For all those seemingly shocked or pretending to be over-whelmed at what US President Donald Trump is doing, they better look at the campaign of 2024 or read again the Republican manifesto that came out last July.

One of the points read: “Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children”.

During the course of his campaign Trump made no bones of the fact that he was going to “fix” higher education and conservatives have long been training their guns on the East and West Coast establishments as bastions of liberal ideology.

“The days of subsidizing communist indoctrination in our colleges will soon be over”, Trump said at an event, adding at another, “To every college President: Vanquish the radicals and take back our campuses for all of the normal students”.

The Trump administration’s focus on higher education came in two ways: first on the immigration front when enforcement officers identified and issued pack up orders to all those international students who had violated their F-1 student visa status by participating in pro-Palestinian demonstrations and vigils across campuses in the wake of the Gaza outrage.

In this way the administration also sought to identify those who were seen as anti-Semitic. The message to foreign students was simple: “You came here on a visa only to study”.

Funding freeze

The second came by way of another dictum: adhere to administration policies or face federal funding cut. Starting with Columbia the pressure tactic began to spread but when Harvard resisted, word came back that the retribution could come in two ways: a re-think on the institution’s tax exempt status and making it ineligible to attract foreign students. “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be taxed as a political entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’” Trump wrote on his social media site.

It is not as if that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is all set to move in tomorrow as the entire process could take months, if not years and may see a protracted legal battle that will eventually land at the apex court. But the financial implications will be severe even if Harvard has an endowment of $50 billion.

The annual revenues from tuition, room and board will be subject to federal and state taxes; and donations will no longer be tax exempt.

A more chilling reminder came from the Department of Homeland Security with its Secretary demanding from Harvard details of violent and illegal activities committed by foreign students on visa. The warning was that if this information is not disclosed by end of April, the institution would lose the Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification and hence will not be able to admit foreign students.

Deportation threat

The squeeze on foreign students, including from India, has been quite visible since January 20, 2025 with several been served deportation notices for what has been seen as minor infractions over a prior period and not necessarily confined to the Gaza protests.

Educational institutions have come to feel the potential loss in foreign student enrolment, the pinch especially so in smaller colleges and universities across the country, especially those that have not fully recovered from debilitating losses of Covid.

American educators are pointing out that the number of international under-graduate students enrolling declined by one per cent in 2023-24 over the previous year; and there has been a 18 per cent drop from the 2019-20 figures.The contribution to the economy is not small change: foreign students pump in between $43 billion and $50 billion to the economy besides creating or supporting some 380,000 jobs.

The writer is a senior journalist who has reported from Washington DC on North America and UN

Published on April 18, 2025