Trump's Tariffs and the Attacks on Higher Education Go Hand in Hand

Returning to a 'golden age' when few people - especially women - attended college

“Patriots, do you think that we should be a country that makes things again? Should we be a society where a family can thrive on a single income? Well, we can never reach those goals unless we get trade policy correct. And tariffs are a huge part of that new agenda of patriotic populist nationalism.”

That was campaign strategist Steve Cortes on Steve Bannon’s podcast, the War Room, over the weekend. I’ve been tuning into Bannon’s show regularly of late in an effort to understand the Trump administration’s evolving economic ‘policy’ and how it relates to their education vision - namely that we need a whole lot less of it. As I’ve been making the case in this newsletter and elsewhere, the Trump world’s obsession with the declining birthrate is a misunderestimated driver of key policy choices, including the attacks on higher education and, yes, tariffs.

If you drop by the MAGA-sphere these days or listen in on the fevered ramblings of the self-styled new right talk, you’ll hear plenty of about strong industries, strong men and strong families. Here’s MAGA pundit Batya Ungar-Sargon predicting that the Trump tariffs will reverse the ‘crisis in masculinity.’ Here’s ‘post-liberal’ C.C. Pecknold waxing over a golden era when men were men and women were at home:

“It was once possible for a married man’s wages to pay for everything sufficient for his family to flourish. His wife didn’t need to do work outside the home in order to meet the needs of the family. The man made a “family wage,” and this was a non-negotiable pillar of a just society.”

This idyllic stretch was also, of course, a time before college in America. Barely 10 percent of Americans attended college as late as 1960, and those who did tended to be wealthy, white and male. Trump’s effort to restore the era of industrial might is also an attempt to take us back to an era where college was for the few.

Hating U

The right has been hating on college for so long that it can be easy to miss the increasing radicalism of their anti-higher-education fervor. I still remember hearing Rush Limbaugh mock left-wing academics, like the one I aspired to be, as I motored around the Heartland back in the day, listening to AM radio. But in recent years, college has come to stand for everything that conservatives are convinced has gone wrong in America. Here’s Scott Yenor, official spox for the belief that there are too many ladies on campus (and newly appointed to the board of the University of West Florida by Gov. Ron DeSantis) summing up this view:

“[I]ncreasing numbers of graduates leave modern universities convinced that the country is irredeemably racist, that our civilization is despicable, that a global patriarchy peddles love and motherhood as tools that oppress women, that the world is simply matter in motion, that gender is simply a social construct. Without attachment to a just order, hopes for decent family life, or a love of God, graduates come to celebrate their “independent” identities, while conforming to the deadening dogmas of DEI.”

As political scientists Matt Grossman and David Hopkins document in their terrific new book, Polarized by Degrees, American universities really have become more liberal as political sorting between our two parties has intensified. (You can hear Hopkins explain this in an interview I did for Have You Heard.) But that’s only part of what’s motivating the right’s assault on higher education. This is also a backlash to the Democrats’ relentless overselling of college as the answer to inequality. In other words, college is a hell hole where your kids will be indoctrinated and learn to hate you and your country, also they have to go.

In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech at the National Conservatism conference, lamenting the idea that the only path to the middle class runs through college campuses. “We have got to get out of the mindset that the only way to live a good life in this country, the only way for our children to succeed is to go to a four year university where people will learn to hate their country and acquire a lot of debt in the process,” Vance railed. Women, who now earn close to 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees, have been sold a particular bill of goods, he claimed.

“The fundamental lie of American feminism over the past 20 or 30 years is that it is liberating for a woman to go and work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at Goldman Sachs shipping her fellow countrymen's jobs off to a regime that hates them, and that is liberation compared to the problems of family and patriarchy in our modern society.”

At the time, Vance’s remarks seemed shocking in their radicalism. Today this view is shaping both Trump’s economic policies and his attacks on higher education.

