Trump’s 2024 Budget and the Future of Higher Education

By: Julie Sun

A central slogan of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign has been to increase government efficiency through significant budget cuts. This agenda has manifested in reduced funding for key research institutions, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This has manifested in Trump’s targeting of higher education through using federal funding as leverage, most notably pressuring Columbia University by threatening to withhold millions in federal support unless it complied with his demands, which include banning face masks on campus, empowering security officers to remove or arrest individuals, and taking control of the department that offers courses on the Middle East from its faculty, according to The Guardian. Now, his attention has turned to a broad range of federal education programs. The new budget proposal, released on May 2 in the fiscal year federal budget blueprint, would aim to slice $12 billion from the Department of Education and eliminate many K-12 and higher education programs. Almost none of the federal education programs have been spared.

Amidst the blueprint, the administration proposes eliminating TRIO and GEAR UP, two longstanding initiatives that aim to expand access to colleges for low-income students. According to their respective websites, TRIO “includes eight programs targeted to serve and assist low-income individuals, first-generation college students, and individuals with disabilities to progress through the academic pipeline from middle school to postbaccalaureate programs”, while GEAR UP “is designed to increase the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education. GEAR UP provides six-year or seven-year grants to states and partnerships to provide services at high-poverty middle and high schools.” 

The budget proposal calls these programs a “relic of the past when financial incentives were needed to motivate Institutions of Higher Education to engage with low-income students and increase access … Today, the pendulum has swung and access to college is not the obstacle it was for students of limited means,” according to an article by Inside Higher Ed. GEAR UP currently serves approximately 570,000 students across 2,954 secondary schools, in which more than half of the students receive free or reduced-price lunch, according to the Center for American Progress.

A strange juxtaposition amidst these cuts is the funding increase for charter schools. The proposal calls for an increase of $60 million, bringing the total investment to $500 million, to expand the number of charter schools across the nation. Focusing more on charter schools, many of which operate with less oversight, comes at the direct expense of the public. Ultimately,  by simultaneously slashing support for programs designed to help marginalized populations while boosting funding for alternatives often inaccessible to those same populations, the administration’s budget reflects a clear shift in federal education priorities.