My oldest will be starting high school later this year, so we're still a few years out from college. But we've been pushing the idea pretty hard that if they do want to go to college, it will be out of the country. And doubly so now because of the capitulation of universities to this administration.

College campuses are not safe places to be at this point. I don't trust any of them to act in their student's best interests.

Not a parent of a college age kiddo but I work for a major public university. The absolute stress that I see on undergrads is WAY higher than it was a decade ago. We're talking stress to get into college, stress to perform while in college, and stress that the degree won't financially "pay off" when they finish. These are the years where many of us become adults, make the friends that become our support group, meet our partners/spouses......and a LOT of these kids are completely missing out.

My twins are graduating from high school in two months, and this is top of mind for me. We're thinking a local community college next year, and then see where things are at. Maybe the whole fam moves out of the country??? IDK.

I've got a kid a couple years out from university. A U.S. school could have been a possibility for her, as she's a dual citizen and both of us went to U.S. universities. We'd been leaning against it, because Canadian schools are very strong globally and more reasonably priced. It's a definite no-go now, though. I don't think she'd have any idea how to even navigate a political climate like the U.S. -- for example, Indigenous studies are a core part of the elementary / high school curriculum here and the schools are much more open to various genders and sexualities.

My daughter is still 10 years away from college but we have always told her that is part of the plan (for all the reasons Jason mentions).

It is so sad/scary to see what the Trump admin is doing to colleges. The US university system is the envy of the world -- and we will destroy it for what? Because some disagree with what research comes out? Or that kids experience diversity and become "woke"?

Or is this a concerted effort to destroy our future? Only a traitor would destroy one of America's greatest assets.

I have one kid entering college this fall and one a few years away

As you know, same.

We're plowing ahead, but, yeah, it's a tremendous amount of anxiety. All of this depends on a functioning student loan department, FAFSA, etc, to help with costs, setting aside what's happening with broader funding (especially for research universities) and crackdowns on campuses. The stakes were already so high at the start of this school year, and layering in chaos and unpredictability just amps things up further.

And a big part of what we're paying for is the community, not just the credential. Bridging the gap between living at home and being independent, being part of a community, is what it's about. We all know college costs have outpaced inflation since you or I went to college (a few years apart, in the nineties), and I cringe at paying this much for "an experience," so we're already setting the tone that this is an investment, but now we're getting into anti-experience territory.

Avoiding getting in trouble is a next-level concern now. There will be more conversations about social media and surveillance and technology and not getting caught up in things. All that said, I think a liberal arts education is as critical as ever for our, and their, futures.

My eldest is a high school freshman. They're nonbinary and disabled, they care passionately about social justice and improving the human condition, and they want to become a doctor, either in general practice or in epidemiology. It's becoming more and more clear that both their identity and their intended field are at profound risk here. So many of their plans, our plans, are being shattered, and it absolutely breaks my heart. We've started talking about how supports and school would work in other countries--and we've also started talking about whether we will all need to get out sooner, but we're not wealthy and may not be able to. I want my children to have both the opportunities and experiences associated with a college education, but the system remade to Trump's demand will not in this, as in all other areas of life, accommodate or tolerate people like us. Being a single parent means I really can't give in to despair but it gets hard some days.

During the pandemic, I remember sitting at home with my kids while they were doing online (K-12) school and I was doing online work and thinking that the whole pyramid was collapsing. Kindergarteners learning to read, college freshmen in their first lecture, product owners managers in a scrum meeting--it was all a Zoom meeting. Depressing. I think overall that virtual learning and virtual meetings are a benefit and that their usage will skyrocket to the point where the idea of the "traditional" college education could be obsolete. On the other hand, there is a HUGE demand for the college experience and a college degree. Trump can't wholly reverse supply and demand here.

Our oldest is a sophomore in college. Our middle is going next year to the same liberal arts college. How cool! College is working as intended. Our daughter is working hard, learning a ton, learning to be friends with all kinds of people, managing a busy schedule, having fun, and dancing with adulthood. It's amazing to watch.

College is actually a pretty great example of how politics doesn't understand the world. Teachers are still working hard to create educated students. Teaching them to learn, to be curious, to communicate better, to understand. They're also teaching them the facts of history and English and biology and coding. Yes, their students identities are topics. Yes, they worry about Palestine. But, the teachers worry about the dissemination of education more than anything.

And, the students, too. They're living their college lives.

