What would a second Trump administration mean for higher education? Summing up Project 2025

What happens to higher education if Trump wins November’s election?

We’ve been exploring this question over the past year, including months of reading, analysis, reflection, and conversation about Project 2025 might mean for higher education. Today I’d like to sum up what we found.

The book, Mandate for Leadership, addresses academia directly on multiple levels. I’ll break them down here. The implications for the broader society within which colleges and universities exist — that’s a subject for another post.

I’ve organized the various ideas and threads into several headers: the Department of Education, higher education economics, international education and research, research supported and opposed, military connections, sex education, and anti-intellectualism.

Higher education and the Department of Education Many accounts of Project 2025’s educational impact draw attention to its attack on the Department of Education, which makes sense, since this is where the document focuses its academic attention. to begin with, Mandate for Leadership wants to break up the DoE and distribute its functions to other federal units. For example, the work the Office for Postsecondary Education (OPE) does would move to the Department of Labor, while “programs deemed important to our national security interests [shift] to the Department of State.” (327).