Layoffs at Stanford, University of Oregon, Michigan State, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Harvard Kennedy School

In recent weeks, several prominent institutions of higher education—including Stanford University, the University of Oregon, Michigan State University, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and Harvard Kennedy School—have enacted rounds of layoffs, signaling broader structural challenges in the U.S. academic and healthcare sectors. Despite their elite reputations, substantial endowments, and billions in annual revenue, these institutions are shedding jobs, restructuring departments, and quietly retreating from long-standing commitments to faculty, staff, and students.

The reasons cited vary: declining enrollments in some programs, budget shortfalls, revenue realignment, digital transitions, and post-pandemic financial recalibrations. But the broader narrative is one of institutional austerity and technocratic realignment—driven not by scarcity but by strategic choices that often prioritize financial optimization over community stability.

Stanford University: "Voluntary" Departures and "Organizational Review"

In May 2024, Stanford University initiated what it called a "voluntary separation program" for staff across its libraries and various administrative departments. The move came amid a sweeping “organizational review” led by consultants and senior management. While Stanford did not initially label the departures as layoffs, internal communications revealed pressure on departments to cut personnel costs amid shifting budget priorities. Meanwhile, construction of new capital projects continued, and executive pay remained untouched. Critics see this as part of a Silicon Valley-inspired push toward leaner, more corporate university models.

University of Oregon: Retrenchment and Program Consolidation

The University of Oregon’s recent layoffs hit multiple academic and support units, including information technology, library services, and even academic advising. Faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences have expressed concern about being asked to do more with fewer resources, especially as administrative spending has not faced equivalent cuts. The administration defended the move as necessary due to a structural deficit, though critics argue it reflects misplaced priorities, particularly as Oregon increases its investments in athletics and public-private development ventures.

Michigan State University: Fallout from Scandal and Financial Strain

Michigan State University, still grappling with reputational damage and legal costs from high-profile scandals, has trimmed staff in several support areas while quietly shelving plans for new academic initiatives. Some layoffs have come in student affairs and auxiliary services, disproportionately affecting non-tenured staff and hourly workers. Union leaders have pushed back against the lack of transparency and what they view as an erosion of the university’s mission in the name of risk mitigation and corporate-style management.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center: Layoffs in a Profitable Sector

Perhaps the most controversial layoffs have occurred at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC), a health system that reported strong financials in previous years. In June 2025, VUMC laid off more than 100 employees, including nurses, administrative personnel, and technicians. The center cited the need to reduce costs amid “changing patient volumes” and “shifts in healthcare delivery.” Yet critics point to a broader trend among elite medical centers: aggressive expansion, high executive compensation, and an overreliance on precarious labor—even as core medical services are under strain. The layoffs at VUMC come amid growing public scrutiny of hospital labor practices and the commodification of healthcare within nonprofit medical institutions.

Harvard Kennedy School: Cutting Diversity and Public Policy Staff

At Harvard Kennedy School, layoffs have disproportionately affected staff involved in diversity initiatives and student services, raising questions about the university’s commitment to equity and public interest education. In May 2025, at least 20 staff positions were eliminated, including roles related to community engagement, public service programming, and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) work. The cuts occurred just as Harvard faced external criticism over its tepid response to national and international crises. While the school defended the layoffs as part of a broader “strategic restructuring,” students and faculty protested what they saw as a retreat from the school’s mission of fostering ethical and inclusive leadership.

A Symptom of Deeper Malaise

These layoffs are not isolated incidents. They are part of a larger transformation within higher education and affiliated medical centers—one shaped by managerialism, austerity policies, declining public investment, and a technocratic ethos that often sidelines human costs. Even as tuition rises and research funding grows in some areas, universities and academic health centers increasingly rely on contingent labor while outsourcing vital functions and reducing core services.

What’s being lost is not just jobs, but trust—between institutions and their workers, students, and the broader public. As layoffs mount in places once considered recession-proof and mission-driven, a pressing question remains: what kind of future are these institutions building, and for whom?

Sources

• Stanford Daily, May 2024

• Oregon Public Broadcasting, June 2024

• Lansing State Journal, April 2024

• Nashville Scene, June 2025

• Harvard Crimson, May 2025

• The Chronicle of Higher Education

• Internal communications and faculty council statements

• National Nurses United reports on hospital layoffs

• Interviews with laid-off staff and faculty union representatives

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For more investigative reporting on U.S. higher education and academic labor, follow the Higher Education Inquirer.