Our oldest is a high school senior and I'm definitely worried about what their experience will be like. Their school choices are all public universities in blue states, and thus likely to be disproportionately targeted by Trump, but maybe somewhat protected by their state governments?

We've talked a lot as a family about moving out of the country, but there are a number of challenges with uprooting four teenagers. But depending on how the next few years go we might encourage the kids towards international universities and make it work.

I'm a college professor and have a son who is off to graduate school in the fall (assuming that his acceptance isn't pulled) and a daughter who is off to college also in the fall. I'm sad and angry in ways that are almost too strong for me to think about given what is happening. There is literally nothing that the administration is doing that will make the world better in any way shape or form, and uncountable ways that it will make the world worse. I anticipate that many schools will simply close down in the coming years and many others will see dramatic cuts. I hope that my own kids can finish their educations while their schools are still relatively intact, but I fear the speed at which it is happening.

Here's the snapshot of What Is right now, understanding that things change:

My twin sons currently attend private universities on the west coast. One is a junior at a mid-sized Jesuit school in LA, and currently studying in Spain, the other is a sophomore (took a gap year) at a small liberal arts school in the PNW. They're both liberal arts majors--no STEM other than requirements to graduate. College continues to work out for them as I'd hoped--they're learning a lot and broadening their horizons, they've both made some faculty connections and they've each cultivated some great friendships. On top of it all, I get to live vicariously thru one of my kids' weekly radio show. (My Big 10 university radio station was super competitive.)

I’m a faculty member and to say my students are afraid and anxious is an understatement. Not all of them, mind you, but many. And exactly the populations you’d expect to be feeling most vulnerable. Grad student recruitment is already being heavily impacted this coming fall (who will be willing to live where and with what support), an undergrads will be next year. But I will say, there are so many faculty and staff working and worrying day and night about how to preserve the best of higher ed and help our students in the face of willful, destructive threats and attacks, it’s what keeps me getting up every morning.

Patrick Rhone wrote down some thoughts after touring a dozen or so colleges:

I'm unsure what to make of it all. I'm hoping that someone would just be honest with us about the whole thing. I'd love to walk into a info session and have the Associate Director of Admissions get up at the podium and say, "Everything I would normally tell you in the next hour is likely no longer applicable and we have no idea about our very future as an institution let alone anything about your young person's."

I feel like I'm being gaslit by the entire process.

I'm begging for someone brave enough to admit the truth of not knowing and bold enough to say it and to recognize the challenges that face my kid and so many others.

Like one of your commenters, I have twins going into college this fall. They are making their selections in the next few weeks, but we're definitely leaning and pushing them towards going international. London and Canada. But we'll see. This anti-intellectualism and anti-college behavior in the administration worries me.

I'm a UC Berkeley graduate and feel strongly that students need to be exposed to a diversity of ideas and feel unburdened by government oversight. I was there during the apartheid protests and it made a big impact on me.

On a slightly adjacent topic, my dad, who lived through the Holocaust and was in a concentration camp, started to get worried about our country during 9/11. He saw the flag waving as a prelude to nationalism and worse. I thought he was overreacting, but boy was he on to something.

My oldest is wrapping up her second year at a college in British Columbia - after living in constant dread of a school shooting throughout high school (we live in the Denver area), she was eager to get out of the country.

The university she's attending costs about the same as in-state tuition at CU Boulder, so while dealing with currency exchange/visits/shipping care packages is a pain, financially it's a wash. Tuition at several colleges we've looked at in Ireland and Scotland are comparable.

My middle kid is starting high school in the fall, and my youngest is two years behind them. I'm going to encourage both of them to apply to as many colleges abroad as possible.

When my oldest graduates, she gets a couple years after her graduation to seek permanent residence in Canada, and I hope fervently she takes the opportunity. (Bonus: my wife and I can visit for loooong periods once the nest is empty.)

With any luck, any grandkids I might eventually have will be born in some other country. I'll also understand if my kids never have any kids of their own, given the state of things.

My friend's kid is currently abroad getting their master's and, being trans, hopes to stay there (or really anywhere but the US) once they graduate.

