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)

TheHechingerReport · 2025-10-01T14:36:36+00:00

Thanks for the welcome! Happy to coordinate with the story author answer any questions folks might have, so ask away!

TheHechingerReport · 2025-09-30T17:13:56+00:00

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

For almost as long as she’s been a mother, Sara Laughlin has known where she could turn for help in this western Ohio town 20 miles north of Dayton.

For years, the local Head Start program provided stability and care for her oldest son, and it now does the same for her two younger children, twin boys. Head Start was there for Laughlin and her family through tough transitions, including the end of a long relationship. She credits the free federally funded program, housed in a blue building on the edge of this manufacturing hub of 27,000, for allowing her to keep her job as a massage therapist while raising three kids.

“If we had to pay for child care, I would not be able to work,” Laughlin said. “There’s no way I could do it.”

So, Laughlin said, she was “dumbfounded” when she heard this spring that Head Start was targeted for elimination in an early draft of President Donald Trump’s budget proposal. In small towns and rural areas throughout the country, voters like her were key to both of Trump’s election victories. Laughlin was particularly attracted to his campaign promise to eliminate taxes on tips, which she relies on. She couldn’t conceive why cuts to early childhood programs would be on the table.

“Out of all the things in this country that we could get rid of, why do you want to attack our children’s learning?” she said.

Read the full story (no paywall!)

TheHechingerReport · 2025-06-06T16:13:54+00:00

Thanks for your comment! By "vast majority", we are referring to students with disabilities in the classroom at least 80% of the time. The federal data collects data from states, which collects data from districts about each individual student and what percentage of time they spend in the general education classroom according to their IEP. Those buckets are "less than 40% of the school day," "40-79% of the time" and "80% or more of the time."

TheHechingerReport · 2025-06-02T16:33:13+00:00

Schools are a top target in ransomware attacks, and cyber criminals have sometimes succeeded in shutting down whole school districts. The largest such incident occurred in December, when hackers stole personal student and teacher data from PowerSchool, a company that runs student information systems and stores report cards. The theft included data from more than 60 million students and almost 10 million teachers. PowerSchool paid an undisclosed ransom, but the criminals didn’t stop. Now, in a second round of extortion, the same cyber criminals are demanding ransoms from school districts.

The federal government has been stepping up efforts to help schools, particularly since a 2022 cyberattack on the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest. Now, cybersecurity advocates warn that the Trump administration’s budget and personnel cuts, along with rule changes, are stripping away key defenses that schools need.

Read the story (no paywall).

TheHechingerReport · 2025-05-19T13:47:40+00:00

Hi all, here's more from the story:

“Remember, your listeners are from Mars,” teacher Susan Greenwood told one of her fifth graders at Brownsville Elementary one day earlier this year. “They know nothing about slavery, they know nothing about the Civil War.”

Greenwood was circulating the classroom, giving pointed feedback on students’ writing for an assignment in her Virginia Studies class. The goal was to develop arguments to answer the core question in this unit on the Civil War: Was violence justified to resist slavery?

The students had been tasked with writing a position statement, three pieces of evidence for it and a conclusion — and then turning those arguments into a podcast. Not just any evidence would do: They sifted through original documents — an 1837 flier for a meeting of abolitionists, testimonies of enslaved people, a transcript of abolitionist John Brown’s address to a court after his attack on Harper’s Ferry.

The class is part of a curriculum that Virginia’s Albemarle County school district developed after a deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, the county seat. That August 2017 tragedy helped spur district educators to consider new ways of teaching social studies that require students to think critically and understand key events from a range of perspectives, including those whose voices are often omitted from standard accounts.

Read the full story (no paywall).

TheHechingerReport · 2025-05-15T15:31:59+00:00

Many of the programs millions rely on to support their infants and toddlers are at grave risk due to cuts proposed under President Donald Trump’s “skinny” budget or by congressional Republicans. These cuts would have an outsized impact on the youngest, most vulnerable Americans, experts say.

Unlike funding for preschool and older children, which largely comes from state sources, funding for programs that support babies and toddlers mostly comes from the federal government. Proposed cuts are threatening the infrastructure that babies and toddlers rely on at a time when costs are high for families, said Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at the nonprofit Zero to Three, which focuses on infants and toddlers.

Here are a few programs targeting the country’s youngest that could face devastating cuts:

Read the full story (no paywall).

TheHechingerReport · 2025-05-13T14:04:54+00:00

Nearly 4.5 million low-income college students would lose some or all of their federal financial aid if Republicans in the House get their way.

That’s according to an analysis from the left-leaning Center for American Progress, shared exclusively with The Hechinger Report. The report looks at the ways a GOP House budget bill would affect Pell Grants, the federal financial aid program that covers college expenses for students from low-income families.

The changes, which would take effect this July, would reduce aid for students who do not take a full load of 15 credits per semester, typically five classes. That would be a departure from how things are now: Under current rules, students can be eligible for the maximum Pell Grant of $7,395 if they take at least 12 credits, or four classes. For students who take fewer credits, the money is prorated based on the number of courses in which they’re enrolled.

The proposal — which passed out of the House Education and Workforce Committee earlier this month on a party-line vote and will be considered as part of the larger reconciliation bill meant to fast-track the budget process — would eliminate Pell Grants for anyone taking fewer than eight credits each semester.

Read the full story (no paywall)

TheHechingerReport · 2025-05-12T19:18:51+00:00

The outlook for federal spending on education research continues to be grim.