Failing Students by Design: Strategic Inefficiency in US Higher Education

Southern New Hampshire University isn’t the only institution quietly unraveling. Across the U.S. higher education landscape, millions of students are being failed not by accident—but by design.

Financial aid systems are convoluted. Mental health services are threadbare. Loan forgiveness programs are bureaucratic nightmares. Advising and support services are being outsourced or cut altogether. And as universities continue to raise tuition, slash labor costs, and celebrate "efficiency," it becomes increasingly clear: these aren’t unfortunate oversights. They are intentional. The failure is the strategy.

This is what scholars and critics call strategic inefficiency—the deliberate maintenance of confusing, slow, or inaccessible systems to limit responsibility and reduce costs. In other words, when students slip through the cracks, it's often because the cracks were engineered that way.

At every level of higher education, we see systems designed to frustrate and exhaust the very people they're supposed to help. Financial aid forms get lost. Transfer credits vanish. Borrower Defense claims sit idle for years. Campus disability services are underfunded and overwhelmed. Counseling waitlists stretch for months. The result is a student experience marked by delay, confusion, and denial—not because schools can’t do better, but because they choose not to.

This isn't just negligence. It is institutional betrayal. Colleges and universities advertise themselves as spaces of care, opportunity, and transformation, but then they abandon students when they are most vulnerable. The betrayal is especially cruel because it wears the mask of benevolence. The smiling brochures, the mission statements, the student-first slogans—all serve as cover for a business model that exploits rather than supports.

Meanwhile, respected voices in academia are stepping away from this battlefield. Steven Mintz’s recent farewell to Inside Higher Ed exemplifies this retreat. He chooses to move toward quieter explorations of literature, aesthetic experience, and cultural inquiry. While his Substack musings on Bob Dylan, T. S. Eliot, and the inner life of students may be intellectually rich, they avoid the urgent reality facing most people in higher education today. The house is on fire, and some of our most thoughtful voices are choosing to paint watercolors instead of sounding the alarm.

But who benefits from this design? Not students. Not faculty. Not families. The winners are university executives, educational tech vendors, loan servicers, and financiers. These stakeholders thrive in a system where services are minimal and revenues are maximized. It’s no coincidence that tuition climbs as instruction quality declines, or that the most visible innovation in higher ed is financial packaging, not pedagogical reform.

And above it all, the rich and powerful quietly reap the benefits. They need their soldiers, and underfunded community colleges and for-profit trade schools supply them. They need their sex workers, and the crushing weight of student debt pushes desperate students into survival economies, including cam work and transactional relationships. They need a compliant, credentialed workforce that is obedient, overworked, and drowning in debt—unable to organize, challenge authority, or dream of another way. What they do not need is a generation of radical thinkers or empowered critics. They do not want philosophy majors with housing security or history graduates with zero debt. They want streamlined, segmented, and indebted labor—perfectly positioned to serve, not to resist.

Higher education is not broken. It is operating exactly as designed, serving the interests of power while selling the illusion of mobility. The rhetoric of opportunity masks the machinery of extraction. Every unpaid internship, every unanswered financial aid ticket, every overwhelmed advisor is a cog in that machine.

Real reform won’t come from think pieces about ambiguity or nostalgia for the humanities. It will come from student and worker organizing. From lawsuits and public exposés. From demanding transparency and refusing to be treated as liabilities. From confronting the fact that this system is not failing. It is succeeding at doing precisely what it was built to do.

Until that truth is widely recognized, students will keep being misled, mismanaged, and monetized—by design.

The Higher Education Inquirer will continue to name that design and expose those who profit from it.

How the 940-Page Senate Bill Accelerates the College Meltdown

In the midst of economic uncertainty, demographic decline, and ballooning student debt, the U.S. Senate has introduced a 940-page spending and tax reconciliation bill—dubbed by some lawmakers as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” But behind the political branding lies a sweeping blueprint for disinvestment in working-class Americans, especially in higher education. If passed, the bill would not only accelerate the ongoing College Meltdown—it would codify it.

Slashing the Ladder: Pell Grant Restrictions

At the heart of the bill is a deceptively simple change: redefining full-time college attendance from 12 credits per semester to 15 credits. This shift may sound technical, but its consequences are enormous.

