association for Institutional Research, which is advising colleges on how to properly report the data. Community colleges are exempt, but four-year institutions with selective admissions or those that give out their own financial aid must comply. Graduate programs are included as well. That adds up to about 2,200 institutions. 

    Related: Inaccurate, impossible: Experts knock new Trump plan to collect college admissions data

    In another filing with the Office of Management and Budget, the administration disclosed that none of the five remaining career Education Department officials with statistical experience had reviewed the proposal, including Matt Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. Most of the department’s statistical staff were fired earlier this year as a first step to eliminating the Education Department, one of Trump’s campaign promises. RTI International, the federal contractor in North Carolina that already manages other higher education data collections for the Education Department, is also handling the day-to-day work of this new college admissions collection. 

    During two public comment periods, colleges and higher-education trade groups raised concerns about data quality and missing records, but there is little evidence those concerns substantially altered the final design. One change expanded the retrospective data requirement from five to six years so that at least one cohort of students would have a measurable six-year graduation rate. A second relieved colleges of the burden of making hundreds of complex statistical calculations themselves, instead instructing them to upload raw student data to an “aggregator tool” that would do all the math for them. 

    The Trump administration’s goal is to generate comparisons across race and sex categories, with large gaps potentially triggering further scrutiny.

    Missing data

    The results are unlikely to be reliable, experts told me, given how much of the underlying data is missing or incomplete. In a public comment letter, Melanie Gottlieb, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, warned that entire years of applicant data may not exist at many institutions. Some states advise colleges to delete records for applicants who never enrolled after a year. “If institutions are remaining compliant with their state policies, they will not have five years of data,” Gottlieb wrote.

    The organization’s own guidance recommends that four-year colleges retain admissions records for just one year after an application cycle. One reason is privacy. Applicant files contain sensitive personal information, and purging unneeded records reduces the risk of exposing this data in breaches.

    In other cases, especially at smaller institutions, admissions offices may offload applicant data simply to make room for new student records. Duncan said John Brown University has all seven years of required data, but a switch to a new computer system in 2019 has made it difficult to retrieve the first year.

    Even when historical records are available, key details may be missing or incompatible with federal requirements, said Christine Keller, executive director of the Association for Institutional Research, which previously received a federal contract to train college administrators on accurate data collection until DOGE eliminated it. (The organization now receives some private funds for a reduced amount of training.) 

    Related: Chaos and confusion as the statistics arm of the Education Department is reduced to a skeletal staff of 3

    Standardized test scores are unavailable for many students admitted under test-optional policies. The department is asking colleges to report an unweighted grade-point average on a four-point scale, even though many applicants submit only weighted GPAs on a five-point scale. In those cases, and there may be many of them, colleges are instructed to report the GPA as “unknown.”

    Some students decline to report their race. Many holes are expected for family income. Colleges generally have income data only for students who completed federal financial-aid forms, which many applicants never file. 

    Ellen Keast, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said in an email, “Schools are not expected to provide data they don’t have.” She added, “We know that some schools may have missing data for some data elements. We’ll review the extent of missing data before doing further calculations or analyses.”

    Male or female

    Even the category of sex poses problems. The Education Department’s spreadsheet allows only two options: male or female. Colleges, however, may collect sex or gender information using additional categories, such as nonbinary. 

    “That data is going to be, in my estimation, pretty worthless when it comes to really showing the different experiences of men and women,” Keller said. She is urging the department to add a “missing” option to avoid misleading results. “I think some people in the department may be misunderstanding that what’s needed is a missing-data option, not another sex category.”

    The new “aggregator tool” itself is another source of anxiety. Designed to spare colleges from calculating quintile buckets for grades and test scores by race and sex, it can feel like a black box. Colleges are supposed to fill rows and rows of detailed student data into spreadsheets and then upload the spreadsheets into the tool. The tool generates pooled summary statistics, such as the number of Black female applicants and admitted students who score in the top 20 percent at the college. Only the aggregated data will be reported to the federal government.

    At John Brown University, Duncan worries about what those summaries might imply. Her institution is predominantly white and has never practiced affirmative action. But if high school grades or test scores differ by race — as they often do nationwide — the aggregated results could suggest bias where none was intended.

    “That’s a concern,” Duncan said. “I’m hopeful that looking across multiple years of data, it won’t show that. You could have an anomaly in one year.”

    The problem is that disparities are not anomalies. Standardized test scores and academic records routinely vary by race and sex, making it difficult for almost any institution to avoid showing gaps.

    A catch-22 for colleges

    The stakes are high. In an emailed response to my questions, the Education Department pointed to Trump’s Aug. 7 memorandum, which directs the agency to take “remedial action” if colleges fail to submit the data on time or submit incomplete or inaccurate information.

    Under federal law, each violation of these education data-reporting requirements can carry a fine of up to $71,545. Repeated noncompliance can ultimately lead to the loss of access to federal student aid, meaning students could no longer use Pell Grants or federal loans to pay tuition.

    That leaves colleges in a bind. Failing to comply is costly. Complying, meanwhile, could produce flawed data that suggests bias and invites further scrutiny.

