The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has aggressive legal action underway targeting state higher education systems over policies that grant in-state tuition for illegal aliens.

The DOJ argues that offering reduced tuition rates to non-citizens—while requiring out-of-state U.S. citizens to pay significantly higher fees—violates federal immigration law and unconstitutionally discriminates against American citizens.

At the center of the lawsuits is Section 1623 of the federal Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). Under federal statutory law, individuals who are not lawfully present in the U.S. are ineligible for postsecondary education benefits based on state residence, unless all U.S. citizens are granted the exact same benefit regardless of where they reside.

The DOJ contends that workarounds used by states—such as tying in-state tuition eligibility to local high school attendance or graduation rather than explicit legal residency—circumvent federal law. As a result, out-of-state American citizens are charged double or triple the tuition rates offered to undocumented students attending the same institutions.

The federal campaign has escalated rapidly, with the DOJ filing lawsuits against at least 20 states across the country:

The DOJ has already secured favorable court orders, settlements, or consent decrees halting or restricting in-state tuition policies in Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Illinois. In Texas, the state quickly settled to block its long-standing statewide policy. In addition to these states, suits have been filed against California, Virginia, New Jersey, Minnesota, Kansas, Massachusetts, Maryland, Colorado, Connecticut and Vermont. The suits are still pending with several contesting the charges and awaiting legal rulings from the courts.

This policy is an outgrowth of the DREAM Act enacted under President Obama and has given preferential financial treatment to illegal aliens above American citizens.

The Trump Administration has taken an aggressive stance on reforming education since taking office last year and has undone decades of educational policy that they felt were either harmful to students or unnecessary.

Depending on how much the affected states fight back, this issue may wind up in the Supreme Court for a final rendering.

This article was written with the assistance of Google Gemini.

According to a report by the Orange County Register, public school enrollment in California has dropped by over 300,000 students over the past six years—a sharp contraction fueled by declining birth rates, outward migration from high-cost living areas, and an increasing shift toward private schools and homeschooling options following the COVID-19 pandemic. Demographers project that this trend will only accelerate through the end of the decade, creating what education policy experts describe as an escalating “enrollment timebomb.”

For years, many California school districts managed to buffer the fiscal impact of missing students thanks to temporary state “hold-harmless” funding provisions and a massive influx of federal COVID-19 relief grants. However, with federal relief funds officially expiring and state emergency protections winding down, districts are now confronting the full weight of baseline state funding models, which strictly allocate revenue based on Average Daily Attendance (ADA).

When attendance drops, state funding decreases proportionately—yet school districts still face sticky fixed costs, including facility maintenance, administrator salaries, and growing pension liabilities. As a result, administrators across large urban and suburban districts are finding it impossible to balance budgets without making deep operational cuts.

Many school districts have already closed schools or merged campuses to deal with the enrollment drop. However, these steps fail to address the fact that this is a growing trend across most of California. More drastic measures will need to take place to align facility capacity with lower enrollment, which could force districts to pool resources to combat a problem that is not going away.

While some reasons for the decline are financial—as families relocate to less costly parts of the state or leave California altogether—the trend is compounded by a sharply falling birth rate, leaving districts with far too many facilities for a shrinking school-aged population.

California’s problems are exacerbated by the sheer size of its school-aged population. However, because birth rates are declining nationwide, similar “enrollment timebombs” are likely to detonate in school districts across the U.S. in the not-too-distant future.

Written with the assistance of Google Gemini

While the university’s official statement framed the transition as a personal decision to return to full-time teaching and research, inside sources and institutional observers point to the intense scrutiny surrounding the recent Capitol Hill testimony. During the panel hearing, lawmakers aggressively questioned law school leaders regarding institutional spending, admissions practices, and the integration of DEI criteria into faculty hiring and student programming.

The abrupt exit underscores an escalating conflict between federal lawmakers, university boards, and administrative staff across the country. Over the past year, legislative committees have intensified their focus on public and private institutions, evaluating whether campus DEI frameworks comply with legal standards and federal funding requirements.

“The University remains fully committed to continuing to provide our law students with an excellent legal education at Penn State Dickinson Law at our primary location in Carlisle and at University Park,” said Penn State Executive Vice President and Provost Fotis Sotiropoulos.

The school announced Friday that Danielle M. Conway had stepped down as dean effective immediately, two days after a former Penn State Dickinson Law student testified during congressional hearings accusing the dean and school of “ideological coercion.”