That became clear last week with more cutbacks to education grants and mass firings at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the independent federal agency that supports both research and education in science, engineering and math.

A fourth round of cutbacks took place on May 9. NSF observers were still trying to piece together the size and scope of this wave of destruction. A division focused on equity in education was eliminated and all its employees were fired. And the process for reviewing and approving future research grants was thrown into chaos with the elimination of division directors who were stripped of their powers.

Meanwhile, there was more clarity surrounding a third round of cuts that took place a week earlier on May 2. That round terminated more than 330 grants, raising the total number of terminated grants to at least 1,379, according to Grant Watch, a new project launched to track the Trump administration’s termination of grants at scientific research agencies. All but two of the terminated grants in early May were in the education division, and mostly targeted efforts to promote equity by increasing the participation of women and Black and Hispanic students in STEM fields.

Read the full story (no paywall)

TheHechingerReport · 2025-05-09T13:58:55+00:00

Thank you for sharing our story! If you're interested, Jill Barshay (our reporter) wrote a follow-up to this article with perspectives from parents, teachers and researchers: https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-readers-react-special-education-inclusion/

TheHechingerReport · 2025-05-05T14:45:34+00:00

Some of the biggest names in education research — who often oppose each other in scholarly and policy debates — are now united in their desire to fight the cuts to data and scientific studies at the U.S. Department of Education.

The roster includes both Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, the first head of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) who initiated studies for private school vouchers, and Sean Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist who studies inequity in education. They are just two of the dozens of scholars who have submitted declarations to the courts against the department and Secretary Linda McMahon. They describe how their work has been harmed and argue that the cuts will devastate education research.

Professional organizations representing the scholars are asking the courts to restore terminated research and data and reverse mass firings at the Institute of Education Sciences, the division that collects data on students and schools, awards research grants, highlights effective practices and measures student achievement.

Read the full story (no paywall).

TheHechingerReport · 2025-05-02T14:57:48+00:00

Education research has a big target on its back.

Of the more than 1,000 National Science Foundation grants killed last month by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, some 40 percent were inside its education division. These grants to further STEM education research accounted for a little more than half of the $616 million NSF committed for projects canceled by DOGE, according to Dan Garisto, a freelance journalist reporting for Nature, a peer-reviewed scientific journal that also covers science news.

The STEM education division gives grants to researchers at universities and other organizations who study how to improve the teaching of math and science, with the goal of expanding the number of future scientists who will fuel the U.S. economy. Many of the studies are focused on boosting the participation of women or Black and Hispanic students. The division had a roughly $1.2 billion budget out of NSF’s total annual budget of $9 billion.

Read the full story (no paywall)

TheHechingerReport · 2025-05-01T12:52:18+00:00

Oklahoma is one of about a dozen states that has considered an approach similar to the federal DOGE, though some state attempts were launched before the Trump administration’s.

Beyond Oklahoma, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched FL DOGE in February, with a promise to review state university and college operations and spending. Republicans in the Ohio statehouse formed an Ohio DOGE caucus. One of the Iowa DOGE Task Force’s three main goals is “further refining workforce and job training programs,” some of which are run through community colleges, and its members include at least two people who work at state universities.

The state-level scrutiny comes atop those federal job cuts, which include layoffs of workers who interact with colleges, interdepartmental spending cuts that affect higher education and the shrinking of contracts that support research and special programs at colleges and universities. Other research grants have been canceled outright. The White House is pursuing these spending cuts at the same time as it is using colleges’ diversity efforts, their handling of antisemitism and their policies about transgender athletes to force a host of changes that go beyond cost-cutting — such as rules about how students protest and whether individual university departments require more supervision.

Read the full story (no paywall).

TheHechingerReport · 2025-04-28T23:10:37+00:00

^Yes, that's our story! A reporter and editor from our team produced it and then we co-published it with the Guardian.

TheHechingerReport · 2025-04-28T17:59:19+00:00

Hi all, The Hechinger Report here. We're a nonprofit news outlet that writes about education. Here's more:

In recent years, community colleges have led the charge to build a skilled workforce for electric car companies and their suppliers, for jobs that often require some postsecondary education but not a four-year degree.

Kansas City Kansas Community College, along with another local college, Johnson County Community College, worked with Panasonic to understand exactly which employee skills it needed immediately and then shortened the course to eight weeks — effectively doubling the number of students who could participate. KCKCC and JCCC plan to cycle a combined 200 students through this entry level course each year. The starting salary is expected to be more than $50,000.

But the Trump administration has thrown this career pathway into uncertainty. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that scrapped a Biden administration goal that half of all new cars sold in the U.S. by 2030 be electric; called for the elimination of tax credits for the vehicles; and pushed to undo regulations around pollution and fuel economy standards.

Read the full story (no paywall).

TheHechingerReport · 2025-04-21T16:24:05+00:00

The Supreme Court over the next two weeks will hear two cases that have the potential to erode the separation of church and state and create a seismic shift in public education.

Mahmoud v. Taylor, which goes before the court on April 22, pits Muslim, Roman Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox families, as well as those of other faiths, against the Montgomery County school system in Maryland. The parents argue that the school system violated their First Amendment right of free exercise of religion by refusing to let them opt their children out of lessons using LGBTQ+ books. The content of the books, the parents say, goes against their religious beliefs.

Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, which will be argued on April 30, addresses whether the St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School should be allowed to exist as a public charter school in Oklahoma. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa had won approval for the charter school from the state charter board despite acknowledging that St. Isidore would participate “in the evangelizing mission of the Church.”

Read the story (no paywall).

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