Trump’s ongoing attacks on HE ‘reverberate across borders’

The Trump administration’s continued attacks on major universities – and Harvard University in particular – have driven interest in studying in the United States down to levels comparable to those during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Weekly page views on the Studyportals website, a good predictor of future enrolment decisions, have collapsed by 50% since Donald J Trump returned to the Oval Office in late January.

In August 2023, almost 12% of students signing on to the Studyportals university information website sought information about studying in the United States; at the end of April this year, that figure had plummeted to 7.5%.

“This decline can largely be attributed to the worldwide coverage of the actions taken against higher education in the US,” said Cara Skikne, Studyportals’ head of communication and thought leadership.

Most recently, this was an attack on Harvard University, America’s most famous university – and one that attracts the best and the brightest from around the world.

“When the government targets international students, strips funding, or publicly undermines institutions like Harvard, it sends a clear message about American higher education that reverberates across borders.”

Fanta Aw, executive director and CEO of NAFSA, which recently reported that international students provided the US with a net economic benefit of US$43.8 billion, producing more than 375,000 jobs, and which has partnered with a number of organisations such as Education USA and Academic Programs International, has also sounded the alarm.

“International students and their families seek predictability and security when choosing which country to trust with their future. The US government’s recent actions have naturally shaken their confidence in the United States. Government actions and policies have consequences.

“The decline in student interest carries with it serious ramifications for US pre-eminence in research, innovation, and economic strength. This early trend data should serve as an urgent call for Congress to intervene before further long-term damage is done,” Aw noted.

The chaos in American higher education is also manifest in data from American students.

Among Americans themselves, interest in studying at an American university declined by 20.5% in the first quarter of this year as compared to the same quarter last year, said Studyportals, the world’s largest study choice platform, which is based in Holland.

Further charges against Harvard

The figures that Studyportals provided to University World News were prepared on Tuesday 27 May, and do not include the effect of Trump’s post on Truth Social that day: “I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from the very antisemitic Harvard and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land. What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!”

Similarly, Studyportals’ data, which predicts that if the trend line of declining interest in the United States as an international education destination continues, the overall decline for 2025 “could plummet over 70%” by the end of the year, does not take into account a letter from the General Service Administration (GSA, the agency of the US government that oversees financial disbursements) detailing the “Review for Termination or Transition of Harvard University contracts”.

After rehearsing a number of charges against Harvard, including continued violations of the US Supreme Court’s decision banning affirmative action and failing to deal with antisemitism on the campus, Josh Gruenbaum, federal acquisition service commissioner, instructs federal agencies to “terminate for convenience each contract that it determines has failed to meet the standards [established by the government], and transition to a new vendor those contracts that could be better serviced by an alternative counterparty”.

In short, the letter instructs the agencies of the United States government to defund Harvard.

What problem is Trump trying to solve?

While Harvard has not issued a written response to Trump’s post, Allan Garber, the university’s president, addressed it in an interview with Stever Inskeep on his National Public Radio show, “Morning Edition”.

The federal government, Garber said, has the authority to reallocate funds through its budgeting process.

“But the question to ask is, ‘what problem is he trying to solve by doing that?’” Garber said.

He then pushed back against the perception – seen, for example, in Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s letter a few weeks ago in which she averred that Harvard didn’t warrant government grants and contracts because of its US$52 billion endowment.

“The money that goes to research universities in the form of grants and contracts, which is almost all of the federal support we get, is used to pay for work that we perform at the behest of the government,” said Garber.

Reallocating that money, Garber underlined, means that such “work just won’t be performed … I’m less concerned about whether it goes to a trade school or if it goes to some other project, like working on highways.

“The real question is, how much value does the federal government get from its expenditures on research?”

Garber’s question was something of a rhetorical one since just a few moments earlier, he outlined two of Harvard Medical School’s most recent contributions to advancing Americans’ health.

