The Leading Higher Education News Stories Of 2024

The election of Donald Trump to a second term as U.S. president was the major higher education news story for 2024, with potential implications for almost every aspect of college operations. However, other significant developments took place as well, affecting many aspects of the nation’s colleges and universities. Here’s a synopsis of some of the year’s most important ones.

Trump’s Higher Education Agenda

Among several higher education-related promises Donald Trump made during his campaign for the presidency were closing the Department of Education, revamping the accreditation process, rolling back DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives, threatening to tax the endowments of wealthy universities, and directing changes to what Trump and his allies view as liberal indoctrination in college curricula.

How many of these policies will eventually be enacted remains to be seen, but it’s certain the next four years will be among the most challenging and controversial that college officials have seen in decades.

While it’s unlikely the Department of Education will be eliminated entirely, its funding could be cut, and many of its functions could be farmed out to other agencies. (Ronald Reagan also wanted to eliminate the Department of Education when he was president, but many of its programs proved too popular among the general public for his plan to be fulfilled.)

What will happen to the department’s various access and support programs? Will financial aid be on the chopping block? Will Trump privatize all student loans? How many of Title IX’s protections will be rolled back? How far might Trump go in directing the department to pursue his political ends? And how will Trump treat federal research funding in his budget recommendations? Those questions loom large as campuses brace for a second Trump term.

Mega Gifts

Once again, it was another banner year for “mega gifts,” those private donations from individuals or organizations of $100 million or more. Leading the list was the $600 million donation by Michael Bloomberg to the endowments of four historically Black medical schools. The medical schools at Howard, Meharry, and Morehouse each received gifts of $175 million, and Charles R. Drew University of Medicine & Science was given $75 million.

Other institutions that saw mega-level contributions, estate gifts or commitments included Columbia University ($400 million), Seattle University (a $300 million gift of art works), Depauw University (a combined donation of $200 million), Catawba College, (with its second anonymous $200 million gift in just three years), Dartmouth College ($150 million for financial aid), Washington and Lee University ($132 million), UCLA ($120 million), Laguardia Community College ($116 million), the California Institute of Technology ($100 million), the College of William & Mary ($100 million), University of Arkansas ($100 million for student scholarships), the University of Chicago ($100 million), Spelman College ($100 million), Purdue University ($100 million) and the United Negro College Fund ($100 million).

The year will also be remembered for one gift that turned out to be a giant hoax. After an outside investigation was launched, it was determined that a $237 million gift by Gregory Gerami to Florida A&M University, which would have been the largest in its history, was fraudulent. The ensuing fallout saw the university’s president admit it was a mistake to accept the gift; he subsequently stepped down from office.

More Budget Cuts and College Closures

As billions of federal dollars in Covid-19 relief funds began drying up, inflation kept rising and enrollments continued to sag, scores of colleges and universities found their finances taking serious downturns. As a result, several nationally prominent institutions had to impose large-scale budget cuts to stem the red ink.

Marquette University; Drake University; Pennsylvania State University; the Universities of Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Arizona; Brandeis University; Baldwin Wallace University; Drexel University; Buffalo State University; Portland State University; St. Cloud State University; the University of California, Santa Cruz; and St. Louis University, were among the institutions forced to make deep cuts to their budgets, often resulting in both faculty and staff layoffs.

Financial woes at other colleges became so severe they were forced to declare financial exigency or close entirely. Included in the casualties were Fontbonne University in St. Louis, Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama, Vermont’s Goddard College, Wells College in New York, The University of Saint Katherine in California, and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Total Enrollment Up, Freshman Numbers Down

On the enrollment front, the news was mixed. Overall college enrollment increased a healthy 2.9% this fall, according to preliminary figures from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The increase was accounted for largely by a 3% year-over-year increase in undergraduate students, with graduate student enrollment up by 2.1%.

However, enthusiasm over those gains was tempered by an ominous decline in freshman enrollment, which suffered a 5% overall decrease compared to last fall. The drop-off was a sharp reversal of 2023’s growth in freshman enrollment, and it was particularly steep at public and private nonprofit four-year institutions (-8.5% and -6.5%, respectively).

At four-year colleges where high shares of the undergraduate population receive Pell Grants, freshman enrollment was down by more than 10%.

The FAFSA Fiasco

What began as an attempt to simplify the process of applying for federal financial aid ended up being a prolonged fiasco with one delay or technical glitch after the other making it much more difficult for students to complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. These problems undoubtedly contributed to the decline in the number of entering freshmen students.

At one point during the application cycle, FAFSA completions were down 40%. Although that number eventually lessened due to the efforts of individual states and colleges, the reduction in applications still stood at about 9% near the end of this year’s admission cycle.

In a recent survey, almost three-quarters (74%) of private, nonprofit colleges said the FAFSA crisis changed the composition of their incoming classes this fall, and 49% indicated that FAFSA problems made their freshman class “more difficult to fill.”

The Department of Education has promised that the FAFSA process will be improved for the 2025-2026 admission cycle, and initial Beta testing has raised expectations that the changes and additional tools to help students and families complete the form more quickly and easier will prove successful. The debugging procedures proved effective enough that the department was able to launch the form ten days ahead of its December 1 target date.

