A Presidents’ Day sequel to “The Presidential Imprint”.
Every U.S. President since 1953 has held a degree from a higher education institution. But 12 presidents, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, never held degrees (though several received honorary ones). While formal credentials have not been required for office, administrations’ policy stances impact higher education. Last year, we explored how modern presidents imposed their vision through funding and incentives, pushing higher education toward an explicitly economic view (“learning to earning”). This year, we examine how the executive branch governs through leverage, using funding access, settlements, accreditation, and compliance. Some embrace this as accountability, however this approach risks America’s long-run soft power and innovation advantage. It is also historically novel.
Higher education has never been tidy in American politics. Across eras, presidents have treated colleges and universities as one (or more) of three things: a national asset worth building, a cost center worth constraining, or a political institution worth contesting. Today’s debate about budgets and campus culture has become a leverage point for governing tools that rewire incentives at scale.
America’s postwar bargain: Universities as national capacity, global attraction, and innovation engine
The modern U.S. higher education system did not become globally dominant by accident. During the Cold War, the country treated universities as strategic assets, transforming science, language, and engineering study into a pipeline of human capital. The “Sputnik moment” cemented the imperative. Fear of Soviet technological superiority spurred the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) and deeper federal engagement in education as national competitiveness infrastructure.
This capacity-building created a second advantage: Global attraction. American universities became magnets for ambitious students and scholars who built networks, professional norms, and institutional trust that persisted for decades, regardless of where graduates lived. Those benefits didn’t appear on campus balance sheets, but they’re part of the country’s “attraction power,” which is an enduring form of influence (“soft power”) that lasts beyond the degree.
Just as importantly, the system became an economic engine. Federal research funding seeded discoveries that U.S. companies could commercialize, especially after policy enabled universities to translate federally funded work into patents and licenses. The Bayh–Dole framework (1980) allows universities and nonprofits to retain title to inventions from federally funded research, enabling licensing and commercialization pathways and institutionalize technology transfer.
This bargain remains invisible to most Americans. Higher education isn’t only a private benefit for students or a public expenditure line item. It’s also national capacity through talent attraction, discovery, commercialization, and global influence.
This is not new: Adversarial presidents, skepticism cycles, and recurring campus conflict
Tensions between the federal government and academia have spanned the modern era.
Adversarial relationships are not new. The Nixon Administration was antagonistic toward universities amid intense social upheaval over Vietnam. The federal response to campus unrest became a central national conversation, captured in the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest (Scranton Commission) report. The political dynamics rhyme with today’s. As national conflict spills onto campuses, campuses become symbols, and the executive branch feels pressure, or opportunity, to act. Universities are cast as either essential guardians of freedom or elite institutions out of step with the nation. As the Scranton Commission stated, “Campus unrest is a fact of life. It is not peculiar to America. It is not new and it will go on. Exaggerations of its scope and seriousness and hysterical reactions to it will not make it disappear. They will only aggravate it.”
The ROI debate is not new either. Reagan-era politics established modern return-on-investment skepticism. Reagan judged higher education as a cost center and student aid a budget and accountability battleground. Americans have argued for decades about whether higher education’s benefits justify its costs, and presidents have often amplified the debate for their agendas. Presidents have long oscillated between building higher education and battling it, and the public has long argued about value versus expenditure.
What is new: Governance by leverage
While the rhetoric has historical precedent, the mechanics are unique.
- Enforcement through selective prosecution.
The Northwestern case is a concrete example of executive-branch leverage intersecting with civil-rights enforcement and research funding access. The Department of Justice announced an agreement under which Northwestern would pay $75 million and adhere to specified terms. Northwestern’s own communications describe frozen research funding and the restoration of access after the agreement. Contemporary reporting also emphasizes the mix of antisemitism allegations, investigations, and funding pressure. The debate shapes these reforms as “accountability” or “coercion.” Either way, the deployment uses case-by-case bargaining power for money, access, and legal exposure to shape institutional conduct. - Accreditation as a primary lever (system-level control).
Based on its original purpose as quality assurance for stakeholders, accreditation becomes a gatekeeper for federal aid eligibility and institutional legitimacy. And thus it has become a “new weapon” for compliance. The executive branch has shifted their policy implementation from individual compacts and deal making to system architecture through accreditation. - Compliance through ambiguity.