    The order itself contradicts another administration goal. President Trump campaigned on reducing federal red tape and bureaucratic burden. Yet ACTS represents a significant expansion of paperwork for colleges. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that each institution will spend roughly 200 hours completing the survey this year — a figure that higher-education officials say may be an understatement.

    Duncan is hoping she can finish the reporting in less than 200 hours, if there are no setbacks when she uploads the data. “If I get errors, it could take double the time,” she said.

    For now, she is still gathering and cleaning old student records and waiting to see the results… all before the March 18 deadline.

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about college admissions data was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-admissions-data-collection-strains-colleges/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=114400&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-admissions-data-collection-strains-colleges/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • Senate advances bills rejecting Trump’s efforts to slash research funding

    Senate advances bills rejecting Trump’s efforts to slash research funding

    Dive Brief:

    • Senate lawmakers have engineered bipartisan fiscal 2026 spending proposals that would largely maintain scientific funding, defying the Trump administration’s calls for massive cuts to research. 
    • Budget bills released by Senate committees in recent days would provide $188.3 billion in total scientific research funding — 21.3% more than requested by the White House, according to an analysis published last week by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
    • However, legislators’ proposed research funding levels would still fall 3.6% below fiscal 2025 spending. The full Senate voted on Monday to advance the bills, teeing up a final vote. Congress needs to pass a budget by Jan. 30 to avoid another shutdown.

    Dive Insight:

    Since retaking office last year, President Donald Trump and his administration have pushed to downsize and disrupt the country’s longstanding system of scientific research, which for decades has relied on a financial partnership between the federal government and scientists, many of them attached to universities. 

    Headed into 2026, the Trump administration proposed broad-based cuts to the research. In all, it asked for $155.2 billion for scientific research — a 21% drop from fiscal 2025 levels — according to AAAS. 

    That figure obscures the depth of some agencies’ requested cuts. For example, the National Science Foundation under Trump asked Congress for a $3.9 billion budget — well under half its 2025 funding levels. Instead, the Senate’s appropriations committee on Thursday released an $8.8 billion budget for the NSF to “sustain U.S. leadership in scientific discovery.” 

    The Senate’s NSF proposal included investments in quantum information, artificial intelligence, regional innovation, and “critical” research facilities. 

    The Trump-appointed head of the National Institutes of Health requested $27.9 billion, a nearly 40% decrease from 2025’s $46 billion. The agency said the shrunken budget aimed to “maximize the impact of NIH research by streamlining processes and more efficiently providing funding.” 

    The Senate Appropriations committee rejected the administration’s proposal, instead advancing a $48.7 billion budget for NIH, according to Sen. Patty Murray’s office. Murray is the top-ranking Democrat on the committee.

    “The bill rejects the Trump administration’s harmful efforts to defund and dismantle critical work that HHS oversees — maintaining important funding for programs across HHS that touch the lives of nearly every American, while providing targeted increases to important bipartisan priorities,” Murray’s office said in a bill summary.

    While overall, Senate plans fall short of fiscal 2025 scientific research spending, its proposed $44.9 billion budget for basic research — which explores fundamental principles of nature and science — would tick up by 2.4% compared to last year, according to AAAS. 

    The provisional budget bill set to expire at the end of this month was a stopgap that ended the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history.

    Source link

  • Ousting Venezuela’s leader was high on Trump’s to-do list

    Ousting Venezuela’s leader was high on Trump’s to-do list

    When a little known politician recently declared himself interim president of Venezuela and called for fresh elections, opponents of the sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, saw a bright future for a country mired in misery and hunger.

    But ousting Maduro has proved more difficult than expected. Optimistic assumptions have collided with a reality once summed up by the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

    Juan Guaidó, the youthful opposition figure who declared himself president on January 23, has been recognized as Venezuela’s legitimate leader by the United States and almost 50 other countries. But Maduro is still in power, backed by the country’s military and paramilitary forces. Maduro’s international backers include China, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua.

    What Guaidó and Washington administration officials had in mind sounded optimistic but not impossible.

    After Guaidó emerged as undisputed leader of an opposition long weakened by internal feuds, he brought out tens of thousands of demonstrators who denounced a government they blame for an economic collapse that has resulted in severe shortages of basic goods and services.

    Humanitarian aid and presidential power

    Displays of public anger week after week, or so the thinking went, would convince Maduro to step aside in favor of his 35-year-old challenger. A key test of the dueling presidents’ power — and the military’s ultimate loyalty — hinged on the delivery of humanitarian aid flown in by U.S. military planes in mid-February to the city of Cúcuta on Venezuela’s border with Colombia.

    Maduro said the aid was a precursor to a U.S. military invasion, blocked border crossings and dispatched troops to block convoys of trucks or people carrying supplies. In the scenario envisaged by Guaidó, the troops would refuse to intercept desperately needed aid and instead defect en masse.

    That did not happen.

    Instead, things have gone from bad to worse since the failed aid delivery. Tons of food, medicine and medical supplies remain boxed in warehouses on the Colombian side of the border.