I am a tenured Professor at a small, Jesuit Liberal Arts university. We are part of a network of 28 Jesuit schools in the United States that have as our remit commitments to educating the whole person, and commitments to social justice (in the best sense of the word). Our universities- which include Georgetown and Boston College as the research figureheads of our network - are working hard to educate ourselves and out students about the lines between academic freedom (for scholars) and codes of conduct (that regulate student behavior in community), both of which are necessary for robust dialogue and learning. We are also using our commitments to support members of our communities marginalized by the unfolding policies of the Administration that affect our environment. These include things like educating faculty and staff about institutional procedures for responding to warrants, understanding the law around FERPA (which protects all student information, regardless of citizenship and visa status), providing as much access to supportive resources in the academic community and our partnerships in the community, and most importantly, communicating what we know to students in a humane and supportive way.

Faculty and staff at Jesuit schools are not uniformly Catholic or folks adhering to faith traditions (but are small-c catholic) and so the impetus for our work comes from our commitment to a just and humane world. There are institutions out there that are doing the work to uphold academia and its robust forms of dialogue and critique as a way of coping with the moment; I happen to believe that I teach at one of these.

That said, there are concerns shared by all of us - visible targets or relatively invisible institutions - like concerns about financial aid and the downstream effects of shuttering the DOE. State budgets take on an outsized importance, especially for state schools. Research funding has enormous impacts, to be sure, and larger schools will feel this more acutely than smaller schools - but we will all feel it. Economic pressures are inviting administrators to abandon full-time faculty for contingent adjunct instructors (though this is nothing new). Outright silencing and disappearing of individuals with contrary views is a new threat that everyone should be concerned about, on college campuses or not.

In the midst of these macro pressures, at the everyday level we are still showing up, still working to help young folks discern their way toward adulthood, and offering the best tools we can for meeting this moment with courage and care.

I have a high school freshman who just realized the other day that her high school experience is almost one-quarter complete, we live in a small college town, and I am non-tenure track at the flagship state university, so thinking about this in all sorts of ways. Those lenses in reverse order:

As faculty, my undergraduate students are increasingly unconcerned with the idea of expanding themselves, becoming a complete person, or doing anything other than getting a credential that will then make them money. In my intro undergrad class, one of the early assignments is a personal values assessment and a disturbing number of them list "Making money" as one of their top five most important values, above "gaining wisdom, "respect," "creating beauty," or "building something." The idea of being challenged and needing to work through ambiguity seems absent from their educational experience so far and utterly repellent as an educational practice now. There are, obviously, exceptions, and it is likely that my course skews toward those students for a range of reasons, but it is incredibly disheartening to read that from them.

My grad students are an entirely different breed. They are engaged, passionate, questioning, want to challenge and be challenged. Ours is not a research-focused MA program, and it attracts all kinds of students. The ones fresh out of undergrad are just as curious as the ones who are 50 years old and coming back to school (and everyone once in a while, there's a 50 year old fresh out of undergrad too!) I look forward to meeting with them in class and working with them individually. I hope that the undergrads are responding to external pressures and will, in time, develop into the sort of people/minds/spirits our grad students represent.

As a townie in a small-college town, I'm really worried. Our local university is now run by a Koch-appointee, who has taken the sort of chainsaw to academic freedom and faculty governance that is the dream of autocrats everywhere. He did so because enrollment was falling; it has continued to plummet. He has threatened to use his allies in the state legislature to take over the local tech college (like his own personal Greenland), despite/because of its ongoing success. Should someone criticize him in town, they will be warned about the need to speak quietly, even if they have no connection to the university. Enrollment is going to continue to fall, the campus will likely be turned into a satellite of a larger institution, and the town will be the worse off for it.

As a parent, I'm terrified. One serious risk is changing enforcement of Title IX, including procedures for sexual assault allegations on campus (and since they targeted these in the first admin, they are pretty sure to do so again now, or they'll just give up enforcement altogether with the abandonment of the Dept. of Ed). I've never wanted my daughter to go to a big university for undergrad. The admin's goal of targeting "whales" now gives additional weight to that advice. They've explicitly said they're going to make examples of universities with big endowments. It seems likely that smaller institutions, both public ones that will have state-level protections and private ones with religious/philosophical commitments toward protection, will be safer. They're less likely to be targeted for enforcement actions and more likely to be able/willing to keep students safe. Of course, we're talking about starting college right before the next presidential election (I mean, if we have one at all), so a gap year might be the safer choice anyway. She's done one on-campus camp, has another planned for this summer, and we're going to do some preliminary visits this summer as well, so I'm going to be very curious what admissions folks say before and after they find out where I work.

we just started our second kid's (hs jr) college tours last week, a variety of ivy/private/public, big and small schools to get her familiar with the differences, and like Patrick's experience, I kept feeling like we were whistling past the graveyard. The schools I'd expected to see leading the charge to protect students, academic freedom, and the college experience have been the quickest to cave, and the big public schools still touting their extensive research and many gov't-related internship opportunities (schools near DC) sounded positively delusional at the moment.