Each researcher had recently been awarded the Breakthrough Prize: one for “work that led to the discovery of GLP-1 drugs [for example, Ozempic], which are now revolutionising how we approach obesity, diabetes and many other conditions”, and the other for advances in gene editing, “which is already being used to cure disease”.

An absence of due process

Robert Quinn, director of the Scholars at Risk Network, was forensic in his analysis, noting that the GSA’s letter “uses allegations – ‘suspected’, ‘possible’, ‘potential’ – without attribution, investigation, or supporting evidence to paint one private company (the university) with alleged, unproven conduct [by] a range of different autonomous actors”.

For example, Gruenbaum writes that a “remedial math course, which has been described as ‘middle school math’, for incoming freshmen” is proof that Harvard has been admitting unqualified African Americans and Hispanics “in the top academic decile”.

In making this claim, Gruenbaum ignores, as did McMahon several weeks ago while making the same argument, the impact of the pandemic on students’ math skills.

According to Harvard math professor Brendan A Kelly, “The last two years, we saw students who were in Math MA and faced a challenge that was unreasonable given the support we had in the course. So, we wanted to think about: ‘How can we create a course that really helps students step up to their aspirations?’

“Students don’t have the skills that we had intended downstream in the curriculum, and so it creates different trajectories in students’ math abilities,” he added.

The GAS letter provides no evidence to support the claim of “potential discriminatory hiring practices” while asserting that “Harvard is suspected of engaging in a pattern”.

Nor does the letter take into account various actions – including revisions of syllabi and the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliances’ definition of antisemitism – to deal with what the university’s administration admitted was an antisemitic problem on campus.

The two cases Gruenbaum cites, the US$65,000 fellowship award by the Harvard Law Review to one student who is facing criminal charges for assaulting a Jewish student on campus and another who was chosen by the Harvard Divinity School to be class marshal for commencement, “suggests staggering incompetence” at best, while at worst it is “deliberate malice disguised as ignorance”.

Gruenbaum ignores the fact that these decisions were made by autonomous sub-units of the university.

Quinn underscored the point that the government’s sanction – “the cancellation of unrelated contracts” (which will, for example, impact a number of major hospitals in Boston that are affiliated with Harvard’s Medical School) – is being undertaken “without any regard to due process”, a bedrock legal principle that many of Trump’s executive orders also disregard, as has been noted by numerous judges who have placed injunctions on them.

Quinn’s use of the phrase “one private company”, which, in law, is what Harvard is (it was founded as a corporation by the government of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, under the name President and Fellows of Harvard University, in 1628), is important because by proceeding against it without due process, the administration opens the door to proceeding against other corporations, all of which have the same legal standing.

“What is to stop the administration from doing the same to any other private entity in the country – a private corporation, family business, community group, charity, or church – without recourse?”

Quinn then expanded his critique to another bedrock constitutional principle.

“And what happens to the ‘full faith and credit’ of the US government [enshrined in Article IV, Section 1 of the United States Constitution] if signed contracts can be cancelled after the fact on transparently ideological grounds?”

Interest shifts to the UK

As interest in studying in the United States declines, it has picked up in other English-speaking countries, Studyportals data shows.

“America’s main rival for students is the UK. When students search for US bachelor and masters degrees, they most likely also browse British programmes.

“In fact, almost one in 10 students (9%) research the UK in the same browsing session,” up from 8.5% a year earlier. This 0.5% difference may not seem significant, but it “translates to millions of students actively comparing American to one of its closest competitors”, said Studyportals.

Interest has also risen in universities in Spain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland. For a number of reasons, including a drastic cut in the number of international student visas it will issue, interest in Canada’s colleges and universities remains below last year’s figure: 4.3% to 5.2%

Speaking of both international students who shy away from studying in the US and American students who choose to leave the country because of concerns about the state of American higher education, Edwin Van Rest, founder and CEO of Studyportals, told University World News:

“Every student who decided against America isn’t just lost tuition money – it’s lost talent. The person who could have started the next big company or made some major discovery might end up in London instead of Boston, all because of decisions being made right now.”