According to the Congressional Budget Office and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), this new definition would result in more than 4.4 million Pell Grant recipients receiving either reduced aid or losing eligibility entirely. An estimated 1.4 million students—mostly community college attendees, part-time students, older learners, and single parents—could lose access to Pell Grants altogether.

In a nation already grappling with declining college enrollments and rising student attrition, these changes will likely push thousands more out of the system and close the door for many before they ever step into a classroom.

Medicaid, SNAP, and the Vanishing Safety Net

Higher education does not exist in a vacuum. The Senate bill proposes more than $930 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade. These cuts come alongside the imposition of work requirements and cost-sharing mandates that will affect millions of low-income Americans—including a significant share of college students.

Many students depend on Medicaid for mental health support, primary care, and prescriptions. Others rely on SNAP to eat. Under the proposed legislation, these essential supports would be stripped from the very students who need them to persist in school.

A 2023 GAO report found that over 30 percent of U.S. college students experience food or housing insecurity. This bill doesn’t just ignore that crisis—it actively worsens it.

Starving Public Colleges

The federal Medicaid cuts would ripple through state budgets, forcing legislatures to make difficult decisions. In many cases, that will mean diverting funds away from public higher education systems.

Already under strain from declining enrollment and years of austerity, public colleges—especially regional universities and community colleges—would face even deeper cuts. The likely result: tuition increases, faculty layoffs, program closures, and the elimination of student services.

In effect, the bill shifts the cost burden of public education from the collective public to individual students and families, reinforcing a model of privatized risk and public abandonment.

Loans Over Grants, Profits Over People

In parallel with Pell Grant restrictions, the bill unwinds critical student loan protections put in place over the last five years. It reverses enhancements to Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plans and proposes the elimination of Biden-era loan forgiveness programs.

These changes benefit the student loan servicing industry, which stands to profit from lengthened repayment timelines and reduced cancellation pathways. Meanwhile, borrowers—especially those from low-income backgrounds—are pushed deeper into long-term debt peonage.

For a generation already saddled with debt and entering a labor market rife with instability, the Senate bill amounts to a massive wealth transfer upward—from struggling students to banks and servicers.

Enabling the Rise of Robocolleges

The weakening of financial aid and public support creates fertile ground for low-cost, low-quality alternatives: online diploma mills, edtech credential vendors, and "robocolleges" that replace faculty with algorithms.

Without adequate Pell funding or public college access, desperate students will be more likely to fall into the traps of for-profit institutions and unaccredited providers that promise quick credentials—but often deliver worthless degrees and predatory loans.

This shift doesn’t just hurt students. It undermines the quality of the U.S. workforce, degrades academic labor, and cedes the future of education to automation and private equity.

A Future for the Few

Ultimately, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” cements a two-tiered higher education system: elite universities insulated by billion-dollar endowments, and a gutted public sector limping along under austerity, privatization, and surveillance.

It is no coincidence that these policies are being introduced as the population ages, racial and economic inequality deepens, and faith in democratic institutions erodes. Higher education, once framed as a ladder of mobility, is becoming a narrow gangplank—offering escape only to the few who can afford it.

Meltdown Legislation 

The College Meltdown is no longer a slow decline. It’s being legislated into crisis.

If passed, the Senate’s 940-page bill would mark a turning point: a systemic dismantling of the supports that make higher education possible for working-class Americans. From financial aid to public health, from state colleges to community safety nets, the tools of educational access are being hollowed out by design.

And while elite donors and legislators continue to fund their own children's paths to Princeton and Stanford, millions of other Americans will be left out—again.

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Sources:

• NASFAA: Pell Grant Aid Analysis

• Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Medicaid Cut Estimates

• Inside Higher Ed: “Community Colleges Fear Pell Changes”

• GAO Report: “Food and Housing Insecurity Among College Students”

• Brookings Institution: “Cuts to the Social Safety Net and the Future of Higher Education”

Layoffs at Southern New Hampshire University

Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), long hailed as a leader in online education and a symbol of institutional reinvention, laid off approximately 60 employees on June 27, 2025. The move came without warning to staff, according to an anonymous source close to the situation.

Employees reportedly received a generic email from Lisa Marsh Ryerson, SNHU's newly installed president, delivering the news of their termination. There was no video call, no face-to-face meeting, and no meaningful explanation beyond the cold language of corporate HR.

“There was no sincerity,” the source said. “No real communication. Just a robotic email. No opportunity for questions, no acknowledgment of people’s service.”

