Commentary: Why Trump is waging war on colleges
President Trump often seems to pick fights with anybody who has ever criticized or opposed him. But sometimes there's a method to the hostility.
Trump's war with elite universities may have started as a personal vendetta. Some people who know Trump say he resents Ivy League elitists who have never given him an honorary degree or invited him to deliver a commencement speech. Though Trump himself graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, multiple bankruptcies undermine his own claim to be a highly educated business hotshot.
Permissive cultural environments at many universities have fueled Trump's 'war on wokeness.' Anti-Israel protests on several campuses after the 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel perplexed many Americans who wondered why the protesting students seemed morally one-sided. All of that made elite schools fatter targets for Trump.
But there are also legitimate socioeconomic questions about government policies that confer massive privileges on universities and their students while broadly overlooking millions of Americans who never go to college. Many policy experts think the federal government oversubsidizes college education through federally guaranteed student loans that are easy to take out but often hard to repay. Cheap financing probably drives up the cost of a college education by boosting demand, contributing to debt loads that are an overwhelming burden for millions of borrowers.
Neglect of the working class, meanwhile, is the very thing that fueled Trump's rise and helped get him elected president, twice. It's possible to get student loans for trade schools and other forms of non-college education, but if anything, the US has done a poor job of helping prepare young Americans not bound for college for rewarding careers that are there for the taking with only the right skills and focus.
Trump has a knack for identifying and capitalizing on problems other politicians overlook and then overplaying his hand and proposing lousy solutions. On trade, for example, there's a strong case for rebuilding some domestic manufacturing capacity in key industries, as Trump insists. But Trump's tariffs are a terrible way to go about it, because those import taxes punish Americans first and leave the US economy weaker, on net, according to most mainstream economists.
Likewise, there's a solid premise adjacent to Trump's war on the college class: that the US needs to invest more in working-class Americans not headed to college. Trump's call to invest more federal funding in trade schools, for instance, echoes many other calls to boost worker training in the many trades where there aren't enough skilled workers. There's already a shortage of hundreds of thousands of welders, carpenters, electricians, and other skilled workers, according to McKinsey. Federal aid with that sort of training would actually be a much better idea than imposing new tariffs on imports, because it would help working-class Americans without punishing anybody.
As usual, however, one good idea is likely to get lost amid Trump's braggadocio and the collateral damage of his cultural warfare. Trump hasn't proposed any kind of rational plan to boost the kind of worker training the US economy needs. He only wants to direct new funding toward trade schools because that would be $3 billion in federal grants he would block Harvard from receiving. Trade schools would only benefit to the extent that Trump is able to punish Harvard and any other school whose federal funds he wants to redirect.
Trump has a much bigger war plan on the table in his battle with the college establishment. His Republican allies in the House of Representatives have passed a proposal that would sharply raise the tax on investment income earned at universities with the largest endowments, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and several others. It's not clear if the Senate will approve the plan, but if it does, top schools will be in a scramble to protect their biggest source of wealth.
Trump has targeted Harvard in particular. He has moved to cancel $3.2 billion in federal grants to Harvard, mostly for medical research. He has also tried to cancel $100 million in federal contracts with Harvard and block foreign students from attending. The university is suing, and courts will determine how much unilateral action Trump can get away with. Courts, so far, have overturned many of his executive actions.For Trump, the battle against elite institutions is often the whole point. Electoral politics explains why. Non-college-educated working-class voters, especially whites, are Trump's core constituency. Barack Obama in 2012 was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win a majority of working-class voters. From 2012 to 2024, those voters swung from Obama's Democrats to Trump's Republicans by 12 percentage points. White working-class voters favored Republicans by 20 points in 2012 and 27 points in 2024.
Those non-college-educated Americans accounted for 59% of voters in 2024. Few of those voters, who broadly favor Trump, will feel put off by Trump's attacks on universities, and many of them will approve. For Trump, politically, elite universities are a very safe target.
The more important question, however, may be whether Trump's broadside against the university set will do anything to materially help those who don't go to college. Probably not. Trump tweeting about moving Harvard money to trade schools doesn't make it happen. Without follow-up, legislation, and implementation, ideas go nowhere. Trump's main idea isn't to help tradespeople, anyway. They only factor into his plans as a by-product of how he might be able to punish Harvard.
Read more: Will I be taxed on student loan forgiveness?
President Biden had a very different approach to education, which arguably failed, contributing to the identity crisis that still plagues Biden's Democrats. Biden sided fully with college grads and tried to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for some 26 million borrowers. The Supreme Court struck that down, and Biden attempted a succession of smaller, more targeted efforts to cancel specific types of debt. That hodgepodge of plans ended up reducing debt for something like 5 million borrowers.
Policy experts don't love student debt cancellation, which by definition helps people with college education while doing nothing for less-educated Americans who might benefit more from federal benefits. Voters don't love it either, according to the polls. And in the 2024 presidential election, Democrats lost a lot of ground with younger voters who might be most likely to support debt cancellation.
Trump, who fashions himself the anti-Biden, has halted Biden's student debt relief effort. Again, that may prove popular with his base without necessarily helping anybody. Trump, meanwhile, has the kernel of an idea to improve on the Biden plan by helping working-class Americans land blue-collar jobs that provide a rewarding career. Hammering Harvard, however, won't make it happen.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Bluesky and X: @rickjnewman.
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