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It’s no secret that the Trump administration is not a friend of the country’s higher education system. During a speech he gave at the National Conservatism conference in October 2021, vice-president JD Vance pinpointed American universities as “the enemy” while repeating a litany of increasingly familiar charges about their purported cultural elitism, radical-left ideological agenda, and incapacity to prepare students for the real needs of the labor market.
More recently, Donald Trump has also endorsed plans to tax university endowments and abolish the Department of Education, which oversees both the federal Pell Grant system and most federally subsidized student loan programs, jointly accounting for about 40% of the country’s higher education revenues.
Amongst the stated grounds for this hostility, one of the most frequent – but also perplexing – claims is that colleges and universities are “elite playgrounds”. This is of course one of the several ways in which the current Republican party has sought to rebrand itself as a champion of the interests and values of the working class, against the country’s purportedly progressive establishment.
Yet the appeal to anti-elitist sentiment in the attack against higher education remains perplexing, for a few reasons. To begin with, both Trump and Vance are themselves Ivy-League graduates otherwise deeply invested in preserving, rather than upending, the country’s established social hierarchies. The “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs specifically intended to broaden access to higher education institutions have, if anything, been the target of their most virulent attacks.
It’s also confusing – and somewhat circular – that most of these attacks have focused on Ivy League colleges and universities, which do primarily serve elites but are also responsible for a tiny fraction of the post-secondary education in the country at large. Their total undergraduate enrollment is currently at around 60,000, which is less than 0.5% of the overall undergraduate population in the United States.
But there is a deeper reason why anti-elitism and hostility towards higher education are strange bedfellows. Higher education institutions have historically been among the most effective powerful engines of social mobility in the country. They are therefore natural antidotes against the consolidation of what the founding fathers referred to as “artificial aristocracies founded on wealth and birth”.
In advocating for the creation of a publicly funded university in the state of Virginia, for instance, Thomas Jefferson argued that “those talents which nature hath sown liberally among the poor as the rich” would thereby be “rendered by liberal education worthy to receive and able to guard the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens … without regard to wealth, birth, or other accidental conditions or circumstances”.
The limits of Jefferson’s actual disregard for factors of “birth” in the target population he had in mind when advancing his vision for a publicly-funded higher education institution are evident in the fact the University of Virginia he contributed in creating initially only accepted white males, notwithstanding the fact the removal of the “wealth” barrier was in itself a significant achievement.
Yet the same fundamental faith in the capacity of higher education to break down social barriers also underpinned the subsequent expansion of the United States’s higher education system to include various categories of individuals who had previously been excluded from it.
Women’s colleges began in the first half of the 19th century and played a decisive role in challenging the marginal position that women had historically occupied in American society, eventually leading to their inclusion in previously male-only colleges in the aftermath of the second world war. The same is true of historically Black colleges and universities for African Americans, and of the land-grant universities created between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries for multiple generations of immigrants of Catholic, Jewish and Asian descent.
Contemporary empirical evidence confirms that US higher education institutions continue to function as powerful engines of social mobility: a recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts showed that adult children born to parents in the bottom quintile of the income distribution are about four times as likely to reach the top quintile by attending college.
To be sure, there is also evidence that complicates the long-established narrative. Low-income students still attend highly selective colleges at much lower rates than their peers from richer families, and their enrollment at the mid-ranking institutions that are most effective at propelling them into higher income brackets has actually been declining over the past two decades.
But, if that is the case, the answer should be more, not less, investment in expanding access to higher education. The fact that the incoming administration is intent on gutting not only “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs but also the federally funded Pell Grant and student loan programs shows that it doesn’t really intend to contrast the persistent elements of “elitism” in the country’s higher education system.
On the contrary, to the extent that college education has become one of the most powerful predictors of electoral support for the Democratic party, the goal is more likely to be a further entrenchment of the deep socioeconomic divisions that colleges and universities have historically served to undermine but the current Republican party thrives on.
Seeing past this ruse requires separating legitimate concerns about elite power in the contemporary United States from the attack against the very institutions that are most likely to do something about it.
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Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti is executive director of the Moynihan Center and full professor of political science at the City College of New York.
