55% of Fordham Students Are About to Lose Financial Aid
The “One Big Beautiful Spending Bill” will gut Pell Grants, student loans, and destroy higher education at colleges across the country, but for what?
Author’s Note:
Congress has already passed the One Big Beautiful Spending Bill/H.R.1 - One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a spending bill that, in addition to impacting Medicare and Social Security, would gut federal student aid and put millions of students at risk. According the university, at Fordham University, my university, over 55% of the student body will have their aid negatively impacted. Nearly 3,000 students at Fordham rely on Pell Grants, and most would see their awards cut or eliminated. The fight around this bill has now moved to the Senate, and is expected to proceed by July 4th.
Whether you're registered to vote in Fordham, the Bronx, or elsewhere in New York City, or anywhere else in the country, I urge you to contact your U.S. Senators and ask them to reject cuts to Pell Grants and federal student loans. This isn’t abstract; this is not, nor should it be, a right-wing or a left-wing issue; this is directly affecting your aid money, your wallet, and your family’s financial future. Thousands of your dollars are at stake.
Expect a statement from the university in the next few days.
Find your Senators: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
If I were an agent of a foreign power tasked with dismantling American educational hegemony, I couldn't have designed a better strategy than what the Trump administration is currently implementing on our current world-class system of higher education. By systematically attacking the very foundations of America's global advantage in research and development, its universities, and their procurement of the best and brightest of international talent, President Trump’s administration is essentially doing our adversaries' work for them. At my university(Fordham University), over 55% of students would be negatively impacted by the proposed changes. Nearly 3,000 Fordham students rely on Pell Grants, and most would see their awards reduced or eliminated altogether. These cuts will inevitably raise withdrawal rates, which will have grim results for both our school’s funding structure and, especially, the lives of University students across the country, particularly those from income levels most at risk from these cuts. These are students who attend colleges across the country, all while trying to balance tuition, rent, and jobs in a city that’s already unaffordable. It’s not just financial aid at stake; it’s $93 million in lost opportunity from just one school alone, and it’s not as if we’re special or uniquely in this attack.
If you have a vested interest in the continued dominance of American education or, alternatively, care about education at all, the numbers should tell you a devastating story. Nationwide, 7 million undergraduates rely on Pell Grants. These are students from every region and walk of life, many of them first-generation and working-class; these are your friends and mine. The cuts don’t just risk debt; they risk wiping out college access altogether for an entire tier of the American population, which includes some of the nation’s brightest minds, people you love and work alongside, people who would not be able to attend higher education without this grant. The National Science Foundation, which funds the fundamental research that underpins America's technological supremacy, is operating at its lowest funding level in decades. Grant funding has plummeted by 51% compared to the 2015-2024 average, falling from $2 billion to just $989 million. At Fordham, we've already felt this assault firsthand: for example, in the past few months, Fordham President Tetlow announced the termination of our $60 million EPA grant for environmental projects, with official documents from the university stating that "the objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.” To date, Fordham has lost approximately $600,000 in federal research grants, and yet, for all the hand-wringing about whether college is “worth it,” the data remains clear. Students at Fordham who received Pell support earn over $66,000 on average within seven months of graduation. These grants are not just helping students; they’re delivering positive results for us. However, sadly, I would be shocked to see if the Trump administration’s delusional approach to higher education will halt at this or stop, at what will be impacted by the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
This isn't just about money or the ability of our nation’s universities to support our military’s R&D; it's about the future of American innovation in its entirety, especially as the Trump administration so desperately wants to move industry “back” to our shores. So, when physics funding drops by 85% and materials research by 63%, we're not just cutting budgets; we're surrendering our competitive edge in education to Europe, to China, and to whoever else, for little to no benefit to ourselves, while mostly at the detriment of our own country.