The layoffs have sent shockwaves through the university’s workforce—many of whom had believed that SNHU’s image as a student-centered and employee-friendly institution translated into job security. That assumption, it appears, was misplaced.

SNHU, which once garnered praise from the Obama administration for its innovative online learning model, has undergone significant changes in recent years. Under the leadership of former president Paul LeBlanc, the university expanded its online programs rapidly and became one of the largest nonprofit providers of online degrees in the United States. But as the market for online education becomes increasingly competitive and enrollment pressures mount across the country, even big players like SNHU appear to be tightening their belts.

What’s striking about this latest round of cuts is not just the numbers—but the tone. At a university that prides itself on personalization and student engagement, employees describe the layoff process as abrupt, impersonal, and dehumanizing.

“They preach empathy to students,” the source noted. “But when it came to their own staff, there was none.”

It’s unclear which departments or roles were affected. SNHU has yet to issue a public statement, and no mention of the layoffs could be found on the university’s website or social media accounts at the time of publication.

The layoffs at SNHU follow broader trends in the higher education sector, where institutions—both public and private—are increasingly resorting to staff reductions amid enrollment declines, demographic shifts, and uncertain funding landscapes. But even in this context, the lack of transparency and empathy stands out.

The Higher Education Inquirer will continue to monitor developments at Southern New Hampshire University and invites current and former employees to share their experiences confidentially.

Harvard and Yale Selling Off Private Equity Stakes

Harvard and Yale—titans of American higher education and longtime bellwethers of endowment strategy—are quietly offloading billions in private equity holdings. These moves, confirmed through multiple reports and market insiders, signal a significant shift in institutional investing, with potential ripple effects across the higher ed landscape and beyond.

The two Ivies, boasting the largest university endowments in the world ($50.7 billion for Harvard, $40.7 billion for Yale as of 2024), have long championed the “Yale model” of endowment investing: high allocations to illiquid assets such as private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, and real assets like timberland and oil. But the bloom is off the rose.

From Darling to Dilemma

Private equity once promised high returns, portfolio diversification, and access to elite deals not available to public investors. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, as traditional markets stagnated, institutions doubled down on alternative investments. For years, this strategy paid off—at least on paper.

But cracks have been forming.

Private equity valuations have come under scrutiny as deal activity has slowed, interest rates have risen, and exits through IPOs and acquisitions have dried up. Many private equity funds are now sitting on aging portfolios—so-called "zombie funds"—that have not returned capital in years. Meanwhile, limited partners like universities are increasingly liquidity-constrained, especially as operating costs rise and tuition-dependent revenues remain fragile.

Harvard Management Company and Yale’s Investment Office, once aggressive buyers, are now sellers on the secondary market. Reports indicate both institutions are using intermediaries to quietly market stakes in private equity funds—often at discounts of 10% to 20%, or more, below net asset value.

A Broader Retreat?

This retreat isn’t just about balance sheet management. It’s a broader reassessment of what endowments should be doing—and what risks they should be bearing.

Universities face mounting scrutiny over their massive, tax-advantaged endowments and their relationships with Wall Street. Critics question why institutions with social missions are entangled in opaque, leveraged, and sometimes predatory industries. Private equity firms, after all, have been deeply involved in sectors like healthcare, housing, for-profit education, and prison services—areas where returns often come at the cost of public welfare.

Moreover, the mismatch between the long lock-up periods of private equity investments and the growing need for financial flexibility is becoming more apparent. University administrators now must navigate volatile geopolitical conditions, student protests over divestment, and uncertain federal funding. Liquidity matters more than it did a decade ago.

The End of the Yale Model?

David Swensen, Yale’s late investment chief, revolutionized university finance with his embrace of illiquid alternatives. But times have changed. While the strategy made Yale’s endowment a model for copycats, today it may represent an outdated orthodoxy.

Harvard and Yale’s pivot may be the beginning of the end for the “Yale model” as we know it. Other institutions—especially smaller endowments that tried to mimic the Ivies—may find themselves stuck with toxic assets, unable to unload them without taking steep losses.

In fact, some mid-tier and small colleges may have to choose between covering operational costs and holding on to underperforming private equity positions. For those with limited financial cushions, the fallout could be existential.

Higher Ed’s Reckoning with Risk

The endowment shift also raises a philosophical question: What is the purpose of university wealth?

