2025 brought the first serious reform to higher education in over a decade. The industry began the year with attempts to defend its promotion of racial preferences and campus radicals, ideological capture, and acceptance of foreign funds and influence. That tune quickly changed. Title VI investigations found striking examples of schools arbitrarily enforcing student code-of-conduct rules. Schools began hiding or renaming their “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) bureaucracies.
The Trump administration, Congress, and state leaders have passed legislation, enacted executive orders, and reinterpreted long-standing regulations largely with the support of the courts. Our culture has moved beyond the Great Awokening of the 2010s and early 2020s, allowing criticism of higher education to reach new heights, slaying many of higher education’s sacred cows.
And yet much work must be done. Some reforms go too far, carpet-bombing the industry with arbitrary, sometimes contradictory policies. As we march into the year ahead, I’d like to provide a retrospective on the best shock-and-awe reforms of the past year.
First up on our list, the Trump administration has signaled a reorganization of the Department of Education (ED). Much of the agency’s actions will be split among agencies that already interact or oversee related programs. This will ideally streamline program efficiency, enacting Congress’s intent, and bulwarking ED programs from ideological capture. NAS has long proposed that ED needs extensive reform to properly serve the educational system—as codified in our February 2025 report, Waste Land. While the Trump administration’s actions should have largely beneficial effects—i.e., ridding government of bureaucratic and superfluous educational programs and policies—as always, it would be in the best interest of education reformers if changes to the ED were enshrined by congressional action so as to not be undone by a following administration.
Another reform effort of note is the extensive use of Case Resolution Agreements within higher education. These agreements are formal, legally binding contracts negotiated between higher education institutions (IHEs) and federal agencies. Many of the case resolution agreements made by the Trump administration followed investigations into IHEs for failure to comply with nondiscrimination law. Examples include tolerance of anti-Semistism and the usage of race or sex discrimination in student admissions and in hiring of faculty and staff. Many of these case resolution agreements include requirements to remove programs that promote unlawful race-based outcomes, such as DEI. They also typically include provisions to decrease financial dependence on international students and further require compliance with federal foreign gift and contract reporting obligations.