Why White Male Students Could Face New Enrollment Challenges
Trump’s attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion was pitched as a crackdown on race-based admissions. Now higher education leaders say the group most likely to take the hit might be the very demographic his base loves to claim is under siege: White male college applicants.
After Trump issued sweeping executive orders in January to strip DEI considerations from admissions, hiring, and campus practices, colleges began bracing for impact. The assumption was that race would be the central battleground. But admissions experts argue gender is about to become just as disruptive.
Many elite institutions have quietly relied on gender balancing because men have been opting out of college at far higher rates than women. The result is a sizeable enrollment gap: about 40 percent more women attend college than men nationwide.
At Brown University, for example, recent enrollment data showed 7 percent of the incoming class were men compared with 4.4 percent women. That imbalance has long allowed men, especially White men, to enjoy a statistically easier path into competitive schools.
“That may no longer be the case,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said. ACE, the largest higher ed association in the country, has been sounding the alarm about the gender piece of Trump’s DEI rollback. “This drips with irony,” Mitchell added, noting that a policy framed as ending racial preferences could wind up making it harder for men to get in. “The idea of males, including White males, being at the short end of the stick all of a sudden would be a truly ironic outcome.”
The administration has insisted colleges eliminate consideration of gender in admissions, alongside race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, and religious affiliation.
Shaun Harper, founder of USC’s Race and Equity Center, said people are only now starting to realize the implications. “The racial parts have gotten a lot more attention,” he said, “but practitioners have read very clearly that it says ‘race and gender.’ Taking away the ability of colleges and universities to balance the gender composition of their incoming classes will ultimately have an impact on the college enrollment rates of White males. It is likely to impact them the most.”
The fallout hasn’t been limited to campuses. Corporations such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have aligned themselves with Trump’s anti-DEI agenda, while elite universities have moved more slowly to adopt the administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. That compact demands schools end affirmative action, freeze tuition, cap international enrollment at 15 percent, and implement a slate of policy changes in exchange for priority access to federal funding.
The turmoil has already pushed a University of Virginia president to resign, and even some of Trump’s staunchest cultural allies are stunned by how far the crackdown has gone. In April, conservative commentator Candace Owens criticized the White House for attacking universities and free speech in the name of dismantling DEI.
“I never thought that I would see a day where I would be rooting for a university above Donald J. Trump and his administration,” she said. “But I don’t recognize this administration right now. I don’t recognize what’s happening.”
Owens added that Trump’s approach to higher education “is so messy. It’s so obvious. Everyone knows what you’re doing.”
Trump’s orders were designed to target race-conscious admissions. Instead, their sharpest edge may cut directly into the demographic he insists is being protected. The irony would be almost funny if the stakes weren’t so high.
