Recent changes in the political landscape have caused an extended assault on the current education at many colleges and universities. The Trump administration has alleged that top colleges’ allowance of pro-Palestine protests is antisemitic. Moreover, the administration accuses that Jewish students’ and faculty’s concerns about allowing these protests haven’t been addressed.
As a result, they have decided to withdraw funding for critical research in various fields from top universities. For the funding to be restored, they demand that the universities targeted create safe spaces for Jewish students and faculty. However, their biggest push is often to have DEI initiatives and classes removed from university wording, as well as having any classes or research programs related to DEI removed or reworked so they no longer have any mentions of DEI. Some schools have agreed to implement changes demanded by the administration, while others have decided to fight the funding pulls through the legal system.
Yet, for some, these changes are not changing the places that they are planning on applying to. Senior Mingchuan Liu’s dream school is Columbia University in New York. Columbia was one of the first schools to acquiesce to Trump’s demands. But he feels that the changes don’t affect him much, and he believes “New York is such a diverse place that even with these changes, diversity of thoughts and opinions will not be changed, especially within the undergraduate population of the school.”
This feeling seems to be consistent within the CCO as well. The changes in higher education have been in the making for a long time. But Tania Castro Bradt, Director of College Counseling, notes that questions are not only coming from students, but also from families. In fact, many students are now considering whether the recent changes will increase their admission chances to highly selective schools.
While recent changes in higher education have dominated headlines for the past year, students are not changing where they plan on applying.