I feel like we could absolutely tank our kid's hopes and ambitions with a worst-case nihilistic take, but tbh, hearing about faculty and admin here in the thread who are working so hard gives me some reassurance that things don't have to be as dark as they seem right now. Schools that call the cops on their protesting students, or hand them over to ICE with a shrug, or don't support trans folks will not be on our list, but that's because our kid is taking them off before we even get to the discussion.

As a fifth-year PhD student in engineering, the mood is grim. I thought I'd done everything right, choosing a discipline that I cared about and also seemed to promise some amount of financial stability, and now right as I'm preparing to graduate the rug has been pulled from under me once again (graduated undergrad in 2020, ha). My university has instituted a hiring freeze on support staff, though (for now) postdocs and professors are still being hired. I'm very worried about the job market. I'd interned at NIST and thought I had a good in for a postdoc there, but it sounds like they're totally unable to hire people right now. I'm afraid the only jobs left for engineers in this country will be ones I'm not morally willing to take. Meanwhile international grad workers are getting kidnapped off the streets by ICE, and all our university leaders will do for us is publish general lawyerly advice. A year ago those same leaders were the ones calling the cops on us when we protested. We were already losing our academic freedom even before Trump's election, but it truly feels like us students are on our own now, protected only by each other and a handful of allied faculty and staff.

It's so interesting that you posted this today because I was thinking about this yesterday and I listened to This American Life this afternoon and thought about it some more (their episode was about Ranjani Srinivasan).

We're Canadian and live in Vancouver and have a grade 12 looking to university. She is a super-competent and high achieving kid who is on track to get a 41 in IB (International Baccalaureate) at her public school. She got in everywhere she applied (in Canada) and is making the decision in the next few days.

Yesterday she was saying to me that she regrets not applying to the Ivies - specifically Stanford - as her friends are getting in to them now. It's mostly about Ego and I called her out on that. But I also said that with everything going on in the US I would not have been ok (aka paid 🙂) for her to go.

When students on legal student visas are being held with no recourse in Louisiana or hiding from ICE; when the universities are capitulating instead of using their endowments; where if she was the victim of sexual assault or simply made a mistake she would be forced to find a very difficult solution rather than have a straightforward abortion… that is not a country I want her to live in. There are so many things that are scary right now (even or especially from Canada) but having my kid live in uncertainty is a fear too far for me.

I don't have a great sense of the landscape of US Universities, but in Canada Universities get a huge amount of revenue from International students. If they stop coming (and I'm sure I'm not the only parent in the world that is scared) and the research grants stop flowing - what happens then? I may be wrong - parents may send their kids and tell them to lay low and never be too loud or too argumentative or use social media or protest. Though it may, of course, be worth it depending on where you are from.

I hope that Universities stand up to Trump and give up their federal grants rather than capitulate. But they should expect very real retribution if they do and I understand that they may not have the luxury to ride out that vengeance.

My daughter is also going off to school in the fall (as an education major, no less). I honestly don't even know what to think. I want her to be positive and feel like she can change the world and all that good stuff. But she's smart... she sees what's going on. I remember imagining when she was a baby the day she'd be going off to college and this is definitely not how I pictured it. It's heartbreaking.

I teach high school seniors in a red state, and red state/blue state consideration is a huge part of the discussion. Multiple girls have said our state’s abortion restrictions are part of why they’re looking elsewhere. My trans students this year didn’t even apply for our automatic in-state scholarship. A large number of boys aren’t even considering college, despite having high grades and abilities.

My kid is a junior and we just went on our first college tours last week. We're looking at small liberal arts schools in the Northeast. There's no way in hell I would even consider looking at a school in a state that doesn't have abortion access. I'd like him to consider going to college in Canada - we are both dual-citizens - but he's against it. He doesn't want to move that far away, but I'm going to try to convince him to at least look.

We live a few blocks away from Columbia so I have had a front row seat to the protests and often have the noise of helicopters circling overhead as my work from home soundtrack. Very anxiety-inducing to listen to it all day. I can hear them now as I type this.