More States Ban Legacy Admissions

The move to end legacy admissions, the policy that gives an admissions advantage to the relatives of a college’s alumni or donors, continued to pick up momentum in 2024. In September, California became the fifth state to enact some type of legacy admissions ban. Illinois passed its legacy admission prohibition in August, following Maryland, which enacted a legacy admission ban in April that applies to both public and private colleges. Colorado was the first state to pass a ban in 2021, and Virginia did so earlier this year.

The fairness of legacy preferences has been challenged for years, and several premier colleges have ended its use as an admission factor on their own. However, public pressure against the practice has been building ever since the Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina finding race-conscious admissions to be unconstitutional. Look for more states to join the movement against legacy preferences in the upcoming year.

The Standardized Testing Redux

After a couple of years of discontinuing the requirement that students submit standardized test scores as part of their college applications, several selective and highly selective institutions announced they were resuming the use of standardized tests like the ACT or SAT as a component in their admissions decisions.

Dartmouth College was the first Ivy League institution to reinstate a testing requirement. Yale soon followed suit, as did Brown, Stanford, Cornell, Harvard, Cal Tech and Johns Hopkins. Among public universities, the University of Texas at Austin resumed its use of standardized tests.

Nonetheless, according to FairTest, a leading opponent of standardized testing, more than 2,000 colleges and universities continue to be either test-free or test-optional in their admission policies for 2025 applicants.

Debt Relief/Loan Forgiveness

The Biden administration made several attempts throughout the year to extend debt relief to student-loan borrowers, but most of those proposals were stymied in the courts. The on-again, off-again efforts to provide debt relief were a source of disillusionment and confusion for borrowers.

Biden was able to forgive student loans for one million public service workers after discharging about $4.5 billion for more than 60,000 student loan borrowers through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which was created by Congress in 2007.

However, other loan reduction strategies advanced by the administration (e.g., the SAVE program) were thwarted by court decisions that the Department of Education had exceeded its legal authority to cancel federal student loan balances through various mechanisms.

One estimate was that the administration had approved a total of about $175 billion in student debt relief for nearly five million borrowers through all the actions taken during Biden’s presidency.

Those numbers fell short of what Biden had pledged to accomplish during his campaign for the presidency, and the issue remained highly polarizing throughout his term in office with conservatives constantly challenging his constitutional ability to deliver loan forgiveness through executive action.

Now that they control both Congress and the presidency, Republicans might discover that student debt relief remains popular among several segments of the public, particularly if it were to involve a income-based repayment plan that’s paid for and aimed at the neediest students.

Campuses Rocked By Protests

Higher education leaders struggled for months with the best way to respond to an outbreak of campus protests and demonstrations over the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. Those disruptions, which sometimes turned violent and resulted in the arrest of thousands, rocked dozens of colleges and universities across the nation throughout the spring and into the summer.

At some campuses, administrators got tough with the protesters, cleared out the sprawling encampments and disciplined or even arrested the student demonstrators who occupied and fortified them. At other institutions administrators chose to wait out the protestors, seeking to avoid an escalation of tensions.

A few universities tried a third alternative — striking deals with student protesters that addressed some of their demands in exchange for them ending or curtailing the demonstrations. All of the strategies left one constituency or the other dissatisfied, leading to round after round of second-guessing, recriminations, and campus upheaval.

Turmoil at the Top

Between campus protests and financial difficulties, college presidents and chancellors found themselves in the crosshairs of criticism not only at their own institutions, but also in state legislatures and Congress. Votes of no-confidence and censure increased, universities scrambled to revise their protest and free-speech policies, and several high-profile presidents headed for the door.

The exodus began last December when Liz Magill, President of the University of Pennsylvania announced she was resigning in the wake of her highly criticized testimony at a Congressional hearing about how universities were responding to campus protests. That was followed by the January departure of Harvard University President Claudine Gay over harsh criticism of her testimony at the same hearing and allegations of plagiarism.

They were followed by Ivy League colleagues Martha Pollock, who announced her retirement from the presidency of Cornell University in April and Minouche Shafik, who stepped down as president of Columbia University in August.

Robert Robbins announced he would step away from office at the University of Arizona, following the disclosure of a huge budget shortfall. University of Florida President Ben Sasse resigned amid questions about his spending habits.

University of Illinois Chancellor Robert Jones, Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway, and University of Southern California President Carol Folt all revealed their plans to leave office at the end of this academic year. Two presidents resigned following no-confidence votes from their faculty — Tom Jackson, president of California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt; and Brandeis University President Ronald Liebowitz.

The grim mood was captured in headlines like these: “You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a College President,” “Wanted: New College Presidents. Mission: Impossible,” or “The Impossible College Presidency,” “Campus protests prompt the question: Who wants to be a college president?”, and “Anyone Want to Be a College President? There Are (Many) Openings.”

Now attention turns to 2025, which many college leaders are viewing with trepidation as higher education continues to confront a gauntlet of challenging questions. Will the decline in freshman enrollment repeat itself? Will campus unrest return? How aggressive will state legislatures be in their attempts to exert more control over public colleges? What’s the outlook for institutional budgets? And of course, what does the federal government have in store for higher education with the change in administrations? Buckle up. It could be a very bumpy year.