The Trump administration has made eliminating DEI in colleges and universities a top priority, with many schools eliminating or renaming their DEI offices in order to comply and keep federal money flowing.

This article was written with the assistance of Google Gemini

One example of the politicking that occurred at the meeting was Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, who is not only running for reelection but also auditioning for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. In a speech that barely mentioned education, his preferred target was the Trump administration, which has dealt major blows to union power over the last 18 months.

An example of Moore’s attack on the Trump administration is highlighted in the following excerpt from his speech:

“Because we are watching how, in this moment, a federal administration is trying to disenfranchise Americans under the guise of making America great again. We are seeing how we have politicians who are trying to ban books. We have a president and a vice president who seem to be hell-bent on weakening unions, and they are trying to make the pain that they are causing permanent.

It’s been one year since Donald Trump and JD Vance got their so-called Big Beautiful Bill across the finish line. And I’ll say this: If you’re a billionaire, congratulations. You got your bill. If you’re a billionaire, you had a great year. But if you are a working family, if you are a senior, if you are a student or an educator—you got hosed by this bill.

Donald Trump and JD Vance cut Medicaid deeper than it’s ever been cut in the history of the program. In Maryland, in our state, close to 200,000 of my people could lose their health care for nothing. And our rural hospitals stand to lose a quarter of a billion dollars.

Donald Trump and JD Vance cut food assistance—as if hungry kids learn better.

And buried inside that bill is a tax scheme that takes public funding and steers it towards private schools.

So there is a real and a justified anxiety in this country, and there’s a real and a justified anger in this country.”

Moore chose to hit broad, hot-button political issues even if they were not directly related to education. While he tossed in a couple of brief claims—tying food assistance cuts to poor student performance and alleging a “scheme” to steer public funds toward private schools—he provided no facts to back up his charges.

Furthermore, Moore failed to note the strong public demand for alternatives to the traditional public school system. Democrats who control Maryland’s legislature consistently side with teachers unions to protect union monopolies at the direct expense of students. Meanwhile, property taxes—which have been rising steeply in Maryland—continue to fund expanding school budgets even as overall student enrollment declines.

Educators should be putting the interests of students first. Instead, students remain caught in the death grip of teachers unions and chronic underperformance.

The approval marks a sudden reversal for the board. When administrators initially introduced the software, board members spent over an hour debating the merits of utilizing a digital curriculum to evaluate children’s social and emotional health, ultimately delaying the vote due to internal pushback. Yet, just one month later—and with minimal public dialogue—the board shifted its stance and authorized the purchase.

The decision comes at a time when local families are increasingly vocal about the volume of school-related screen time. During initial deliberations, board member Blair Mosner Feltham highlighted these apprehensions, questioning the sheer number of digital tools kids interact with daily. Feltham noted the inherent contradiction of asking children to input deeply personal feelings into a computer simply to transform their raw emotions into aggregated data points for the district.

District officials defended the decision by claiming a standardized social-emotional learning curriculum was necessary across Madison’s 32 elementary schools. Out of 14 competing bids evaluated by an 18-member review panel, the district selected the California-based vendor. Its pricing package ranked as the eighth most expensive submission, with competing quotes climbing as high as $1.6 million.

Sown to Grow, which currently operates in schools across 40 states, requires students to log in, select an emotional emoji, and write a brief reflection about their week. The software utilizes machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to automatically scan responses and flag “concerning” language. These flagged entries are reportedly checked by trained specialists before alerts are pushed to classroom teachers. The company states that it strips personal identifiers from student data to provide broad trend tracking for district leadership.

Nevertheless, the program continues to draw skepticism from parents. Amy Martino, a mother of two students at Thoreau Elementary and co-founder of the local advocacy group Parent Check on Tech, expressed immediate worry upon learning about the platform’s adoption, illustrating a widening rift between administrative tech reliance and parental oversight.

The skepticism voiced by these board members and parents is well-founded. Beyond the unnecessary screen time, the program utilizes emojis to categorize complex feelings for children who are far too young to accurately express themselves in writing—especially compared to a conversation with a real human being.

This platform is yet another example of how progressive administrators have abdicated their fundamental responsibilities to the children in their charge. The likely outcome is the production of a generation of socially and emotionally dependent students who will struggle to function in the real world.