The administration has focused on DEI enforcement, however the legal landscape is fragmented, with some guidance blocked, some upheld, and courts describing executive order language as “undeniably opaque.” For institutions, this becomes an operational problem regardless of the pressures to make ideological statements and take stances. When rules are contested and enforcement is unpredictable, risk premiums spike, causing compliance departments to expand, and making institutions more cautious. Even schools not directly targeted modify behavior in anticipation, which some say is the point. - Aid architecture impacts access.
Two forces are operating simultaneously: Graduate borrowing limits tightening (with Fed data showing ~28% of recent graduate borrowers exceeded new caps, and nearly 40% of those unable to secure private loans without cosigners), while Workforce Pell expands to cover short-term credential programs starting July 1, 2026. These policies are making traditional graduate pathways more expensive, while subsidizing faster, job-aligned alternatives. This is a deployment of “choice architecture” weighting the incentives of various career pathways to effect policy.
Taken together, the executive branch is able to enact a robust policy framework to enforce a policy position through funding access, settlements, accreditation leverage, compliance pressure, and reshaping aid pathways.
The Trade-Offs Being Ignored
A pragmatic analysis acknowledges potential gains: faster enforcement through leverage versus slow rulemaking, clearer institutional discipline via funding consequences, rebalancing federal aid toward workforce training and manufacturing, and greater executive influence over system gatekeepers.
These are defensible policy objectives even if counter to the status quo. The question is: what may be lost?
Soft power erosion risk. International talent flows respond to stability signals. When a university system appears politically contingent, as the U.S. system does today, and funding access fluctuates, compliance expectations shift, the top researchers and students have substitutes. Canada, UK, EU, increasingly Asia. The lost opportunity to the U.S. economy is more than just tuition revenue. The risk of the loss of decades of accumulated network advantage slowly unwinding is hard to calculate.
Innovation drag. The U.S. research-to-commercialization engine depends on confidence and stable collaboration conditions. Bayh-Dole works because researchers trust the process. If federal research access becomes more conditional or administrative burden increases meaningfully, the system slows and becomes more risk-averse, which means that global competitors don’t even need to build better universities. They can just watch American universities become sufficiently bureaucratic and unpredictable so that ambitious researchers look elsewhere.
Settlement externalities. Case-by-case deals create uneven expectations across institutions. Northwestern’s terms don’t automatically apply to peer schools, but those schools must now decide whether to prepare similar settlements preemptively, hire more lawyers, or wait and hope? Transaction costs compound. Risk avoidance becomes rational. Even institutions never targeted modify behavior.
Program capacity strain. Workforce Pell expansion is potentially transformative, if program quality and administrative capacity materialize. But apprenticeship growth appears to have stalled (up only 3% versus historical double-digit increases) amid Department of Labor office gutting. The policy architecture points one direction. Implementation capacity points another.
Geopolitical risk of openness. The rational question is where is risk actually concentrated? Most legitimate national security and research integrity concerns cluster in specific fields, labs, and data environments and not across all teaching and learning. A calibrated approach would tighten controls where they matter while protecting the openness that generates soft power and scientific advantage.
The Presidents’ Day Question
For higher education leaders, the practical conclusion is to recognize the pattern: The U.S. has entered another cycle where universities are simultaneously asset and adversary.
What distinguishes this cycle is methodological. Previous administrations fought over budgets, regulations, and campus controversies. This one is deploying system levers, like accreditation, settlements, compliance regimes, finance architecture that can reshape institutional incentives rapidly and unevenly.
Presidents have battled universities before. Americans have argued about value before. What’s newer is the coordination and intensity of governance tools designed to bypass traditional policymaking friction.
The Presidents’ Day question worth posing is: Are we optimizing for short-term control and symbolic victories at the expense of long-term national advantage?
Because the long game of American higher education has never been only about campuses or degrees. It’s been about remaining the place the world’s talent chooses. Where discovery becomes industry. Where influence compounds through attraction, not coercion.
That advantage isn’t permanent. It’s contingent. And like any complex system, it can tip faster than anyone expects, especially when the people operating the levers don’t fully understand what they’re optimizing against.