As elite schools back away from the riskier corners of Wall Street, perhaps it's time for a broader reckoning—about not just how universities invest, but why. Should institutions built on ideals of knowledge, access, and social progress be hand-in-glove with industries known for wage suppression, regulatory arbitrage, and asset stripping?

Harvard and Yale may be late to that moral realization. But their financial pivot is a sign that even the most powerful players can’t ignore reality forever.

In the age of growing student debt, declining public trust, and ballooning inequality, selling off a few private equity funds is a small move. But it could be the start of a larger shift—one where higher education finally begins to question whether its financial strategies align with its educational mission.

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If you have insights into university endowment strategies or are a whistleblower inside the private equity world, contact us confidentially at Higher Education Inquirer. 

Higher Education in Retreat (Gary Roth)

 [Editor's note: This article first appeared in the Brooklyn Rail.  We thank the Brooklyn Rail for allowing us to repost this.]

For decades, the top-tier colleges and universities—often represented by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but including a few dozen other private and public institutions as well—have reshaped themselves to accommodate the rapidly-changing demographic profile of the United States.1 From all appearances, the universities were also in harmony with the sensibilities and preferences of the country’s leading citizens. Key moments, like the sanctioning of gay marriage that found support from wide-spread sectors of the upper class, seemed to solidify the drift towards a diverse and tolerant social order, one that resonated not only domestically but internationally as well.

The future evolution of civil society was, in this way of thinking, firmly and finally in hand. Bitter acrimony might characterize the political world or single-issue items like abortion, but actual developments outweighed the leftover pockets of resistance, which in any case were thought to be localized in less significant parts of the country and the world and could at best only slow the inevitable. How hard people pushed for change would ultimately determine the future.

This somnambulistic mode of thought pervaded the university world and also wide swaths of the liberal public. It helps explain the ease with which parts of the university community, after an initial round of caution, joined hands with its political opposition to suppress the campus protests that developed in response to Israel’s brutality towards Palestinian civilians.

Appeasement and accommodation, while regrettable within the academic community because of the retreat from sacrosanct ideas such as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, nonetheless set the stage for developments that followed the national elections at the end of last year. Martin Niemöller’s self-confession about his support—as a Lutheran pastor—for the German fascists during the 1930s captures nicely the corner into which the higher education community had boxed itself:

When the Nazis came for the Communists, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a trade unionist.
When they jailed the Social Democrats, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a social democrat.
When they jailed the Jews, I kept quiet; I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left who could protest.2

Without a vibrant protest movement already in place to push against harsh and arbitrary actions, the universities seemed to have little choice but to acquiesce to a regime that seems interested in flattening the population into an undifferentiated mass.3

Because appeasement and accommodation have been embraced as proactive survival tactics, resistance has centered on a judicial system thought to be less conservative than the groups that have come to dominate the executive and legislative branches of government, a judiciary conceptualized as a mediator rather than an initiator and enforcer of social conflict. Given the legal system’s history, this too becomes another moment of sleep walking. It is a huge distance from the dynamism that characterized the world of higher education not long ago.

Among the most dynamic institutions have been the privately-governed universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Not just their social vision, but their great wealth allowed them to embrace initiatives that stand at the forefront of attempts to remold institutional behavior. Front and center have been efforts to diversify the upper ranks of corporate, governmental, and non-profit establishments such that they too reflect the diversity of the population at large.

Previous attempts to diversify the collegiate student body by means of affirmative action programs that focused on underrepresented groups, especially African Americans and Latines, were struck down by the judiciary. Anti-affirmative action backlash took aim at the admissions policies at highly-competitive graduate programs, such as elite law and medical schools, and on prestigious scholarship programs. The backlash, in other words, concentrated on the byways that provided access into the upper levels of society.

Schools and programs that served the remainder of the population were not of particular concern. Graduate programs in public administration, for instance, where the training of mid-level administrators is the aim, rarely came under attack, whether located at medium-sized liberal arts colleges or regional state universities. These types of institutions also suspended their affirmative action initiatives, but mostly as preemptive moves to avoid future litigation. By strategically targeting the institutions at the top, the entire system was enticed to reorient itself.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives were one of the responses to both past and recent judicial rollbacks. These were initiatives directed toward the recruitment and retention of underrepresented groups rather than their admission and funding. DEI initiatives, though, did not deal with the cost of attendance, which at the elite private institutions is beyond everyone’s means except for the wealthy. For tuition, room, and board to attend as an undergraduate, the current cost for the 2025–26 school year at Princeton, for example, is $82,650. Fees are extra.4

