Concierge Service for Favored Universities?

Just as airlines reward high spending customers with perks such as flight upgrades and special airport lounges, so the Trump administration has decided to provide concierge service to nine universities that, apparently, for the most part, have generally been cooperative with it during the turmoil of the past year. One of the schools, MIT, has already turned down the deal, suggesting that giving preferential treatment to schools on such things as scientific research is totally inappropriate, violating the principle of giving grants solely on the basis of perceived scientific promise. The nine schools (six private, three public) have been told they will gain special benefits—such as enhanced grant support—for agreeing to abide by a fairly extensive number of provisions, seven of which are listed below.

First, the schools have to agree not to discriminate in admission based on such non-merit-based achievement criteria as race or gender, with new undergraduate students required to take a standardized test like the ACT, SAT, or the newer Classical Learning Test. Related to that, secondly, they must agree that not more than 15 percent of undergraduate admissions will be foreign-born (and not more than 5 percent from one country). A Wall Street Journal analysis by Brian McGill and Sara Randazzo shows all nine schools are currently below that level. A related third provision extends the non-discrimination strictures to staff hiring.

A fourth provision states that the signatory schools agree to be marketplaces of ideas, with no tolerance for disruptive behavior inconsistent with civil free expression. Fifth, schools must commit to requiring students to earn their grades based on academic achievement, implying a crackdown on grade inflation. Sixth, schools must agree that there are two genders, based on biological realities. Seventh, the schools must agree to freeze tuition fees for five years.

This is an innovative approach to using federal financial pressures to effect change. Four of the nine schools are prestigious elite Ivy League (plus MIT) institutions. A couple of others are highly regarded but not top 10-ranked private schools (Vanderbilt and the University of Southern California), while three are flagship state universities (Virginia, Texas-Austin, and Arizona) with good to superb reputations.

By providing extra funds and favored treatment to these schools, presumably the administration believes it can gain the cooperation of other institutions wishing to share the spoils of concierge service. And the goals are superb ones. For example, institutional neutrality is critical to a truly open marketplace of ideas where discussion is heated and frenetic, but also fruitful and consistent with robust discoveries and civil debate that advance humanity. This idea promotes academic excellence over identity politics.

In particular, I am delighted to finally see a governmental agency attack the grade inflation that has, over time, led to a pronounced decline in work effort by American college students. The standards in the new rules are disappointingly very vague, although they are a first step to recognizing a huge problem: most college students don’t study very much or work very hard because it is unnecessary.

The tuition freeze is probably mostly meaningless, since few students pay the posted sticker price in this era of rampant tuition discounting.

Moreover, the new higher education fatwa from the Trump administration can be criticized on principle. To begin with, modern American political history is replete with big changes in presidential administration policy orientation. The Obama administration’s higher education policies differed materially from those of the first Trump administration. Take the issue of sexually inappropriate behavior: the Obama administration’s dramatic and, to my mind, un-American assault on the rights of those accused was dialed back dramatically in the first Trump administration, only to be largely reversed under Biden and, no doubt, once again under Trump II, which wants to radically reduce the regulatory state.

Oscillating and contradictory federal policies sow confusion and over-politicization of higher education, so presidential educational proclamations likely will do more harm than good in the long run. For example, a Democratic administration elected in 2028 might declare climate change is the premier issue of the day, requiring completion of a wokish course on the topic by all schools receiving federal subsidies.

Indeed, while I like the tenor of most of the recent provisions in the Trump concierge grant approach, I think it would be far more preferable to decentralize federal funding of higher education, reduce federal grants, end the disastrous student financial assistance programs, and, better yet,  eliminate the entire U.S. Department of Education—even going so far as to destroy its headquarters building or turn it over to the very popular and nearby Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.

A strength of American higher education, and of our federal system of government generally, is that we have 50 different approaches to higher education competing with one another for customers and academic leadership. American higher education today, by many criteria, is in worse shape than it was in, say, 1970, before we had a federal education department and heavy-handed federal efforts to direct the creation and dissemination of knowledge and ideas to new generations of Americans.

Borrowing from Chairman Mao, let us “let 50 flowers bloom,” (one for each state), or even better and more accurately, “Let’s let thousands of flowers bloom,” by decentralizing control over the business of higher education largely to the university-college level, just as we have largely allowed private firms to quite successfully control literally thousands, even millions, of business enterprises. Then let these individual institutions, constrained by student preferences, work with their governing boards and donor bases to remain competitive in a world where declining fertility, irresponsible federal spending, and other problems create big challenges for the next generation of higher educational leaders.

The concierge approach to higher education should be a transitory strategy to restore rationality to existing broken national attempts to govern what is best handled by individual schools. Hopefully, schools can ultimately be weaned off a dependence on a federal government that cannot even put its own fiscal house in order.