    In March, a week-long power cut across all of Venezuela’s 23 states brought more hardship. With electricity out, scarce food rotted in refrigerators and water pumping stations stopped.

    No early end to the suffering

    One heart-breaking video showed people rushing to catch water in buckets and plastic bottles from a leak in a drainage pipe feeding into a sewer.

    Maduro blamed the blackout on saboteurs using cyber attacks and electromagnetic waves to cripple the power system, operations in an “electric war” waged by the United States.

    The opposition pointed to lack of maintenance and an infrastructure that has been crumbling for years.

    In the wake of the longest blackout in Venezuela’s history, Guaidó launched a second round of protests, but the crowds have been noticeably thinner than in the early stage of the contest between the rival presidents.

    Hopes for an early end of the country’s agony appear to be fading in Venezuela. Not so in Washington, judging from bullish statements by President Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Michael Pompeo. Trump told an enthusiastic crowd of Venezuelan exiles and Cuban-Americans in Miami last month that what he called “the ugly alliance” between the Maduro government and Cuba was coming to a rapid end.

    Soon after, Pompeo told a television interviewer he was confident that Maduro’s “days are numbered.”

    Bullish statements from Washington

    When huge crowds jammed the streets of Caracas and other cities to cheer Guaidó, some U.S. administration officials thought Maduro would soon be on the way out. That he has managed to hang on despite popular anger, international condemnation and painful American sanctions has come as a surprise to many.

    Now, the bullish statements from Trump and Pompeo bring to mind American predictions during Barack Obama’s administration concerning Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad when he faced mass demonstrations, international condemnation and U.S. sanctions.

    In Syria, peaceful protests morphed into civil war in the summer of 2011, and the Obama team’s point man on the Middle Eastern country described Assad as “a dead man walking.” Eight years later, having prevailed in the war with the help of Russia and Iran, Syria lies in ruins, but Assad looks secure in power.

    Shortly before taking office, Trump promised that he would avoid intervention in foreign conflicts and “stop racing to topple foreign regimes.” He has largely stuck to that pledge but is making Venezuela an exception, with repeated assertions that “all options are on the table” — a Washington euphemism for military action.

    There’s no single explanation for Trump’s untypical focus on Venezuela. But it is worth noting that he made his toughest speech on the subject in Florida and that he is running for re-election in 2020. Hawkish rhetoric on Venezuela and Cuba plays well with the large Venezuelan-American and Cuban-American communities in that state.

    Florida, the country’s third most populous state, is of key importance in presidential elections. It is a so-called swing state that can go to either of the presidential candidates, often by very narrow margins.

     

    QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:

    1. Can you think of a country where a long-entrenched leader recently bowed to the demands of demonstrators?

    2. Why do you think China, Russia and several other countries are standing by Maduro?

    3. The United States has a history of intervention in Latin America. Can you name some cases?

     

    Source link

  • Judge rules in Trump’s favour over $100K H-1B visa fee hike

    Judge rules in Trump’s favour over $100K H-1B visa fee hike

    The judge ruled on December 23 that it was within the President’s powers to regulate immigration, rejecting arguments brought by the Chamber of Commerce that the proclamation exceeded Trump’s statutory authority.  

    “The parties’ vigorous debate over the ultimate wisdom of this political judgment is not within the province of the courts,” wrote the Obama-appointed judge Beryl Howell.  

    “So long as the actions dictated by the policy decision and articulated in the Proclamation fit within the confines of the law, the Proclamation must be upheld.” 

    The lawsuit is among two other cases challenging Trump’s controversial $100K fee for H-1B petitions, which the plaintiffs argued would lead companies, hospitals and other employers to cut jobs and weaken the services they provide to the public.  

    It was brought by the US Chamber of Commerce – the world’s largest business federation with roughly 300,000 members – and the Association of American Universities (AAU), which represents 69 US-based research universities. 

    Following the proclamation, the administration clarified international students changing status in the US would be exempt from the fee, though stakeholders have said it will undermine America’s leadership in education, research and innovation.  

    Zuzana Cepla Wootson, deputy director of federal policy at the Presidents’ Alliance, called the judge’s decision “deeply disappointing”. 

    “The United States must stop deterring the very talent that strengthens our classrooms, fuels our economy, and drives American innovation,” she said, urging Congress to “pursue bipartisan solutions that support US prosperity and competitiveness”.  

    The White House welcomed the ruling as a victory for American workers, vowing that Trump would continue to protect them from being replaced by “cheap, foreign labour”.

    “The $100,000 payment accompanying any new H1-B petition is a necessary and long-overdue first step to reform the H-1B visa program that has been abused at the expense of hardworking Americans,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told The PIE.

    The fee, which is still being challenged by two other lawsuits, hikes the cost of an H-1B visa petition by more than 20 times the previous charge, which ranged between $2,000 and $5,000.  

    The H-1B visa program enables US employers to temporarily hire international workers in “specialty occupations” from healthcare to computer science and financial analysis. California’s tech industry is particularly reliant on the visa stream.   

