The Trump administration is using the IRS to abolish race-conscious aid at private universities.
The first thing I did, when I read the NPR interview with Wesleyan president Michael Roth, was run the numbers at the kitchen table I always run them at. Eva is four. Ben is one. In thirteen years I will be the parent at the same table with the spreadsheet open, hoping the columns close. The pipeline my parents sat down with my siblings and me under — parochial-school tuition-affordable, regional-Catholic-high-school-affordable, public-university tuition-affordable, working-class-child-can-go frame — was already strained before Ben was born. The Trump administration is choosing, this month, to break it the rest of the way.
The legal door was opened by the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions, which held that race-conscious admissions violate Title VI. The IRS move this week is the enforcement follow-through — once the courts closed the door, Treasury started handing out the keys. Roth sat for the NPR interview as a Wesleyan president who has run the math out loud: Wesleyan has long met demonstrated need for admitted students and recruited aggressively from low-income, first-generation, and racially diverse pools. The school’s pipeline is exactly what the policy is now threatening to defund.
The mechanism is plain. Tax-exempt status is the structural feature that makes private-university financial-aid pools work. An endowment is invested money; the federal exemption is the reason the pile grows at pre-tax rates a household savings account never will. When a school says “we meet 100 percent of demonstrated need,” the demonstrated need is met, in significant part, from dollars the IRS does not tax. Pull the exemption and you do not, mostly, close the schools. They have donor lists and stadiums and a hundred-year head start on the country’s wealth. You shrink the next aid pool. You shrink who walks through the doors next September.
What is being drained has a precedent. Heather McGhee’s argument in The Sum of Us names it: America closed the public swimming pool rather than integrate it; the pool drained on purpose. The pool draining now is the donor class’s favorite higher-ed equity lever — race-conscious aid that lets a kid whose parents did not fund a 529 climb past the legacy admit on financial-aid paper. Treasury’s threat is not a glitch in the policy machinery. It is a budgeting decision.
Let me show you what this means at the kitchen table. The Pell Grant, created in 1972, peaked in 1975–76 at roughly 80 percent of the cost of attending a four-year public university — what the College Board’s Trends in College Pricing series records at seventy-nine percent of those costs at the 1975-76 maximum. Today the maximum award covers roughly 27 to 30 percent. That gap is the headline: the federal share of college costs collapsed across my parents’ lifetime while the published price climbed. I went to college because my mother had the cultural map to navigate a financial-aid appeal, because my father had a postal-supervisor’s wage that produced a defined-benefit pension, and because the country had decided — in the prior political economy — that the kid whose parents did not have a 529 was a kid to invest in. The Trump administration is the announcement that the country has changed its mind. Sara Goldrick-Rab, the higher-ed poverty researcher who runs the Hope Center at Temple, has been documenting this disappearance for years. Her point is that the federal disinvestment didn’t happen by accident — it happened on purpose, and the students it landed on are the ones my parents’ generation thought the pipeline was for.
That the country invested in that kid was a Catholic Social Teaching position before it was a federal-aid position, and the church named the principle first. Wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner — that is Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, the line my grandmother’s generation understood and mine does not have language for. The tax threat is not a budgetary adjustment within that frame. It is the announcement the frame is over. The administration is not pretending to restore what Rerum Novarum promised. It is announcing withdrawal.
The students in the crosshairs are not abstract. They are Black and Latino students who would otherwise have the test scores, the family support, and the drive to attend a selective private university on need-based aid that considers race. They are told, in this enforcement regime: your admission is not legitimate, and we will revoke the tax status of any school that admits you on those terms. I went to a state school that cost real money anyway; the attacks I’m describing land on Black and Latino students, not on me. I write about this for the same reason I write about IDEA’s roughly $24 billion annual shortfall and the Department of Education’s slow-motion dismantling: it is the same story, and it is being delivered piece by piece.
The pattern is the story. Across the last eighteen months the administration has: cut the Department of Education’s workforce by nearly half; gutted Federal Student Aid; shifted the Office for Civil Rights from enforcing civil rights to enforcing political loyalty; dismissed thousands of civil-rights complaints in a single quarter; closed data offices at the National Center for Education Statistics; and now is using the IRS to defund any private university whose admissions program considers race. Every one of those moves pushes the higher-ed pipeline one more step out of reach for the students my parents’ generation thought they were building it for. Every one of them is being done in pieces, so that no single move is the story. The story is the list.
I keep coming back to a question I don’t have an answer to. When the same people who want to defund public schools also want to defund private schools that integrate, what is the alternative they are proposing? I think there isn’t one. The alternative is segregation, and they can’t say that out loud, so they say “race-neutral” instead, and they use the IRS to enforce it.
The Taylor Swift song that keeps playing in the back of my head this week is “You’re On Your Own, Kid.” That is the line I quote most often in column closings, because it is a clean description of American care infrastructure for parents and students: you are on your own. The friendship bracelets in the song are the only safety net — the lateral one, the other mothers in the group text, the cousin who knows a financial-aid consultant, the GoFundMe for the kid whose family did not plan for the gap. They are not a higher-education policy. They are the absence of one. The lateral net is being asked to carry more every year, because the public net is being dismantled in pieces. The IRS move this week is one of those pieces.
Roth on NPR was calm and correct. The fix is the one this column has been writing for two years: rebuild the public pipeline. Fund the Pell Grant back to the 80 percent it covered when my parents’ generation went to college. Fully fund IDEA. Restore the Department of Education staff. End the OCR’s politicized enforcement. The administration has spent months building this very list. We know what is on it. We know what they are dismantling. The dismantling is the policy. The next step is to name it that way.