President Donald Trump’s administration sent a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” to nine research universities on Oct. 1. The administration has since opened the compact to all colleges in the United States.
The compact offers priority for federal grant funding in exchange for a number of concessions, including freezing tuition rates for five years, limiting the number of foreign students to 15% of the student body and posting the average earnings of graduates in each academic major.
Tulane University is aware of Trump’s proposal, but has not been asked to sign anything, according to Tulane spokesperson Mike Strecker.
The compact also imposes new requirements on admissions procedures. Universities that accept the compact will be required to mandate ACT and SAT scores from applicants. Universities will also post “anonymized data for admitted and rejected students, including GPA, standardized test score, or other program-specific measures of accomplishments, by race, national origin, and sex.”
The Trump administration has long argued against affirmative action policies which use race as a factor for admissions. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action policies in higher education.
However, according to the compact, religious institutions will be allowed to maintain preferences for religious affiliation or belief in hiring and admissions and single sex institutions can maintain sex-based preferences.
Some of the benefits of accepting the compact include access to student loans, grant programs, federal contracts, funding for research and “preferential treatment under the tax code.” The compact also states it would allow for the approval of “student and other visas.”
Of the nine initial institutions, seven — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Virginia, Dartmouth College and the University of Arizona — have refused to sign the compact. Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas at Austin have not yet responded.