Making college elite again

This week the Trump Administration announced that it was freezing $1 billion in federal funding for Cornell University and nearly $800 million for Northwestern University while the government investigates alleged ‘civil rights’ violations at the schools. The administration is increasingly flexing its federal funding muscles in order to force institutions it doesn’t like into submission, but Trump is also following the playbook laid out by anti-DEI crusader Christopher Rufo who declared recently that the goal is to “put the university sector as a whole into a significant recession.”

As Ian Bogost wrote in the Atlantic recently, the loss of federal funds is already translating into budget cuts at the targeted institutions. But these orchestrated budget crunches will also quickly begin to reshape who gets to attend schools like Cornell or Penn, which lost $175 million over a transgender swimmer. Generous financial aid, including no or low-cost tuition to working and middle class students, could fall by the wayside, predicts Bogost. “[T]op schools could focus on enrolling students whose families can pay top dollar, at the expense of everybody else.”

And the Trump administration is just getting started. It’s not that hard to imagine, for example, the Department of Education targeting institutions with programs and policies it opposes by cutting off their eligibility to receive federal student aid—a near guarantee of collapse as the abrupt closure of ITT demonstrated back in 2016. Or take the plan to shift the $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio to the Small Business Administration, an agency that not only has no familiarity with the loan program but just lost nearly half of its staff to DOGE-ing. Alan Collinge, the founder of Student Loan Justice, is convinced that the Trump administration is intentionally trying to crash the federal loan program in order to sell it to a third party.

Meanwhile, more than five million college students rely on federal Pell grants, a financial-aid program for low-income families. While the administration can’t just get rid of this program without Congressional approval, it can defund it or send the funds back to the states, a growing number of which share the administration’s anti-college bent.

The combined impact of all of these moves will be to make college more expensive to attend, thus limiting the number and kinds of students who can attend, and that is the point.

Mrs degrees

When I attended college, now a shockingly long time ago, we used to joke that there were certain girls on campus who were only there to get what we called an ‘Mrs degree,’ meaning that they’d come to school to find a husband. This being the rural midwest, these students were often from small farm towns, sent off by their farmer parents with instructions to bring home a ring—graduating with a degree was seen as optional.

That feels positively progressive compared to the view, increasingly prominent on the right, that women should be actively discouraged from going to college. In a policy blueprint prepared for Ron DeSantis, Scott Yenor urged state officials to conduct civil rights investigations into academic programs, including education and nursing, in which women vastly outnumber men. And traditionally male-dominated fields, like engineering and medicine, should stop trying to recruit women, he argued in a speech to the National Conservatism conference, a year after Vance made his version of the same argument.

In my last post for this newsletter, I made the case that education journalists in particular keep missing the larger ideological crusade at play in the assault on higher education and K-12 schools. The obsession with a falling birthrate, and the failure of the ‘right’ women—young, white, married—to produce enough babies, is a significant part of what’s animating the Trump world’s education policies.

Listen closely to the case being made for tariffs by, say Steve Bannon, and the bitter criticism of college coming from the likes of Vance et al, and it’s hard to miss that they’re making two different versions of the same argument. There was a better time when men went to their industrial jobs and women stayed home and raised the babies. Tariffs are meant to take care of the former, going hard at higher education will bring back the latter.

“Forget ‘defund the police.’ Defund the colleges,” argued former law professor Teresa Manning, in a piece for the American Conservative back in 2022, calling for a five year moratorium on the student loan program. Manning was making the now mainstream-on-the-right argument that too many kids attend college, and too many women in particular.

“Herding all young people, but especially young women, into a politicized higher education (sic) system, where they are not only radicalized but incur life-long debt, means that society is making the one job that most women eventually want more difficult. Motherhood is also the job a country most needs to be done well; that is, with stable marriages and committed fathers.”

Nearly a week has passed since Trump announced ‘Liberation Day.’ But while the justifications for his “reciprocal tariffs” keep shifting, the destination remains unchanged. We’re headed back to a time when men were men and women stayed home. Don’t believe me? Just listen.