    The United States must stop deterring the very talent that strengthens our classrooms, fuels our economy, and drives American innovation

    Zuzana Cepla Wootson, Presidents’ Alliance

    “The $100,000 fee makes H-1B visas cost prohibitive for businesses, especially small- and medium-sized businesses that can least afford it,” Chamber of Commerce executive vice president Daryl Joseffer said after the ruling.  

    He said the chamber was considering further legal action and underscored the positive economic benefits of the H-1B stream, which has been found to reduce unemployment rates and lead to faster wage growths for US employers, according to the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP).  

    Howell’s ruling came the same day as the government finalised a rule to replace the random H-1B selection process with a weighted system favouring higher earners – something critics say will harm the US tech industry and dampen the country’s appeal among international students. The new process will come into effect on February 27.  

    Source link

  • What parents, teachers say about Trump’s policies on education

    What parents, teachers say about Trump’s policies on education

    by Caroline Preston, The Hechinger Report
    December 18, 2025

    Child care workers, students and teachers shared dismay over Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that are disrupting learning. School superintendents and college presidents described how uncertainty around federal funding is making their jobs far trickier. 

    Others — including a charter school leader and a for-profit college president — told The Hechinger Report they were grateful for recent changes to education policy, including a new emphasis on school choice and on the importance of workforce education. 

    Those were just a few of the many reactions we heard from 17 parents, students, educators and others around the country when we asked about the impact of President Donald Trump’s actions this year on their schools and communities. Several people told us that with the federal government stepping back from many of its long-standing responsibilities in education, they and their communities were taking on new roles. 

    Below are excerpts from the interviews, which have been lightly edited for clarity and length.      

    Sylvelia Pittman, math interventionist, Henry H. Nash Elementary School, Chicago Public Schools 

    Under this administration we have witnessed ICE being in our neighborhoods. ICE detained two parents of our students. The husband of one of my colleagues was detained and deported to Mexico. The husband of another colleague was questioned at work because he’s half Latino, half white. So it’s hit hard. And then with the cuts that have been made to the Education Department, those have hit my school. We have a large population of special education students. We are about 35 percent Latino and the rest of our students are Black. Many of our families receive SNAP benefits and they were affected. Trump withheld $8 million from our schools because of the mayor’s Black Student Success Plan, for students to continue to learn their history and bring more Black teachers into schools. It’s almost like we’ve taken hit after hit. It’s just as stressful as when we had Covid. We have had to come to grips with the idea that we must take care of our own. It’s going to be up to us, to city officials. Homelessness, health care, mental health — all of these things have to be addressed at the state and local level, because we can’t wait for the federal government to get it right. 

    — Caroline Preston

    TJ Katz, sophomore at Columbia University in New York, which reached a deal with the Trump administration restoring $400 million in federal funding frozen due to allegations of discriminatory conduct, including a failure to protect Jewish students during protests over the Israel-Hamas war

    Campus feels completely different than two years ago. All of the protests have stopped. The Trump administration effectively eliminated them. Whether you want to say Columbia cares about antisemitism, they definitely fear what it would mean to have $400 million stripped away from their budget. As a Jewish student on campus, I would absolutely say I’m glad that the change happened. As someone who’s a massive proponent of democracy and free speech, I have qualms about it. What if there was an administration that didn’t align with what I think is just? We now have a precedent set where the administration could snap their fingers and say this is what has to happen on campuses now. It is slightly scary the precedent that’s been set and the power a president now has over higher education in America. 

    — Meredith Kolodner 

    Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a charter school in New York City, which Linda McMahon toured earlier this year in her first public school visit as education secretary 

    In the Trump administration, there’s a greater affinity for the concept of school choice. That alone is a huge breath of fresh air. There are other things, too — for example, the federal tax credit scholarship. On the surface, it may not seem like that would benefit charter schools, but it does. The money could pay for tuition for a student to attend a private religious school or it could cover SAT prep, tutoring — and that goes to any kind of parent. You could have parents in a public charter school who now have the additional resources to be able to pay for the kinds of things that a lot of middle- and upper-class families are doing to supplement education for their kids. 

    With the Department of Education already heavily gutted, it’s had zero impact on us — literally zero impact. But even if there’s not a formal federal Department of Education, there are a couple of different functions that are important. One is as the scorekeeper: There absolutely needs to be an assessment, annual or biannual, where you can consistently compare 2026 to 2024 to 2022 to 2020. That’s crucial because we do need, every couple years, a sense of what percent of our kids are reading against a common standard. I also think there is value in having kind of a best practices reservoir so that the federal government can be the place to show, ‘Here’s some innovative work going on in Indiana vs. New York.’ But in general, there’s a very limited number of things that I think could really add value in education at the federal level. 

    — Nirvi Shah

    Meka Mo, millennial comedian and nonprofit worker in New York City who took out student loans for undergraduate and graduate school  

    I’m one of the people who should be receiving public service loan forgiveness, but that’s in limbo and tied up in court right now. We don’t know what’s going to happen. So honestly, it’s kind of a mess, and no one’s paying attention to it, because everyone has, like, one thousand other things going on. Basically all our financial futures are being fought out in the courts right now. It’s like they’re not trying to have social upward mobility in the country. 

