The Trump administration’s war on higher education is hitting state universities and community colleges across the nation.

On the impacts of the Trump administration’s attacks on community colleges:

“Since January, the Trump administration has waged war on the nation’s wealthiest and most prestigious universities, freezing billions of dollars in research grants to Harvard and blasting away at Columbia’s institutional autonomy. But collateral damage from these attacks has engulfed schools of all types, including the country’s 1,100 community colleges, which educate about 6.4 million undergraduates each year — roughly 40 percent of the national total and more than twice as many as are enrolled at every highly selective college and university in the country combined,” The New York Times reports.

“Like their four-year counterparts, community colleges are grappling with disappearing federal grants, shuttered D.E.I. offices, eliminated programs, canceled cultural convocations and panicked students and staff. At Delta, many of the grants that fund financial aid for low-income students and the staff that support them have been eliminated or threatened. I went to see the hydraulic-circuit class in part because of how much government funding, a great deal of it federal, it takes to make the teaching possible. It was hardly the only class I could have chosen: Federal funding helps pay not just for heavy machinery used in courses like the one taught by Luna but also, elsewhere on the Delta campus, for the full dental lab for aspiring hygienists; the X-ray machines surrounded by lead-lined walls for radiography students; and the robotic medical mannequins, one that pushed out little baby mannequins and could simulate everything from a breech birth to a health emergency.”

Austen, Ben. “Trump Went to War With the Ivies. Community Colleges Are Being Hit.” The New York Times (4 August 2025).