Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.
This past week, the Trump administration continued to squeeze middle-class families with its decision to restart the process of collecting on student loans that had been paused during the pandemic. The administration said it was threatening to garnish wages even as borrowers and advocates expressed concerns about the ripple effect of a new financial obligation weighing down on Americans already grappling with Trump’s tariffs.
The decision was just one of many in which Team Trump has targeted current and former college attendees, along with the schools themselves.
Trump has authorized law enforcement agencies to abduct and detain college students expressing opinions he disagrees with. He has also cut federal funding for schools like Harvard and Columbia University and affiliated institutions while pressuring them to get rid of diversity programs and admissions, and he has pressured schools to exclude transgender athletes.
Related | Trump holds federal funding hostage as war on Harvard escalates
Colleges are also set to be punished as part of the administration’s plan to destroy the entire Department of Education, which has existed in America since 1980.
America doesn’t like Trump’s posture toward college and universities.
An Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released on Friday found that 56% of those surveyed disapproved of Trump’s actions on higher education. Majorities of those surveyed said colleges are a positive for medical and scientific research and as a source of new ideas and technological innovation. Additionally, pluralities said colleges are a positive for the U.S. workforce and for defense and military research.
Trump isn’t alone in his disdain for college and making it accessible to everyone. Republicans in Congress fought against efforts by the Biden administration to relieve student debt, and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court significantly scaled back Biden’s relief program.
Major Republican donor and multimillionaire Peter Thiel even set up a fund to pay students not to attend or to drop out of college.
Why is conservatism so dead set against colleges and universities despite the public’s position?
The right-wing movement has long seen college as a source of left-wing indoctrination. Conservatives have forwarded the notion that previously apolitical students are somehow brainwashed when they go off to college, returning to their families as left-wing radicals.
This is of course, absurd, because if this were truly the case few people who attend college would become conservatives or Republicans—but millions of people who vote for the Republican Party are also college attendees or graduates.
Conservatives are so concerned about this purported brainwashing that they have created groups like Turning Point USA, conservative pundit Charlie Kirk’s college activism group. The right has also created entire colleges devoted to cranking out right-wing thinkers at institutions like Hillsdale College.
What is really going on isn’t indoctrination, but a failure of conservatism to win the war of ideas. And as is so often the case with the right, when they can’t win a fair fight, they try to rig the system from the inside. Republicans fail to enlist those who go through a college education to their side of the aisle, so they undermine student loan programs, try to bully colleges, and even attempt to turn college sports into another casualty of the bigoted “culture war.”
Even when Republicans decisively win an election this is a battle they overwhelmingly lose. In the 2024 election Vice President Kamala Harris lost the popular vote and the electoral college, but among college graduates she crushed Trump 56% to 42%. Among voters of color with a college degree she won by even more, 65% to 32%.
Trump infamously said in 2016 “I love the poorly educated,” because it was the voter demographic most inclined to support him. And despite his policies negatively affecting this group, he has continued to garner their support while blaming colleges for all manner of negative things. It is a useful boogeyman for demagogues like Trump, even though college for most is a positive experience that opens their minds to different perspectives.
Republicans are using their power to bend colleges to their whims, and unfortunately in some instances these schools have given in to Trump—only to be pushed to give him more control and power. The right wants to break the will of schools, which they believe will eventually lead to more Republican votes.
Complex issues like taxes and tariffs and climate science require an educated populace to make informed decisions not only for themselves but for future generations. The right perceives a college education as another target they must attack and conquer. That’s why Trump is fighting so hard to destroy them and tear down some of the brightest lights in American education.
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