Whatever happened to allowing children to grow up without these intrusive, “touchy-feely” administrative programs, letting them get their emotional and social needs met where they belong: from their parents and families?

*This article was written with the assistance of Google Gemini.

According to preliminary estimates for the 2025–2026 academic year, the average institutional tuition discount rate for first-time, full-time undergraduates reached 57.1 percent. That’s up from 54.5 percent in the previous year and marks the highest point in the last ten years. For all undergraduates combined, the discount rate climbed to 51.3 percent.

While a 57.1 percent discount sounds like a win for families looking at college affordability, it masks a structural crisis within university administration. The reality is that colleges are caught in a hyper-competitive arms race. With the impending demographic cliff—a shrinking pool of high school graduates—institutions are forced to offer massive financial incentives to entice applicants.

An estimated 90 percent of first-time undergraduates received some form of institutional aid this year. Yet despite these aggressive price cuts, baseline student enrollment across participating institutions has remained flat. Colleges aren’t actually growing their student bodies; they are simply paying significantly more per student just to maintain their current class sizes.

The NACUBO report reveals that after adjusting for inflation, average net tuition revenue from all undergraduates fell by 1.9 percent. For first-time students, it fell even sharper, at 2.2 percent.

To survive, independent colleges have attempted to improve retention and graduation rates to offset freshman recruitment losses. However, as NACUBO itself noted, “retention alone is not enough to eliminate financial strain at many tuition-dependent institutions.”

The report underscores the fallacy that tuition is based on what it costs an institution to educate students, as well as the actual value of an education. This trend has been driven by the student loan racket, which has made borrowing to fund a degree all too easy and allowed colleges and universities to ratchet up tuition since they get paid even if the student defaults on the loan. Tuition costs have become equated with the quality of the education received, when in actuality, they were just funding a bloated administrative structure that is now coming home to roost.

In a defiant follow-up video, Hesham—a member of the local Palestinian Youth Movement—remained unapologetic about violating the campus policy.

“This small act that I took waving the Palestinian flag, and the repression that followed it, is a small example of the UC system’s wider complicity toward the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” he stated. “I’m demanding that UC Berkeley cuts ties with genocide, cuts ties with companies that are fueling this ongoing genocide.”

Predictably, the incident sparked a viral wave of online outrage from progressive activists, who claimed the move was an act of targeted political censorship. Yet the reality of the situation points to standard, content-neutral rule enforcement. UC Berkeley’s official, pre-published commencement guidelines explicitly list banners, signs, and flags as prohibited items within its graduation venues to prevent views from being obscured and ceremonies from being derailed. The Executive Vice Chancellor’s office had previously issued reminders reinforcing that while students may wear identity-based regalia, carrying large, disruptive objects onto the stage violates university policy.

We commend the UC Berkeley administrators for firmly enforcing their policy. At a time when universities nationwide are facing heavy scrutiny for allowing their campuses to be turned into pro-Palestinian activism camps following the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, seeing Berkeley stand behind its policies instead of caving into the left is a welcome change.

To stem the bleeding immediately, the administration has instituted an immediate hiring freeze, halted pay adjustments, and capped nonessential travel.

The immediate catalyst for this latest emergency is a projected, significant drop in incoming out-of-state freshman enrollment. In UO’s case tuition accounts for roughly 80% of its Education and General Fund, with high out-of-state tuition fees heavily subsidizing in-state students to prop up university operations. Nonresident students make up nearly half the student body, meaning even a minor dip in their numbers triggers an outsized financial earthquake.

President Scholz listed various macro-level excuses for the decline, including “demographic shifts,” economic uncertainty, and a “declining trust” in public higher education. These shifts however didn’t just spring up overnight but have been developing for years going back to at least 2020 when Covid changed attitudes about the value of a college education and the explosion of online learning.

The administration ignored these real-world issues and like many colleges and universities continued to operate as if nothing changed. Like most other schools UO suffers from rampant administrative bloat. While specialized administrative offices and non-academic bureaucracies have expanded, the core academic mission has shrunk. Rather than trimming the top-heavy administrative state, the university’s first instinct in past crises has been to target faculty lines and look at eliminating legacy academic programs like classics, religious studies, and German.

The cutback in academic programs is not necessarily a bad thing as enrollment shrinks, but ignoring the administrative bloat is and UO appears to be blind when it comes down to the best ways to trim a bloated budget much to its own peril. If they don’t get a handle on this, these budget cuts will not be last.