Trump’s Atrocious War on Higher Ed Demands an Aggressive Response

America’s colleges and universities make America great. They drive innovation, prosperity, national security, and social mobility.

Trump administration officials have called American colleges and universities “the enemy” and unleashed myriad attacks on them that would undercut their funding and trample their independence. These include cuts in biomedical research funding; eliminating research agencies; threatened reductions to student Pell grants, travel bans, and slow processing of visas of international students; attacks on free speech on campus; a proposed massive increase in taxes on endowments; and on and on.

Most recently, the administration pressured Columbia University into making a series of concessions as a precondition to negotiations over $400 million in federal funding that President Trump has threatened to cut.

Don’t think this is just a war on the Ivy League. It’s a war on all higher education. Too much time and effort has been spent focusing on higher education’s flaws. There are flaws. And they should be addressed. But not enough time has been spent on the real benefits that touch every sector of our economy in every state, every American regardless of their politics or whether they work for a university, and the very fabric of our society.

Right now the partnership between universities and government is at risk. Silence in the face of this threat is dangerous. As Ryan D. Enos and Steven Levitsky recently wrote in The Harvard Crimson: “Public opinion is not formed in a vacuum.… In the absence of a countervailing message, a one-sided debate will powerfully shape public opinion.”

We live in a moment that has reversed the ethos of the 1950s, when a bipartisan consensus formed under President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, about the crucial value of federal investment in higher education.

If higher education falters, the most brilliant scientists and entrepreneurs will take their research and their companies elsewhere, depriving the United States of high-paying jobs. Investors who provide the capital that fuels the economy will follow. If America loses its place as the world leader in higher education, the domestic consequences will be vast and not limited to college graduates or the elites.

For students, the primary benefit of college is education.

For starters, college brings its matriculants financial reward: The “median earnings for bachelor’s degree holders are $40,500 [per year] or 86 percent higher than those whose highest degree is a high school diploma and $1.2 million higher over a lifetime.” Plumbers, electricians, and other tradespeople earn a premium with some college education. For instance, “California workers with some college earn about 20 to 30 percent more than otherwise similar workers with only a high school education. And for those with associate degrees, this wage premium is at the high end of that spectrum—about 32 percent.”

But the benefits to both individuals and society extend beyond the merely pecuniary. College fosters a transition to adulthood. By exposing students to new ideas and information, college challenges them to engage in deep self-reflection on their identities and inherited values and expand their sense of the world and its possibilities. Sharing this process with their peers fosters lifelong friendships, essential to a healthy and fulfilling life.

In addition, university education and citizenship go hand in hand. College-educated Americans, especially those who take social science courses, are much more likely to vote. In addition, according to researchers at the American Enterprise Institute, Americans with college degrees “participate in associational life at high rates and have robust social and friendship networks.” They tend to attend church and other associations, volunteer and participate in community meetings and local events, and contribute three times more to charity—all integral to sustaining America’s unique civil society.

All these benefits mean that with college, there is very little buyer’s remorse. About 75 percent of people who did not complete college wish they had more education rather than less. And very few people who took college courses or finished college wish they hadn’t.

Fixated on the nearly $100,000 per year of all-in college costs, the public perceives universities as unaffordable. In fact, the cost of higher education—even at the most elite universities—is more affordable than at any time in the last 35 years, and the benefits are greater. According to the College Board, the typical in-state cost of tuition at a four-year public university after grant aid, adjusted for inflation, is less than $5,000. That has not increased in 15 years. Simultaneously, community colleges have become more affordable. In at least 35 states, community colleges are now free.

At private universities, a main purpose of the endowments is to directly finance costs to reduce, and even eliminate, student debt. For instance, Harvard University recently announced that students from families who earn $100,000 or below will soon attend for free, including tuition, housing, meals, books, and everything else. Students from families earning between $100,000 to $200,000 go tuition free, which accounts for nearly 70 percent of the cost of attending. Other selective universities have similar policies. As a recent Brookings Institution study concluded: After taking into account financial aid and tax benefits, “net tuition has not increased since the 1990s. The reason is that financial aid (excluding loans) has increased almost as fast as posted tuition prices.”