    — Marina Villeneuve 

    Leticia Wiggins, librarian at the Center for Ethnic Studies at Ohio State University, which closed its Office of Diversity and Inclusion and Center for Belonging and Social Change in response to the Trump administration’s threats to withhold funding from schools that use race-conscious practices in programs, scholarships and other areas of campus life 

    Those were places where people could go and feel a sense of community and that they belonged somewhere, and now those spaces no longer exist. Some of the student communities have been sort of dissolved — students feel at a loss for where to go. We’re still trying to conduct business as usual and make up for what’s lacking, but everything is just getting more threatened in terms of what we’re even able to talk about. 

    — Meredith Kolodner 

    Todd Dugan, superintendent of Bunker Hill Community Unit School District 8 in Illinois, which saw roughly $22,000 in Title II federal funds frozen for services to recruit, retain and train teachers

    I’ve been a superintendent for 14 years. It’s definitely getting harder. It’s taking a job that’s already hard and getting harder, and making it harder still. And it appears that it’s being done needlessly. The freezing and clawing back of Title II was announced on June 30, when usually we apply for it on July 1. And then they finally released it the second week of August. It was a lot of extra work making things difficult for a job that is already difficult. I don’t know what the game was, because Title II funding didn’t get clawed back. It just made everybody anxious. 

    — Ariel Gilreath

    Michael A. Elliott, president of Amherst College, in Massachusetts 

    I see an impact in the growing anxiety of our international students, faculty and staff members. Many are questioning whether there is a safe and stable place for them on our campus or in this country. These uncertainties touch every part of their lives — academic, personal and professional. They influence decisions about research, travel and connections with family, and they undermine the sense of belonging and security that is essential to a place like Amherst. When members of our community carry this kind of persistent fear, the effects are felt by all of us who care about them and want to support them as extraordinary classmates and colleagues. 

    — Lawrie Mifflin 

    Kyshanna Patman, a North Carolina mother of four children who works from home

    It’s been a crazy year, especially since he’s been in office, with the food stamp benefits being delayed, Medicaid — it’s crazy. And then the things they’re saying about autism. My 4-year-old is autistic and it’s really, really crazy how they’re making the assumption about women taking Tylenol and causing autism. It has not been a good experience since he’s been in office.

    When SNAP benefits were delayed, I was struggling trying to come up with the money to keep food in the house. I have four kids in the house and they need to eat. I mainly made sure they had enough before I tried to eat anything myself.

    And with the Medicaid work requirements, I just don’t understand. It shouldn’t have to be a requirement for people to have Medicaid. People have preexisting conditions. You’re talking about a work requirement just for people to be seen. It doesn’t make any sense. 

    There’s too many changes he’s trying to do. They’re not trying to listen to what people have to say. People put you in [office]. He’s supposed to be listening to us and working for us instead of being stricter. You’re supposed to be helping and he’s not doing that. He’s doing the complete opposite. 

    — Jackie Mader 

    Leslie Cornick, provost and vice president of academic affairs at California State University, Chico, which lost funding for teacher training after the Trump administration canceled two grant programs of roughly $600 million, citing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives

    One of the challenges we are still continuing to follow up on is the loss of the Teacher Quality Partnership and SEED grants that support stipends for students who are going into teacher education programs and becoming teachers in rural counties and communities. Many of those students are Latinx and are coming to Chico State to become teachers so they can go back into their rural communities that desperately need teachers.

    We lost $700,000 or so. We couldn’t run the entire fall cohort of that program this year because access to those grants is still being litigated. We’re making the case for why these grants are so important and why they should not be discontinued. But in the meantime, we don’t have the money and so we can’t support the students. That means we are losing students that we will never get back. And there’s an impact not only on that individual student, but on that student’s family, generationally, and on our economy in the state of California because we’re not getting those teachers out into those rural communities that need them.

    From my perspective, it’s critically important that we continue to engage the administration in dialogue and help them understand especially the value of the regional public institutions. 

    — Olivia Sanchez

    Nicole Greene, a special education teacher at Scarsdale Middle School, in New York

    The landscape of special education has changed dramatically in the 13 years that I’ve been teaching, and that’s thanks to the ample research and the amount of effort that can go into advancing the field, advancing the profession. Without that, how do teachers get better? How do we learn more about how students learn best? Maybe we can agree that grants are good for furthering the field.

    A child should be able to go to any state in the country and their needs should be supported based on federal law in equal measure. At the end of the day, the argument that we are going to leave it up to the states just means that they can interpret IDEA however they see fit, without anyone ensuring that that’s in compliance with what was written. That’s a dangerous place to leave kids. 

    — Christina A. Samuels

    Daniel Cordova, junior at Edmonds-Woodway High School in the Edmonds School District in Washington state, which enrolls many children of migrant parents who work on nearby farms

    It’s scary times right now. You leave school, and you don’t know if you’re going to see your friends the next day because they might have some orders from the government to go back to their country. One of my friends is an immigrant. He’s worried like crazy about being deported. My friend’s mother has a deportation order. They’re struggling a lot right now. We feel it across the whole school. 

