Trump and McMahon are turning college into a political loyalty test.
Linda McMahon’s August 3 letter asks colleges to post declarations about academic rigor, free speech, “malign” foreign influence, “American interests,” and hiring faculty from “all relevant perspectives.” The Education Department presents this as a trust exercise. It is a loyalty pledge in the language of institutional choice.
The earlier version was less subtle. The department’s 2025 college compact asked schools to limit international enrollment, accept the administration’s definition of biological sex, and consider “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle or even spark violence against conservative ideas.” It also said academic freedom “is not absolute.” No school signed. Several rejected it publicly. The new letter drops the promised funding advantage and softens the demand, but the demand remains: colleges must announce that they accept the administration’s priorities before they can count as trustworthy.
A public education department has the right to ask whether colleges teach well, protect students from discrimination, disclose their finances, and spend public money honestly. It does not have the right to turn federal recognition into a political confession.
The kitchen-table version of this story is not a university’s website language. It is the education pipeline my parents could afford and my generation has been told to finance privately.
Sara Goldrick-Rab’s documented Pell Grant comparison shows the collapse in one number: the grant once covered roughly 80 percent of the cost of attending a four-year public university; today it covers roughly 25 to 30 percent. The exact share changes with the cost measure and year, but the direction does not. Federal student loans now total roughly $1.7 trillion across more than 40 million borrowers, according to Department of Education portfolio data. The bridge between working-class family income and college has been narrowed, then filled with debt.
The institution that should be helping families cross that bridge is checking whether colleges have declared the right political loyalties.
I sat at the table at eleven at night doing the math on my children’s future. Childcare for Eva and Ben is $2,400 a month. Our mortgage, utilities, student loans and groceries take the rest of the spreadsheet before college appears. Those are figures from my household, not a survey of every millennial family. My parents put three children through Catholic schools and into adulthood on a USPS supervisor’s income. Their school costs, family income and tuition-aid arrangements were specific to our household and time. What was not specific was the public infrastructure beneath the family budget.
The parish school in Lansdale was subsidized by parish resources and in-kind labor: the school carnival, the fundraiser, the classroom rotation, the May procession, the sacramental calendar that structured the year. My parents’ Catholic high-school tuition was roughly five and a half months of my father’s net salary, a family figure I remember from the household accounting rather than a national tuition series. The arrangement was strained, but it was possible. My children’s education begins with a daycare invoice larger than many families’ mortgage payments and proceeds toward a college bill whose public subsidy has been steadily hollowed out.
Anne Helen Petersen calls the millennial version of this trap human-capital formation: degrees, credentials, internships, professional brands, endless optimization. The family buys the credential, the worker becomes the credential, and every institution in the pipeline learns to price the anxiety. Now the government is asking the institutions that certify that human capital to prove their political usefulness. The credential becomes a loyalty badge. The student becomes a consumer of ideological reassurance. The bill still arrives either way.
That is why McMahon’s language about “public trust” matters. Trust is not restored by making a college president announce that the faculty contains enough approved perspectives. Trust comes from a school that teaches well, admits students transparently, protects students from discrimination, and remains accountable to the public. Goldrick-Rab’s work begins where federal policy keeps refusing to look: today’s students are older, working, parenting, and often insecure about food and housing. Their emergency is not a shortage of institutional slogans. It is the cost of staying enrolled.
The same department is weakening the machinery families rely on while demanding that colleges reassure the country about their intentions. The Education Department announced in March 2025 that it would cut its workforce from roughly 4,100 employees to about 2,100, with reductions concentrated in Federal Student Aid and the Office for Civil Rights. That is not an impressionistic claim about bureaucratic decline; it is the department’s own workforce-reduction plan.
The offices being reduced are not decorative. Federal Student Aid administers the repayment system through which millions of borrowers must navigate changing plans, litigation and payment rules. The Office for Civil Rights enforces federal protections in schools and colleges. The department’s own 2025 record included thousands of complaint dismissals, according to Brookings’ review of the office’s posture. The administration has also been moving education programs, including civil-rights and special-education functions, through interagency agreements, as reported in the transfer records cited in this coverage. A government can weaken the institution responsible for educational rights, then blame colleges for the public’s resulting anxiety.
The Department of Education has been underfunded and badly administered at different moments. That is not an argument for dismantling its capacity to protect students. It is an argument for rebuilding it.
IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, promised federal support equal to 40 percent of the average per-pupil expenditure for special education. Congressional Research Service figures show that the federal share has never reached that promise; in 2021 and 2022 it was about 12.7 percent, leaving a nationwide shortfall of roughly $23.92 billion. The annual gap is larger than the entire Title I appropriation. Local schools cover the difference by taking money from other students, other classrooms and other services.
The federal government has paid roughly one-third of what it promised for special education for fifty years, and then lectures colleges about public trust.
Diane Ravitch’s record inside and after the school-reform movement matters because she does not treat every change as bad. She warns that “reform” can become a respectable label for a hidden agenda. Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider trace that agenda from Milton Friedman’s 1955 school-choice proposal through the policy networks that have worked to privatize public education. Derek Black’s constitutional history supplies the older fact: public education was built into the nation’s state-building project, and the modern Department of Education was created in 1979 with Republican support, including 14 Republican Senate cosponsors. The department is not an alien appendage to American education. It is part of the public infrastructure now being used to stage ideological submission.
The old argument was that public schools were failing and private markets would rescue them. The new argument is that universities have lost public trust and political declarations will rescue them. In both versions, the same move occurs: the institution is starved, the resulting strain is called evidence of failure, and the remedy is obedience to the people who did the starving.
Taylor Swift’s “You’re On Your Own, Kid” is often treated as a song about private endurance. Its title is the colder policy statement. When public education stops acting like a public good, families are told to manage the consequences alone: borrow more, work longer, choose a cheaper school, navigate the forms, absorb the interest, and call the resulting exhaustion responsibility. The new letter adds another instruction: make the institution that failed you publicly praise the terms of the failure.
A real pro-family, pro-education policy would restore Pell Grants to a meaningful share of public-college costs, fully fund IDEA, reduce the federal student-debt burden, support childcare and paid leave, rebuild the Office for Civil Rights and require colleges to disclose admissions and financing practices in plain language. It would protect academic freedom because students need institutions capable of discovering what is true, not institutions trained to anticipate which declaration keeps federal power satisfied.
The spreadsheet is still open.
The parish school I remember, the public university my parents could afford, and the school my children will attend are not abstractions. The Education Department can restore the aid, enforce the rights, and fund the services it promised. Instead, Trump and McMahon want the institutions carrying the public’s children to certify the system’s innocence.
The political loyalty test is not an education policy. It is a demand that the people paying for the system also praise the terms of their own abandonment.