The benefits of higher education don’t redound just to students; they also buoy local economies across America. For instance, the number-two private employer in North Carolina is Duke. The University of Iowa is also the number-two employer in Iowa. In Kentucky, Nebraska, and other states, university health systems are the top employer. Through operations, employee payroll, capital improvements, student, alumni, and visitor spending, the University of Pennsylvania contributes over $37 billion to the southeastern Pennsylvania economy, including $547 million in tax revenue to Philadelphia. And then there are the 300 spin-off companies based on Penn research that were started in the last 10 years. Every major university has a similar story and statistics. Indeed, in every region of the United States, the share of college graduates directly correlates with higher-wage jobs.

Finally, colleges and universities are good for the nation. They have been instrumental in scientific advancement. Since 2000 and the complete mapping of the human genome, there have been five major biomedical advances: CRISPR, genetic therapy, CAR-T cures for cancer, mRNA vaccines, and now GLP-1 drugs. Of these advances, all were achieved in U.S. colleges and universities, with GLP-1 shared between the United States and Denmark. Robust academic research is the major reason why the U.S. has six of the top 10 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in the world.

But all of that is being put at risk by sudden cuts in federal research funding and the threat of more to come. Laboratory work and clinical research of new treatments are on hold, and schools are reducing the number of graduate students they are admitting. For instance, the University of Utah’s Huntsman Cancer Institute, which treats patients from many Western states, is uncertain about its future should cuts in National Institutes of Health funding—now on hold, thanks to lawsuits—move forward.

Beyond biotech, universities also help agriculture by developing foods like the Honeycrisp apple, which have been important products for the industry, and improving water management for agriculture. The unique connection between university research, financial markets, and companies is why the United States leads in quantum computing, research on fusion energy, and many other areas. Right now, this partnership is at risk.

Universities have also been instrumental in securing our national defense. Radar came from MIT. University-based engineering research has been critical to the development of computers, the internet, GPS, artificial intelligence, precision controls, hypersonic aerodynamics, advanced sensors, and other technologies that keep the country safe. And today, thousands of service members are alive because of Defense Department–funded trauma research at university medical schools.

There’s much more. Our understanding of human decision-making radically changed with the insights derived from academic research into behavioral economics that started in the U.S. Historians have mined archives and advanced new understandings of the nation’s founding, the American presidency, slavery, the space program, the origins and consequences of the Cold War, and other seminal topics. And colleges and universities have catalyzed the arts, fostering the creation of transformative literature and other cultural contributions.

Moreover, American universities attract talent from all over the world. More than 1.1 million foreign students come to the U.S. each year to study. Indeed, higher education is the country’s eighth-largest “export,” in the sense that these students contributed over $43 billion to the U.S. economy in foreign currency balances. Indeed, higher education is a bigger “export” than all that corn, wheat, soybeans, and other grains. And foreign students who came to the U.S. to study founded 55 percent of America’s 582 start-up companies worth at least $1 billion.

Like every institution and organization, American colleges and universities are far from perfect. Healthy institutions and organizations need to evolve and reform. Universities and colleges need to reimagine and reemphasize liberal education, reduce administrative bloat, embrace ideological diversity, and think about how to adapt education to twenty-first-century technologies. They need to dismantle restrictions—formal or informal—that exist on freedom of speech and stop shielding students from challenges to their views. After all, the very essence of education is to stimulate critical thinking, including reexamining students’ views and values.

Evolution and reform are not promoted through denigration and destruction. Government and universities need to collaborate, not conflict. If the U.S. is to meet the challenges posed by China, universities and government need to work together. And if we destroy higher education, the country—and world—will not be made great in any way but poorer in numerous ways.

University leaders can’t wait for someone else to defend our places of learning. While investigating worthwhile areas of reform, it’s vital that the public does not lose sight of our important, ongoing contributions to the economy, science, knowledge, and citizenship. This is no time to sit silently as these cherished institutions, the envy of the world, are under dire threat.

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