Many of these attacks on education by the current Federal Government largely center on the topic of immigration. In line with this, a recent masterstroke of paranoid destruction has come from the continued attacks on our country’s international students. Trump's recent decision to attempt to bar Harvard from enrolling international students represents perhaps the most shortsighted policy in modern American history. For decades, America's universities have served as talent magnets, drawing the world's brightest minds to our shores. At schools across the country and at Fordham, we've seen preliminary glimpses of this gross milieu of policy in action: several Fordham international students have received visa revocation notices, and the University administration has had to issue a warning that leaving the U.S. could result in an inability to return. This is unnecessary fear.
International students are not just our friends and peers; they not only make a massive impact on our personal lives, but they also have an incredible impact on our country. According to the National Foundation for American Policy, nearly two-thirds of the American billion-dollar startup companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Outside of some overt racial justifications for these policies(you all know what I mean by this), the right-wing argument against foreign college enrollment seems to center on the narrative that immigrants will go to the U.S. for school and then leave to “only” benefit their home countries with the knowledge they’ve, but this is obviously shortsighted. Even those who eventually return home still carry a soft power dividend. A survey of over 1,000 international students (spanning 43 countries) found that 52% said their view of the U.S. improved since enrolling here. Internationally, studies show that foreign graduates of American universities often return as business partners, investors, or allies, deepening trade and innovation ties with the U.S. Why would we squander this opportunity?
The Trump administration's frail justifications for these moves reveal the sheer cynical nature of this “project.” For instance, the Trump administration and large segments of the American right have chosen to weaponize some of the genuine concerns about the rise of anti-antisemitism on college campuses in order to enact deportations and detentions of “political dissidents.” In doing so, Trump and his allies have created a smokescreen and a loose justification for what is essentially a wholesale assault on the academic freedom and institutional independence of higher education. As a group of Jewish students from targeted universities wrote in the Jewish American publication The Forward,
“Trump's plans offer us no comment” and represent “an abject failure” in protecting Jewish students. Instead, the administration exploits "genuine fears of antisemitism to press its own ideological agenda."
https://forward.com/opinion/721870/jewish-students-universities-trump-antisemitism/
This policy is built on a conflation that deliberately obscures the crucial distinction between legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies, including its actions in Gaza that many scholars and international bodies have characterized as genocidal, and actual antisemitism. At this point in the conflict, I doubt anyone’s position on it will be changed by this article. Still, I believe it is an exercise in anti-intellectualism to disagree with the assertion that Anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel's Government and military actions are political positions, and that those political positions are not inherently expressions of hatred toward Jewish people in total.
The targeting of pro-Palestinian protesters for deportation, including students like Mahmood Kalil, who ICE disappeared in front of his pregnant wife for involvement in First Amendment-protected pro-Palestinian protests, epitomizes this dangerous conflation. When students can be detained and deported for expressing political opinions or writing op-eds about American foreign policy, we've abandoned the very principles of not only what made American universities attractive to global talent, but also the values of our country’s founding. The blame is not only with the federal government but also with universities like Columbia, which refused to protect their students like Kalil, who was shipped away to a detention facility in Louisiana with no warning, missing the birth of his firstborn child. The targeting of individual students sends a chilling message to all international scholars: America is no longer a safe haven for free inquiry, nor is it a place for free speech. It’s a policy that doesn’t just repel global talent, it squanders and silences our greatest minds, pushing away the very people who would contribute breakthroughs in academia, in medicine, climate work, tech, and even (more cynically) American business interests.
In line with how ridiculous this policy is, I’ll also include a brief, heightened, but real example:
Xi Mingze, the only child of Chinese President Xi Jinping, chose to attend Harvard and has reportedly continued to live in Massachusetts since. That fact alone speaks to the unmatched soft power of American higher education. And yet, figures close to the Trump movement, like right-wing “commentator” Lara Loomer, have now begun calling for her deportation, not based on security risks, but on the political spectacle of the act. That kind of rhetoric doesn’t just drive away international students; it signals to the world that education in the U.S. is conditional on ideological conformity. I have no idea why no one in Trumpworld is able to fathom appreciating the level of soft power required to have the only child of the leader of the United States’ competing superpower choosing to go to school in the US and stay here after.