Financial incentives based on socioeconomic status, however, were a strategy that seemingly silenced all critics. The most generous programs encompass virtually all applicants from either a working or middle class background; that is, everyone except the elite is covered as long as household or parental income is below $200,000 annually. At Princeton, the limit is $100,000, pegged considerably above the level of median household income in the United States.5

This allows the institutions to be “needs-blind” and recruit students no matter their financial situation. A tuition-free college education—once a hallmark of publicly-funded institutions—has been revived at the upper end of the spectrum, a profound assertion by these institutions of their intent to further the socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic integration of the upper class.

One consequence of these cost-free programs is that it is often cheaper to attend an elite college like Princeton than to attend the nearby publicly-funded state university, the flagship institution—in this case, Rutgers University-New Brunswick. These figures are drawn from government calculations that show actual expenses for families at different tiers of the socioeconomic spectrum:6

CHART 1 – ANNUAL UNDERGRADUATE NET COST OF ATTENDANCE

Family income	PRINCETON	RUTGERS-NEW BRUNSWICK
Less than $ 30,000	$  2,518	$15,885
$30,001 - $ 48,000	$  4,682	$15,532
$48,001 - $ 75,000	$  7,652	$17,578
$75,001 - $110,000	$13,849	$24,020
Over $110,001	$39,943	$33,460

 

A significant reversal has taken place. The elite privates have become the exemplars for the entire system of higher education, not just academically but economically as well. It makes economic sense for the poor to attend elite private institutions (assuming they are offered one of the few open slots) and for the rich to attend publicly-funded ones. Because student loans are not part of these aid packages, students at elite colleges graduate with less debt than students at nearby public flagships.7

We find, then, that the more selective the college—Princeton admits five percent of applicants, Rutgers-New Brunswick sixty-five percent—the cheaper it is to attend, and the more likely you are to graduate—at Princeton ninety-eight percent, at Rutgers-New Brunswick eighty-four percent—the less that debt encumbers you afterwards. And what’s true about the comparison of Princeton and its nearby publicly-funded flagship is true in other states also: Harvard and University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Yale and the University of Connecticut at Storrs, and so on.

Just as important, student socioeconomic profiles parallel those at nearby public flagships. At Princeton, one in five (twenty percent) of its students receives a Pell Grant. These are the federally-funded grants awarded when family income is below, roughly, $50,000. Pell Grants thus serve as a reasonable measure of the density of students from working class and poor backgrounds at a particular institution. At Rutgers-New Brunswick, it is one in four students (28 percent).

Socioeconomic programs like the one at Princeton exist at more than a hundred public and privately-governed college institutions. Taken altogether, there has been a quiet undermining of commonly-accepted assumptions regarding elite institutions and their public counterparts. That the private elite institutions often outperform the public sector ones in matters traditionally considered the latter’s prerogative shows how deeply intertwined the private and public sectors have become.

Yet for all their efforts, the elite institutions still do not reflect the demographics of the population at large. This is true for the elite privates and also for public flagships. Nationally, thirty percent of students receive Pell Grants, a measure of the degree to which the working class has become a substantial part of the university community. At top-tier schools, however, fewer of their students receive Pell Grants. At Harvard, it is seventeen percent; at Yale, nineteen percent; at the Texas flagship, UT Austin, twenty-five percent; at the Florida flagship, UF Gainesville, twenty-three percent.8

That socioeconomic diversity is lower at elite privates and public flagships than is the national norm is not surprising, given the amply-documented correlation between parental finances and scholastic performance.9 Students from wealthier backgrounds, as a rule, perform better academically and are more likely to attend prestigious institutions. Still, the top-tier institutions have come a long way from the times in which they represented, with few exceptions: only the elite.

At places like Princeton, the student body is nearly as diverse racially and ethnically as at the nearby state flagship. According to the broad demographic categories used in government publications and legislation, we find that at both Princeton and Rutgers-New Brunswick, there are no majorities, only minorities:10

CHART 2 – RACE AND ETHNICITY AT TOP-TIER INSTITUTIONS

(in percents)	PRINCETON	RUTGERS-NEW BRUNSWICK
Asian	24	33
Black (African American)	9	7
Hispanic (Latine)	10	16
White	36	31
Non-Resident Alien (International Students)	12	7
Two or More Races (Multiracial)	7	4

 

Immigration and migration initially produced majority-less campuses at urban public institutions; in other words, at institutions located in major metropolitan areas—places where jobs are numerous and resistance to newcomers often diffuse and undirected. At Princeton and other elite institutions, however, it is not demographics, but merit—in combination with these economically-based financial aid packages—that drive the dynamic.

