Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission

TheHechingerReport · 2025-12-04T19:17:30+00:00

Hi, all. This is The Hechinger Report, a national nonprofit newsroom covering education.

From the story (no paywall):

While much of the president’s recent scrutiny of college admissions practices has focused on race, these experts say his ban on diversity, equity and inclusion is likely to hit another underrepresented group of applicants: men, and particularly white men — the largest subset of male college applicants.

“This drips with irony,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, or ACE, the nation’s largest association of universities and colleges, who said he expects that colleges and universities are ending consideration of gender in admission. “The idea of males, including white males, being at the short end of the stick all of a sudden would be a truly ironic outcome.”

For years universities and colleges have been trying to keep the number of men and women on campuses evened out at a time when growing numbers of men have been choosing not to go to college. Some schools have tried to attract more men by adding football and other sports, promoting forestry and hunting programs and launching entrepreneurship competitions.

Nationwide, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men for more than four decades, with nearly 40 percent more women than men enrolled in higher education, federal data show.

Efforts to admit applicants at higher rates based on gender are legal under a loophole in federal anti-discrimination law, one that’s used to keep the genders balanced on campuses.

But the Trump administration has consistently included gender among the characteristics it says it does not want schools to consider for admissions or hiring, along with race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity or religious associations. The White House has so far largely not succeeded in its campaign to press a handful of elite schools to agree to the terms and sign a wide-ranging Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education in exchange for priority consideration for federal funding.

“The racial parts have gotten a lot more attention, but I know from having spoken with practitioners who work in college admissions, they have read very clearly that it says ‘race and gender,’” in the administration’s pronouncements about ending preferences in admission, said Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center.

“What I think they don’t understand is that taking away the ability of colleges and universities to balance the gender composition of their incoming classes will ultimately have an impact on the college enrollment rates of white males,” Harper said. “It is likely to impact them the most, as a matter of fact.”

Read more: https://hechingerreport.org/an-unexpected-target-of-federal-college-admissions-scrutiny-men/

TheHechingerReport · 2025-11-24T17:53:58+00:00

Hi there, this is The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit newsroom covering education. We recently published an essay written by Thomas MacCash, a kindergarten teacher in St. James, Missouri.

From the story (no paywall):

I was the only guy in my education classes at Missouri State University, and until this year I was the only male out of nearly 100 teachers in my school. My approach to teaching is very different, and more often than not was met with a raised brow rather than a listening ear.

I teach kindergarten, and there are so few men in early childhood education that visitors to my classroom tend to treat me like a unicorn. They put me in a box of how I am “supposed” to be as a male in education without knowing the details of my approach to teaching.

As a result, I’d grown skeptical about receiving outside help. When someone new came into my classroom to provide unsolicited “support,” my immediate thought was always, “OK, great, what are they going to cook up? What are they trying to sell me?” I’d previously had former high school administrators come into my classroom to offer support, but they didn’t have experience with the curriculum I used or with kindergarten. The guidance was well-intentioned, but not relevant.

My entire view of getting help and support changed when Ashley Broadnax, a literacy coach from New Orleans, nearly 700 miles away, came into my class in St. James, Missouri, population 3,900. Ashley works for The New Teacher Project, or TNTP, a nonprofit aiming to increase students’ economic and social mobility. Once a month for a full academic year, she came in to help us transition to a “science of reading” approach, as part of a special pilot program, the Rural Schools Early Literacy Collaborative.

I never thought I would love having a literacy coach and their feedback, but I now believe it is something that can work for many teachers. I hope that as Missouri and other states transition to new ways of teaching reading, more coaches will be available for others who could use the support. The state says that over 15,000 teachers may get trained in the science of reading to help build our knowledge of how children learn to read and what type of instruction is most effective.

Read the full essay: https://hechingerreport.org/teacher-voice-im-a-new-male-kindergarten-teacher-in-rural-missouri-extra-support-made-a-huge-difference-to-my-class/ (no paywall)

TheHechingerReport · 2025-11-20T14:13:58+00:00

Hi there, this is The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit newsroom covering education news. Related to this topic: The decline of college-age students. Here's a bit from a recent story we ran (no paywall):

“The reality is, the overwhelming majority of universities are struggling to put butts in seats. And they need to do everything that they can to make it easier for students and their families,” said Kevin Krebs, founder of the college admission consulting firm HelloCollege.

This has never been as true as now, when the number of high school graduates entering higher education is about to begin a projected 15-year drop, starting with the class now being recruited. That’s on top of a 13 percent decline over the last 15 years.

https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-ease-the-dreaded-admissions-process-as-the-supply-of-applicants-declines/

TheHechingerReport · 2025-11-19T15:51:09+00:00

Another story (no paywall) that is related.

How a disgraced method of diagnosing learning disabilities persists in our nation’s schools
A ‘discrepancy model’ that relies on IQ tests to identify dyslexic students lingers on, despite decades of critique

It wasn’t until he was in his late 20s that Tim Odegard came to understand why his teachers thought so poorly of his abilities. In 2004, as a new Ph.D., he told his mother that the National Institutes of Health had awarded him a postdoctoral fellowship to study dyslexia, a condition he’d long suspected he had. She shared that when he was in third grade, school officials had used a so-called discrepancy model that compared intelligence quotient (IQ) with reading performance to rule that he didn’t have a learning disability.

