MIT rejected the offer while the other 8 universities are still considering it.
President Donald Trump recently softened his hardline approach to higher education, offering financial incentives to nine universities if they promise to eliminate preferential treatment by race, enhance viewpoint diversity, and freeze tuition for five years.
This is a pivot from the previous heated exchanges with elite schools that lost federal funding following investigations into campus anti-Semitism and Civil Rights violations rooted in left-leaning policies.
Those episodes yielded mixed results, with some schools agreeing to the Trump administration’s demands and others challenging them in federal court.
The Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, offered by the Department of Education to a mix of public and private universities earlier this month, could become the industry standard for all U.S. colleges and universities, say policy experts.
In exchange for more consideration in the competitive federal grant process and more leeway for overhead costs in research funding, the schools would limit the enrollment of undergraduate international students to 15 percent, freeze tuition rates for five years, ban racial preferences in hiring and admissions, require SAT scores in the student application process, and maintain institutional neutrality on political issues at all levels of administration.
It also requires schools to post average earnings from graduates in each program and refund tuition to undergraduates who drop out during their first semester.
Universities with endowments that equate to more than $2 million per student must provide free tuition to undergraduate candidates pursuing “hard science” programs, and institutions that enter this compact must accept all college transfer credits from military members or veterans.
“These are the best practices,” Matthew Beienburg, education policy director at the Goldwater Institute, told The Epoch Times. “It’s an indictment that higher education has strayed so far from its mission.”
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has rejected the offer, while the other schools are still considering it.
Here’s what we know.