Forty-five years ago, individuals self-identified as white represented eighty-four percent of all undergraduates but only seventy-seven percent of eighteen to twenty-four year-olds (Chart 3). Higher education was a significant cultural dynamic for this group. A major reversal has since taken place, in which the white population now accounts for fifty-two percent of eighteen to twenty-four year-olds and the same percentage of college students. Their lead has been lost.

Every other group has moved in the opposite direction, increasing its presence within the collegiate system faster than their increase in either population or the prime college-attending age cohort (eighteen to twenty-four year-olds). The latter group has been relatively stable within the Black population, for instance, only increasing one percentage point from thirteen to fourteen percent during those decades. But the presence of Black students among undergraduate college students has increased from nine to thirteen percent. Among the Latine (Hispanic) population, the increase has been dramatic. While their share of eighteen to twenty-four year-olds tripled from eight to twenty-four percent, their share among undergraduates increased more than five-fold.

Affirmative action and DEI initiatives fostered the importance of a college education as a means to circumvent obstacles within the economy:11

CHART 3 – RACIAL & ETHNIC DIVERSITY

	18-24 YEAR-OLDS		HIGHER EDUCATION
(in percents)	1980	2022	1980	2022
Asian	2	6	2	8
Black	13	14	9	13
Hispanic	8	24	4	22
White	77	52	84	52
Two or More Races	—	4	—	4

 

Over the past half century, a leveling of the population has taken place, with the Black, Latine, and white communities all participating in post-secondary education at rates equivalent to their respective shares of the prime college-attending age group (eighteen to twenty-four year-olds).

This equalization is an aspect of reality that has been neglected by the academic community, which has generally focused on the advantages members of the white community have both educationally and occupationally due to kinship and parental networks, friendship circles, neighborhood contacts, and a lack of discrimination based on skin color. Implicit in this view is that whites need not rely on the educational system as heavily as other groups, since alternative avenues of advancement are available.

In many of the top institutions, the fall-off of white students is quite pronounced:

CHART 4 - DIVERSITY AT PRIVATE ELITES AND PUBLIC FLAGSHIPS

(in percents)	Higher Education	Harvard	Yale	Columbia	UPenn	UT Austin	UF Gainesville
Asian	8	22	23	18	28	25	12
Black	13	9	9	8	9	5	5
Hispanic	22	12	16	16	11	28	24
White	52	33	32	30	30	32	50
Non-Resident	—	14	11	18	12	4	2
Two/+ Races	4	7	7	6	5	4	5

 

During the decades in which affirmative action and DEI programs have attempted to bring some measure of equal access and equal achievement to educational endeavors, parts of the white community were drifting away. This blind-spot within the academic community’s understanding of social dynamics meant that concepts of relative disadvantage might have fit the situation just as well as ones of privilege and advantage.12

Increased funding in order to include whites in DEI initiatives is a possible solution, although a fundamental rethinking of inclusivity is also called for. Instead, the elimination of services and programs has become a mandate to ensure that no group will be helped to rise out of an undifferentiated mass. If government and higher education are taken out of the picture, social advancement, which always requires additional resources, then hinges solely on the wherewithal of individual families.

The university community, with its emphasis on inclusion and diversity, has represented a last outpost of a kind of thinking—of governmental spending and educational activism—that was once heralded under the label of Keynesianism and dates back to the immediate post-World War II period when everything seemed possible. Like the fate of the white population, society itself has gone through a long-winded period of evolution and transformation despite the tenacity of modes of thought initially generated in previous times.

Because colleges and universities depend so heavily on external funding for research grants and student loans, the political world has laid claim to its governance in ever-aggressive ways. The opening thrust has concentrated on the elite privates—Columbia, UPenn, Harvard, and Princeton among them. The integration of the two worlds of politics and education, in this sense, signals the remaking of higher education into a sphere of government in which the political world functions as its own type of board of directors. While the federal Department of Education is in the process of dissolution, the entire system of higher education is being reduced to the level of a federal department. This is part of an overall effort to curtail civil society and reign in its independence, in which scientists—initially those whose work concentrates on the environment or on global public health issues—have been a major focus.