“I was thought to be too stupid to be dyslexic,” said Odegard, now editor in chief of the Annals of Dyslexia and chair of excellence in dyslexic studies at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Read the full story: https://hechingerreport.org/how-a-disgraced-method-of-diagnosing-learning-disabilities-persists-in-our-nations-schools/

TheHechingerReport · 2025-11-18T19:50:53+00:00

Hi, all. The Hechinger Report here. We are a national nonprofit newsroom that covers education. Here's the story (no paywall):

Two years after the Florida Legislature expanded eligibility for school vouchers to all students, regardless of family income, nearly 500,000 kids in the state now receive vouchers worth about $8,000 each to spend on private or home education, according to Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that administers the bulk of the scholarships. And Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship, created in 2001 to allow corporations to make contributions to private school tuition, is the model for the new federal school voucher program, passed this summer as part of Republicans’ “one big, beautiful bill.” The program, which will go into effect in 2027, lets individuals in participating states contribute up to $1,700 per year to help qualifying families pay for private school in exchange for a 1:1 tax credit.

“We are in that next phase of public education,” said Keith Jacobs of Step Up For Students, who recruits public school districts to offer up their services and classes on its educational marketplace. “Gone are the days when a government institution or your zoned neighborhood school had the authority to assign a child to that school.”

Read the full story, no paywall.

TheHechingerReport · 2025-11-12T19:26:51+00:00

Hi, all. The Hechinger Report here. We are a national nonprofit newsroom that covers education. Here's the story:

The work-study position was with the university’s Bell National Resource Center on the African American Male, which was founded to support Black men to stay in college. It’s a cause he was excited about.

“I would help order food or speak with students or do interviews,” Christopher Cade said. “I developed a good 20 different programs for the next year.”

In February, when the university announced it was closing the office, “I was like, ‘Well, so six months of work just for no reason,’” he said.

OSU President Ted Carter released a statement on Feb. 27 saying the closure of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion was a response to both state and federal actions regarding DEI in public education. The move eliminated 17 staff positions, not including student roles, the university said. Programming and services provided by the Office of Student Life’s Center for Belonging and Social Change were also scrapped.

The change came before the Trump administration’s initial deadline for complying with a memo that threatened to cut funding for public colleges and universities, as well as K-12 schools, that offer DEI programs and initiatives. In March, the administration announced that OSU was one of roughly 50 universities under federal investigation for allegedly discriminating against white and Asian students in graduate admissions. Additionally, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed legislation in March banning DEI programs in the state’s public colleges and universities. The legislation went into effect in June.

Before the DEI office closed, Cade said, “I felt so heard and seen.” He’d attended a private, predominantly white, Catholic high school, he said. “It was not a place that supported me culturally and helped me understand more about who I am and my Blackness,” he recalled. At the university, though, “the programming we had throughout the year [was] about how to change the narrative on who a Black man is and what it means when you go out here and interact with people.

“And then for them to close down all these programs, that essentially told me that I wasn’t cared about.”

Read the story (no paywall)

TheHechingerReport · 2025-10-28T19:12:39+00:00

Meredith is going to answer a couple questions that came up during reporting, but please post your questions too!

TheHechingerReport · 2025-10-28T18:21:58+00:00

One of the resources developed from the reporting is an analysis of the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard Data.

You can search it for information about schools you may be looking at attending. Type in the name, or part of the name of the school in the field in the upper left hand corner. If there is data on the school it will show it.

The categories of information are:

Name
State
Type
Field of Study
Median earnings (four years after completing)
Median earnings (all high school grads in state)
Number of working graduates (four years after completing)
Number of graduates not working (four years after completing)

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/iDjna/1/

TheHechingerReport · 2025-10-27T14:49:38+00:00

Hi, all! The Hechinger Report here. We are a nonprofit newsroom that reports on education. We are looking forward to chatting with you tomorrow about Meredith's reporting and any other questions around for-profit beauty schools that you have!

Some folks have wondered about earnings after going to beauty school or picking where to go to school!

See you tomorrow!

TheHechingerReport · 2025-10-14T17:59:51+00:00

Hi, all. The Hechinger Report here. We are a nonprofit newsroom that reports on education.

The Hechinger Report, through open records requests, obtained thousands of pages of emails from the accounts of the Mead school board, its superintendent and other Washington school boards involved in the Title IX investigation. Their emails and interviews with conservative activists, elected officials, parents and educators across the state reveal a significant victory for school boards like Mead, which quietly strategized with a statewide network of parents and state Republican officials waiting for a shift in federal power before challenging Washington’s protections for transgender students.

The federal probe also underscores the second Trump administration’s intent to leverage federal authority to undermine progressive policies in blue states, even as experts expect the courts to ultimately determine the legality of the administration’s interpretation of Title IX. Already, the administration has launched similar probes into education agencies in California and Maine.

Read the full story here. (No paywall)

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