    It kind of changes the atmosphere. There’s less trust. It doesn’t feel safe, I would say. 

    — Neal Morton

    Brad Kuykendall, CEO of the for-profit Western Technical College, in El Paso, Texas 

    I point back to the executive order issued in April that dealt with preparing Americans for high-paying skilled trade jobs for the future. For far too long, there’s been a lack of acknowledgement of the importance of career, technical and trade schools. We were looked at as a lesser option for students, and to a degree, that’s still the case. But I think we’re starting to see that change a bit. The refocus and reemphasis — not as the only option, but as one of the many options — is very healthy for our economy as a whole and for our nation to continue to grow.

    Under the Biden administration, we did feel like there was definitely not as friendly of an environment [for for-profit colleges] to operate in. I did feel that we were underrepresented in many of the negotiated rulemaking sessions in the previous administration on regulations that impacted us far more than any other institution. We were one or two out of 15 seats at the table, so trying to come to consensus about a regulation in that environment was just very difficult. Going into negotiated rulemaking [to develop regulations under the ’big, beautiful bill’], I think there’s more fair representation at the table, and it’s a more balanced approach. 

    — Meredith Kolodner 

    Mike Shaver, president and CEO at Brightpoint, an Illinois nonprofit that operates child-focused programs, including free, federally funded Head Start centers and home-based Early Head Start services 

    It’s impossible to escape that this administration has not exactly done a great job at supporting poor families when you look at what happened with the struggle over SNAP benefits. And in our state, the increased ICE enforcement activities have had a profound impact. We have seen attendance levels drop.

    In November, an early learning employee — not someone in our program — got out of her vehicle, was walking into the facility where she was an instructor, and ICE agents followed her in, removed her from the building and detained her. It’s really hard to overstate what that kind of image does, not only for the staff who show up every day to meet the needs of these families, but also the families themselves. This is just a lot of added stressors for families, in addition to the challenges that already brought them to our Head Start programs. 

    — Jackie Mader

    Tiffany Tangel, a disability advocate and parent of three — including two children with dyslexia and other learning differences — in western New York 

    I’m closely watching what’s happening with IDEA. Trump said he was going to move it to Health and Human Services. A lot of people are worried about that. There’s a lot of disabilities that have nothing to do with health in that way. My kids have dyslexia. When it was newly diagnosed for my oldest, I went to our pediatrician and asked for resources on dyslexia, for places I could go for help, and they said we don’t know and the school should be helping you.

    I’m also working to restart our school’s special education PTA. Our school had one, but it closed in 2020. With so much unknown in terms of what’s next for our kids, a group of us just felt like now it was needed more than ever. Our hope is to be a place for the parents, because when you have kids in special education, it can be very lonely, and you feel very isolated. And then we really do want to focus on the teachers, because we know as soon as resources are cut, the teachers are feeling it.

    You’ve got to keep advocating at a federal level, at a state level, but it’s going to come down to your individual level, too. 

    — Christina A. Samuels

    Aiden Sirk, high school senior, Lawrenceburg, Indiana

    Conservatives, they’re not about, ‘We don’t want kids to have an education,’ — it’s that we want to make sure that we’re doing it in the most efficient way possible. And with the Department of Education cut, what they’re making sure they’re doing is that we are still going to have Pell Grants, we’re still going to have FAFSA, I can see that’s OK. There is a lot of bureaucracy at the Department of Education.

    A lot of these workers, they’re getting paid and they’re not even coming into the office like they were pre-pandemic. So we didn’t really need all that workforce. But then again, there is a proper way to do things. You can’t just dictate: ‘We’re shutting it down.’ You have to go through Congress. You have to go through the courts. And you have to do it the right way. So yes, I see it’s reasonable, but the way they’re doing it is not reasonable. 

    — Christina A. Samuels

    Heather Shotton, new president of Fort Lewis College, in rural Durango, Colorado, where nearly 40 percent of students are Native American. The college is a Native American-Serving, Nontribal Institution. Shotton is an enrolled citizen of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes 

    Fort Lewis lost $2.27 million in Title III money for Native American-serving institutions. The money paid for academic success initiatives: summer bridge programs, peer educators, various academic supports. That impacts our entire campus. Yes, it helped Indigenous students, but it also helped all of our students. It’s part of the federal government trust responsibility to support Native students. The majority of our Native students are not at tribal colleges and universities. And the majority of tribal colleges are two-year colleges. The shifting of money from Native-serving institutions to tribal colleges — itʼs one-time money, spread across 36 institutions. 

