What to Know About Trump Admin’s Offer to 9 Colleges for Preferential Funding

President Donald Trump recently softened his hardline approach to higher education, offering financial incentives to nine universities if they promise to eliminate preferential treatment by race, enhance viewpoint diversity, and freeze tuition for five years. This is a pivot from the previous heated exchanges with elite schools that lost federal funding following investigations into campus anti-Semitism and Civil Rights violations rooted in left-leaning policies. Those episodes yielded mixed results, with some schools agreeing to the Trump administration’s demands and others challenging them in federal court. The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, offered by the Department of Education to a mix of public and private universities earlier this month, could become the industry standard for all U.S. colleges and universities, say policy experts....