Another Harvard alum, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who’s hardly the “radical leftist” the right associates with academia, wrote in a recent New York Times essay, “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” about the dangers of the Trump admin’s current approach. Despite Pinker’s own criticisms of Harvard, even he recognizes that the university “has made the world a better place" through innovations ranging from the programmable computer to oral rehydration therapy that has "saved tens of millions of lives." Cutting federal grants to such institutions doesn't just hurt America; it actively benefits our competitors, such as China, which Trump claims to want to combat.
As for where the United States is heading, I think you will start hearing the phrase “Brain Drain” a lot more in the following months.
Brain drain is defined as the emigration of highly skilled and educated professionals from one country to another, and it has begun to accelerate in the United States. As The Century Foundation reports, over 75% of U.S.-based scientists are considering leaving the country due to recent policy changes. Meanwhile, America’s academic competitors are rolling out the red carpet. In response to the U.S., the French Government launched its "Choose France for Science" initiative, Belgium's universities opened funded positions for American scholars, and the Netherlands established targeted funds to recruit fleeing researchers. Meanwhile, China has increased its science spending by 10% this year, compared to our… decrease.
For Fordham, and most schools, the “university’s response” demonstrates both the courage and the innate fragility of any institutional “resistance.” Fordham President Tetlow did join Harvard's Alan Garber and over 200 university presidents in signing "A Call for Constructive Engagement," condemning the
"Unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.”
The short letter, which I recommend you read (imperfect as it may be), calls for constructive engagement while rejecting "the coercive use of public research funding” by the Trump administration. However, Fordham's experience also shows our administration's reach and the ways they are fighting. Fordham’s Faculty Senate passed a resolution to protect academic freedom, and the university joined an amicus brief challenging these attacks. Yet even with these “defensive measures,” we’re still in so many areas at the behest of the federal government, and Fordham’s still lost substantial funding and is facing ongoing uncertainty about visa revocations for our international community. At the end of the day, all of this “resistance” (and I guess this article too) is just letters, it’s just words, not lawsuits or direct action.
The Trump administration's defenders might argue these policies are about national security or protecting American students/workers. But this logic is backwards. America's growth in power and prominence post-WW2 never came from isolating ourselves; it came from our ability to further attract and integrate the world's economy and its best minds and partners into our system. While I personally might not have any interest in a new great power struggle or a new Cold War, Trump and his Republican cadres do. So when Chinese graduate students, for instance, can't or are scared to study quantum computing at American universities(and give a lot to the American economy while doing so), they don't just “disappear into the wind;” they’ll just study in Beijing or Hangzhou instead, building capabilities that will compete against the United States instead of for the United States.
What makes this particularly tragic is how unnecessary it all is. From the perspective of any political project involving them, American Universities are complex institutions that can and should more readily be reformed through targeted improvements rather than wholesale destruction. However, Trump's approach isn't about reform; it's about control and ideological conformity to a system and thought riddled with short-sighted stupidity. If I were designing a strategy to end American technological dominance, I too would defund basic research, expel international talent, and create an atmosphere of fear in academic institutions; I would use culture war rhetoric to disguise this demolition as symbolic of my distorted view of patriotism. In other words, I would do exactly what the Trump administration is doing.
Our competitors must be delighted. America is voluntarily dismantling one of the most important nodes of the system that made it a superpower, our educational prowess. Calling any of this "America First" is a delusion. New York State has already witnessed the closure of 10 private colleges in the past two years. With the proposed federal aid cuts, many more institutions, especially those serving low-income students, could and will likely face a similar fate. For those of us at universities like Fordham, watching federal grants disappear and international students receive deportation threats, as several of our students have already faced. The reality is clear: this isn't America First, it's America last, and for little reason, and everyone else besides Trump and those unwaveringly loyal to this policy knows it.
The House has already passed these extreme cuts to student financial aid. The U.S. Senate is now the last line of defense. Call your U.S. Senators today and urge them to reject this act before it comes to the floor by June 4th.
Senate Switchboard: +1(202) 224-3121
Email your Senators: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
Well said, Drew.