    — Nirvi Shah

    Sevan Minassian-Godner, third-year student at the University of California, Irvine and president of Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi and Jewish campus organization Hillel 

    Oct. 7 was a really big event on our campuses, and there was a lot of antisemitism floating around. But that kind of petered off after the first year, and we’re now at a point where it’s much less than it was my first year. But I wouldn’t necessarily attribute that to the Trump administration. I just think we’re further from the incident and from the encampments. I will say that we have experienced an uptick in right-leaning antisemitism recently; there are more groups on campus now that are participating in right-leaning antisemitism. I think that’s become more OK with the Trump administration in office. And I actually do attribute it a lot to Charlie Kirk’s death, too. I think that that ignited a lot of people early on in the year. People are more openly antisemitic, and especially on the right, and this kind of far-right white supremacist ideology, I think, has found its way into a lot more people’s hearts recently. 

    — Meredith Kolodner 

    Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].

    This story about education policies and the Trump administration was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/fear-fatigue-gratitude-students-parents-and-educators-on-the-new-trump-administrations-first-year/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=113967&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/fear-fatigue-gratitude-students-parents-and-educators-on-the-new-trump-administrations-first-year/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • State AGs launch third lawsuit seeking to stop Trump’s H-1B fee

    State AGs launch third lawsuit seeking to stop Trump’s H-1B fee

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    Dive Brief:

    • A group of 20 states filed a lawsuit Friday alleging that President Donald Trump’s proclamation implementing a $100,000 fee on new H-1B skilled worker visas is unlawful, and should be vacated and set aside.
    • The plaintiffs in California v. Noem, each of them being an attorney general for a Democratic state, claimed that the fee is arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, and fails to adhere to that law’s procedural requirements. The complaint alleged the administration exceeded statutory authority and usurped congressional authority over immigration and revenue collection.
    • Friday’s complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts is at least the third such lawsuit challenging Trump’s H-1B policy. Other challenges include a California lawsuit filed by several unions, industry groups and other co-plaintiffs, as well as a challenge filed in Washington, D.C., by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

    Dive Insight:

    California and Massachusetts are the lead state plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which alleged several anticipated negative effects could result from Trump’s proclamation. The complaint identified public colleges, schools and healthcare systems as entities whose operations are particularly threatened by the $100,000 fee.

    Illinois, for example, alleged that the new fee “effectively eliminated” the Chicago Public Schools’ use of H-1B visas to fill roles such as those in bilingual and special education. Maryland similarly said a loss of access to the visas would pose a “grave risk” to classroom staffing in its Baltimore City Public Schools district.

    The plaintiffs alleged that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s authority to assess fees in connection with H-1B visas is limited to levels that are commensurate with agency costs and that the $100,000 fee “bears no connection to any costs” borne by immigration and customs authorities.

    “The Trump Administration thinks it can raise costs on a whim, but the law says otherwise,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “We are going to court to defend California’s residents and their access to the world-class universities, schools, and hospitals that make Californians proud to call this state home.”

    Trump issued the proclamation imposing the new fee in September. At the time, the president justified the decision by noting “systemic abuse” of the H-1B program that “has undermined both our economic and national security.” Trump also criticized employers, saying some abused the visa program to the disadvantage of American citizens.

    The proclamation spawned confusion for participating employers and an array of questions, some of which the government addressed in an October regulatory update. The announcement noted that employers could pay the fee at a Treasury Department website and clarified that it would not be applied to petitions requesting an amendment, change of status or extension of stay for noncitizens who are inside the U.S., so long as the request is granted by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

    In a blog post, law firm Fragomen said employers and foreign nationals “should stay on top of developments in the lawsuits because court orders, government guidance, or both could mean new instructions with little notice.”

    Source link

  • Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission  

    Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission  

    by Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report
    December 4, 2025

    Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year.

    The university accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, even though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in — 7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared to 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data show.

    The Trump administration’s policies may soon end that advantage that has been enjoyed by men, admissions and higher education experts say.

    While much of the president’s recent scrutiny of college admissions practices has focused on race, these experts say his ban on diversity, equity and inclusion is likely to hit another underrepresented group of applicants: men, and particularly white men — the largest subset of male college applicants.

    “This drips with irony,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, or ACE, the nation’s largest association of universities and colleges, who said he expects that colleges and universities are ending consideration of gender in admission. “The idea of males, including white males, being at the short end of the stick all of a sudden would be a truly ironic outcome.”

    Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

    For years universities and colleges have been trying to keep the number of men and women on campuses evened out at a time when growing numbers of men have been choosing not to go to college. Some schools have tried to attract more men by adding football and other sports, promoting forestry and hunting programs and launching entrepreneurship competitions. 

    Nationwide, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men for more than four decades, with nearly 40 percent more women than men enrolled in higher education, federal data show.

    Efforts to admit applicants at higher rates based on gender are legal under a loophole in federal anti-discrimination law, one that’s used to keep the genders balanced on campuses.

    But the Trump administration has consistently included gender among the characteristics it says it does not want schools to consider for admissions or hiring, along with race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity or religious associations. The White House has so far largely not succeeded in its campaign to press a handful of elite schools to agree to the terms and sign a wide-ranging Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education in exchange for priority consideration for federal funding.

    “The racial parts have gotten a lot more attention, but I know from having spoken with practitioners who work in college admissions, they have read very clearly that it says ‘race and gender,’” in the administration’s pronouncements about ending preferences in admission, said Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center.

