KENT, Ohio — Deepan Wagle came to the United States from Nepal to study mechatronics engineering. While the prospect of a quality education encouraged him to come to this country, the early and anticipated impacts of President Donald Trump’s second term are pushing him to leave.
Wagle said that what worries him most is witnessing what he sees as a complete consolidation of Trump’s power – from a Republican majority of Congress to a Supreme Court shaped by his appointments. Seeing few options to fight back against Trump’s policies, Wagle said he’ll be looking to Europe after he graduates in 2027.
Cleveland.com | The Plain Dealer talked to students as classes commenced at Ohio’s universities. For incoming freshman, Donald trump will be the commander in chief for almost their entire college careers.
They worried over where the country is headed under Trump, state policies that could affect teaching in their classes, the cost of their schooling and what that all might mean for their education and future careers.
Wagle, a sophomore at Kent State University, has experienced life as a student under two presidents.
“I feel like I came to the U.S. just as its downfall has begun,” he said.
Trump is dramatically reshaping higher education, with executive orders attempting to end diversity, equity and inclusion on campuses; federal agencies cutting billions of dollars in research at universities; investigations for alleged antisemitism during campus protests against Israel; legislation that provides less money for some federal student loans; and an attempt, which thus far has failed, to terminate the legal status of thousands of international students.
Gen Z voters, like the country at large, were divided in last year’s presidential election, with about half saying they voted for Trump and half saying they voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, said Gabriel Rubin, a professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey who has interviewed Gen Z college students about their political views.
This is more conservative than previous generations when they were young. However, like all generations, the views of young people evolve over time.
“I think that they’re going to shift,” he said. “I think they’re highly, highly influenced by social media and by the news that they see.”
Students willing to talk to cleveland.com expressed concerns about Trump. Rubin, who has talked to Gen Z voters in the Northeast, said those who are conservative often are cautious about admitting they voted for the president.
In his experience, they often asked to be interviewed anonymously for fear of backlash, Rubin said
Disappearing DEI
On the Oval at OSU, Zen Bowers and Cadence Linn, sophomores each majoring in ecological engineering, remember in February when OSU closed two diversity, equity and inclusion offices to comply with Trump’s executive orders and in anticipation of state Senate Bill 1 passing, which banned DEI in public colleges.
OSU closed the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and the Center for Belonging and Social Change. The Office of Institutional Equity was renamed the Office of Civil Rights Compliance to more accurately reflect its work. Some of the programs were transferred to Academic Affairs or Student Life, but were modified to comply with Trump administration demands.
“All the safe spaces created for people of color are now being more inclusive to people who are not as oppressed, like white students and men,” Bowers said.
Linn said students were notified of the DEI closures in an email, just a day before they closed.
“It’s a little bit scary to me,” Linn said. “There shouldn’t be so much political control over education. The whole thing about education is that it’s not supposed to be touched.”
Impact of SB 1
In addition to Trump’s policies curtailing DEI and limiting protesting on the grounds of keeping campuses safe against antisemitism, Ohio public colleges have to comply with state Senate Bill 1, which also prohibits DEI on campus. SB 1 is forcing dozens of changes in how professors address students who have unconventional ideas, under the auspices of fostering intellectual diversity, prohibits universities from taking positions on “controversial topics,” and potentially firing tenured professors if they do “not meet performance expectations” in post-tenure reviews the bill requires.
“I haven’t experienced anything directly, especially since I present as a straight white guy,” said OSU freshman Jaxon Stevens. “I am bi, though. That kind of puts a little bit of hazard in the back of my mind.”
Stevens thought about leaving Ohio to get away from SB 1.
“Due to money in general, I decided to stay,” he said. “It was something that was in the back of my mind a little bit and I did apply to a couple out of state. But I decided in the end, I think I can deal with people being idiots for it being a couple thousand dollars cheaper.”
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‘Get out of our country’
While some students’ criticisms of Trump centered on certain policy points, others were more sweeping. Asked his thoughts on the president, Kent State freshman Jonah Axelrod’s appraisals ran the gamut.
“Yeah, he sucks. Get out of our country,” Axelrod said of the current president.
“Bad foreign policy. Bad domestic policy. He’s not fair to his own people. He dumps money in the White House when he should be dumping it, you know, into like cancer research for kids, meals for kids. He’s a selfish, greedy, pig.”
Axelrod is studying to be a commercial pilot in Kent’s professional pilot program, which combines Federal Aviation Administration approved coursework with training university-owned integrated flight simulators. Trump’s mission to shrink the federal workforce has touched nearly every agency, including the FAA. Axelrod said he has been keeping tabs of how the federal budget cuts have altered his future industry.
“I’ve been impacted sometimes because I fly out of a New York-area airport. New York has been affected by it. You know, all the ATC [Air Traffic Control] outages. There have been times where you’ve had less controllers at my airport.”
‘A little anxiety’
Freshman Kelly Hauck, from Long Island, N.Y. was looking for a large college with a football program near a city. OSU checked all the boxes, she said.
She attends OSU on a competitive Morrill Scholarship, which covers her tuition. Hauck received the scholarship because of her grades, as well as an essay in which she described her desire as a woman to study industrial engineering. The scholarship’s eligibility criteria that had to be modified due to the state’s DEI ban, although OSU kept her award, she said.
Last winter, as she was preparing to graduate high school and head to Columbus, family members interested in politics and the news learned about SB 1.
To Hauck, the worst part of SB 1 is the provision banning the university from taking positions on controversial topics, which the bill includes in its definition “issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”
SB 1’s sponsor, state Sen. Jerry Cirino, has said that such topics can be discussed, it’s just that schools can’t take positions on them.
Some of the controversial topics in SB 1 are only controversial to the legislature. For instance, two-thirds of Ohio voters believe human activity is at least partially responsible for climate change, according to 2024 Baldwin Wallace polling. The state’s abortion rights constitutional amendment passed with 58% of the vote.
Hauck noticed that students and faculty at OSU protested against the bill at the legislature. Recognizing that Columbus is a blue city, she went ahead with the move.
“I’m a little worried for everything but I’m trying to stay positive and not consume too much media because it does give me a little anxiety.”
Federal loan cuts
Under the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” approved by Congress and signed by Trump, the Direct PLUS loans that allow graduate students to borrow the costs of their education is going away next year.
The bill replaces it with a program that will cap loans to $20,500 a year with a lifetime grad school limit of $100,000. This will make it difficult for middle-class and low-income students to attend grad programs– unless they can get generous scholarships or obtain private loans, which can have higher interest rates and are less regulated.
OSU freshman Fouvia Ahmed, a first-generation college student, watched the news as the bill progressed through Congress. She dreams of going to medical school. The new law will make it difficult.
“I don’t know where I’m going to get the funds, especially when they passed that bill,” she said. “It’s scary.”
Hannah McCauley, a freshman at Kent State planning to study journalism and history, also expressed concern about the changes to student loans.
“Under the big, beautiful bill, instead of having six months to start paying things back, we have to start doing so immediately,” McCauley said. “That might not seem like a lot of time, but still plenty of time that we could be saving up,” she said.
Despite her fears for the future, McCauley is choosing a career to build a brighter future for her generation. She hopes to help combat misinformation that has become increasingly commonplace online.
“You know the big reason I wanted to be in journalism and history was because the state of everything right now,” McCauley said. “There’s so much misinformation going on.”
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