Perhaps it is in this sense that we can understand the reluctance of university executives to confront directly what at first seemed to be scattershot criticisms aimed at various parts of their enterprises and why they did not push back harder at the assertion that criticism of Israeli policies is a form of antisemitism. It is not just that the higher education community was unprepared for the level and intensity of the criticisms, but that it was so highly vulnerable.

The top-tier institutions are the gonfaloniers of modern times, targets whose capture on the battlefield disorients the troops that follow their lead. To intimidate and diminish the top-tier institutions sends a message to the wider educational community about the punitive actions that non-compliance may bring. It effectively shifts the center of gravity throughout a major portion of society. In the conflict between the government and the educational community that depends on it, the latter can only lose, even if the degree to which it loses is still to be determined. The universities are a highly strategic and, as it turns out, easy target, ideologically and in terms of government expenses.

That the university community has also served as a base and breeding ground for liberal politics is still another reason for its subjugation.13 The overall result gestures in the direction of a shrunken and harshly repressed and repressive educational system that cowers to executive mandates because of the certainty that if not, legislative enactments will follow.14 Highly successful white males are the driving force behind all this. Their goal: a system that encourages no exceptions except for people who mimic themselves.

The world we have known is disappearing, an unraveling that would take considerable time to now reassemble. It is unclear whether and to what degree colleges and universities will remain as sanctuaries for the expression of ideas inconsonant with the political establishment. Perhaps some solace is to be found in this quip by Mother Jones, herself a fierce labor movement advocate at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries. She was heard to say: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

1. Between 1980 and 2022, the major changes were in the white population, which fell from 80 to 59 percent, while the Latine population increased dramatically from 7 to 19 percent. The Black population barely changed—from 12 to 13 percent, and the Asian population increased from 2 to 6 percent. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics–Most Current Digest Tables, 2023, Tables 101.20.
2. Many versions of this poem exist. The version here is unabridged, translated from the original.
3. Alan Blinder, “Trump’s Battles With Colleges Could Change American Culture for a Generation.” The New York Times, March 20, 2025.
4. Cost & Aid | Princeton Admission.
5. Median annual income is just over $80,000 per year. These programs also take into account a family's wealth in property, business assets, etc., in complicated formulas that can mitigate qualifying on income alone. Stephanie Saul, “Harvard Will Make Tuition Free for More Students.” The New York Times, 17 March 2025; Peyton Beverford, Free Tuition for Low-Income Students | Appily. 21 March 2025; US Census Bureau, Income in the United States: 2023, 10 September 2024.
6. Unless indicated otherwise, all data is from the US Department of Education, College Scorecard, 23 April 2025. For each institution, see the various listings under: Costs, By Family Income; Financial Aid & Debt; Test Scores and Acceptance; Graduation & Retention; Typical Earnings; Campus Diversity.
7. At Princeton, the median debt for undergraduates when they finish their degrees is $10,320; at Rutgers-New Brunswick, it is $21,500.
8. Share of Federal Pell Grants recipients U.S. 2024 | Statista.
9. The situation a decade ago: “among ‘Ivy-Plus’ colleges (the eight Ivy League colleges, University of Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and Duke), more students come from families in the top 1% of the income distribution (14.5%) than the bottom half of the income distribution (13.5%).” Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, “Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility,” National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w23618, July 2017, p. 1.
10. Not listed are: American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and Unknown. Numbers do not always equal 100 due to rounding or these absent categories.
11. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics-Most Current Digest Tables, 2023, Tables 101.20, 306.10 (scroll down for the relevant data—based on 2022 totals, rounded up).
12. In the academic trilogy of race, class, and gender, many scholars sought a means to move the discussion of class from the theoretical, where it received extensive attention, to the concrete so that it could function similarly to the analyses of race and gender. Intersectionality has been one of the results, which nonetheless still leaves class undertheorized on a concrete level.
13. On voting patterns, see: Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, Polarized Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics. Cambridge University Press: 2024.
14. Isabelle Taft, “How Colleges Are Surveilling Students Now.” The New York Times, March 29, 2025.

Thanks to Jules David Bartkowski, Anne Lopes, and Paul Mattick for comments.

Gary Roth is the author of The Educated Underclass: Students and the Promise of Social Mobility (Pluto Press, 2019).