    “What I think they don’t understand is that taking away the ability of colleges and universities to balance the gender composition of their incoming classes will ultimately have an impact on the college enrollment rates of white males,” Harper said. “It is likely to impact them the most, as a matter of fact.” 

    At some private colleges, male applicants are more likely to get in

    School % of males admitted % of females admitted
    Brown University 7.0 4.4
    University of Chicago 5.6 3.7
    Yale University 4.6 3.4
    University of Miami 22.5 16.5
    Middlebury College 12.2 9.6
    Baylor University 56.8 47.9
    Pomona College 7.6 6.7
    Tulane University 14.9 13.4
    Vassar College 20.4 17.6

    SOURCE: Hechinger Report calculations from universities’ Common Data Sets

    Agreements that the administration has reached with Brown, Columbia and Northwestern universities to settle allegations of antisemitism discrimination also include language about gender.

    In a statement announcing the Brown deal in July, Education Secretary Linda McMahon promised that “aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”

    Asked if that meant male applicants would no longer be admitted at higher rates than female applicants — which has helped Brown keep its undergraduate enrollment at almost exactly 50-50, even with twice as many female applicants — spokesman Brian Clark said, “We have made no changes to our admissions practices in this regard.” 

    The Trump administration has also vowed to make all higher education institutions submit details about the students they admit, including their gender, to find out whether they’re “discriminating against hard working American” prospective students, McMahon said in another statement.

    Spokespeople for the Department of Education did not respond to questions about whether advantages in admission based on gender will be scrutinized in the same way as purported advantages based on race.

    Related: Inaccurate, impossible: Experts knock new Trump plan to collect college admissions data

    Universities are looking at the administration’s edicts “and they’re saying, ‘Well, we’d rather be cautious than stick our neck out’” by continuing to give advantages to male applicants, said ACE’s Mitchell, who was undersecretary of education under President Barack Obama. “I think we will see people dropping gender preferences, even though it is still within the law.”

    Colleges that have been accepting men at higher rates are trying to avoid a marketing problem they fear will happen if their campuses become too female, said Madeleine Rhyneer, who headed admissions offices at four private universities and colleges and is now vice president of consulting services and dean of enrollment management for the education consulting firm EAB. Colleges worry, “Will men look at that and think, ‘That’s essentially a women’s college, and I don’t want to go there’?”

    Related: Universities and colleges search for ways to reverse the decline in the ranks of male students

    “For the Browns and Columbias and highly selective and very competitive institutions, it is a problem,” Rhyneer said. “They want to create what feels like a balanced climate.”

    The results of ending this practice could be dramatic, experts predict. In 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, 817,035 more women than men applied to universities and colleges, federal data show.  Boys also have lower mean scores on the SAT in reading and writing, score lower overall on the ACT and have lower grade point averages in high school.

    “If we were going to eliminate preferences for men, the undergraduate population would skew to 65 percent female overnight,” Mitchell said.

    Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the right-leaning think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out that similar predictions were made after the 2023 Supreme Court decision effectively ending affirmative action based on race.

    At the time, he said, colleges spoke “in apocalyptic terms of the implications for the racial composition of student bodies.” But the number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled at universities and colleges the next year rose, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Then, said Hess, “there was a lot of, ‘Never mind.’” 

    The country’s top 50 private colleges and universities have 2 percentage points more male undergraduates than the top 50 flagship public universities, which do not consider gender in admission, according to research by Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer. He said this suggests that at least some are putting a thumb on the scale for male applicants.

    Columbia took 3 percent of women applicants last year and 4 percent of men. At the University of Chicago, 5.6 percent of male applicants were accepted last year, compared to 3.7 percent of female applicants. The ratio at the University of Miami was 22.5 percent to 16.5 percent; and at Vassar College, 20.4 percent to 17.6 percent. 

    Besides Brown, none of these universities would respond when asked if they will continue to accept higher percentages of men than women, Neither would others that do it, including Yale, Baylor and Tulane universities and Pomona College.

    Private institutions are allowed to consider gender in admission under Title IX, the federal law otherwise banning discrimination by universities and colleges that get federal funding. That’s due to a loophole dating from when the law was passed, in 1971.

    At the time, the gender ratio was exactly reversed, and men outnumbered women on campuses by nearly three to two. One of the universities’ congressional allies, Rep. John Erlenborn, R-Illinois, successfully amended the measure to let private colleges and universities continue to consider gender in admission.

    Erlenborn said at the time that forcing colleges to stop considering gender would be “one more giant step toward involvement by the federal government in the internal affairs of institutions of higher education.” 

    There’s little ambiguity for admissions offices now, said USC’s Harper.

    “It says here, in writing, ‘no discrimination on the basis of race and gender,’” he noted. “It says that explicitly.”

    Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.

    This story about men in college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/an-unexpected-target-of-federal-college-admissions-scrutiny-men/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=112505&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/an-unexpected-target-of-federal-college-admissions-scrutiny-men/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link