This generation of kids has had such a disrupted education experience - most of them were in middle school during covid and now they are entering college during the Trump administration's dismantling of higher education.

It's all really scary. But I still believe in the importance of the college experience and my hope (naive as it may be), despite it all, is that my kid can find a place where he feels like he can be himself while being pushed to try/learn/do new things and grow into an adult with his peers.

I'd like to provide encouragement for those here whose kids are considering international schools. Our eldest is graduating shortly from a fine research university in the Netherlands, and our younger (senior in high school) is deciding among a couple of UK schools. Our decisions to look internationally weren't specifically political -- had more to do with the kids' excitement to live and study abroad + parental delight that they could attend top-notch programs at *very affordable* tuition -- but as things get increasingly squirrely here, I can't say I mind shifting my draft-age boys out of the county.

I'm a fourth-year college student in Canada — while I've lived almost my entire life here and my whole family is Canadian, I was born in the States and have dual citizenship. I applied for masters programs this year and while I briefly considered studying in the US I immediately stopped looking after November 5th. I haven't regretted that choice once.

The work I do in undergrad and plan to do in graduate school is based in the biological sciences, and often deals with topics like infectious disease and climate change. I keep reading about grants (and graduate student stipends!) being mercilessly slashed over the last few months in the US and I deeply worry for the future of American sciences and the arts. If Canada is smart, we welcome American researchers with open arms over the next few years and make our country a sanctuary for higher education. I think, to some extent, this is already occurring — at least one American researcher/writer on fascism from Yale, Jason Stanley, has already made his move to the Canada and is quoted in a CBC article as saying that "The University of Toronto is poised and ready to take the place of American universities under attack, to be a world leader". I hope that this sentiment can be applied to the rest of Canada more broadly as a country as our faith in American freedom collapses.

I'm terrified. I have two kids going to college next year and the risk of being kidnaped and shipped off by the government is a real possibility and they will live 2 or 10 hours away. If that wasn't enough, sexual assault allegations are likely to be ignored and I'm sure this will be known by perpetrators. One's college has already had at least one professor investigated by feds and has disappeared. I know someone that had attended as well and there were snipers pointed at him during his talk at a protest. One current college students I've talked to said most of his friends are afraid to talk about how they're feeling, knowing the disability office and office of returning adults is likely to be gone next year, along with groups and resources for his LGBTQ friends that attend. I hope I can get my kids to Canada in time, before things get even worse.

This is excellent info. I have a HS Freshman and we had never even considered anything but a US university before this year. So much to think about now.

I seriously considered moving to Canada after Trump’s first election. But I read something that pointed out that we have all played a part in creating this situation - no matter how we voted. If we run away now and just let the US continue down this path unchallenged then no country will be safe in the end. This is our house and our mess to clean up. Unfortunately, the burden will likely also fall on our children’s shoulders. They’ve already handled Covid’s curveball so they know what it feels like to get an education even when it’s uncomfortable and scary. We can’t hold them back. Let’s arm them as best we can with information and empathy and have their backs as they move irrevocably forward.

It's unfortunate that we didn't have social media to record the thoughts and anxieties of the people who somehow managed to attended college during the Great Depression, WWII, and the Vietnam War.

Perhaps they would have had some lessons or insights that might be useful today.

I teach college kids every day and they continue to be creative and thoughtful and even optimistic. They also have no frame of reference for a before time. Their whole sentient life is a post-Trump America. A big part of what I do is help them think about social and democratic norms/values so they are aware that it doesn't have to be this way.

All schools rely on federal funding to some extent. The more STEM oriented the school is, the more likely it's operating budget is tied in to federal grants. (That includes most public flagships, the jewels in the American university system.) Tuition-dependent schools have the advantage in this landscape.

I am an adjunct (non-tenured and also not tenured-tracked) professor at an R1 institution and wanted to add something to the discussion here that I think is relevant, that I think many people operating outside of academia might not know. What's happened in the last couple decades is the adjunctification (for lack of a better term :) of the lecturer pools at colleges/universities. What this means is an increasing percentage (I've seen some stats say as high as 70%) of higher ed teachers in this country have no job guarantees/security whatsoever, and are contract workers living paycheck to paycheck, cobbling together multiple gigs despite their expertise/training/desire to be more involved. This precarity felt by most college lecturers has a big effect on free speech, and the overall university climate, even though experientially, most students don't realize there's a distinction being created behind the scenes between tenured professors and adjuncts.

To state the obvious: having the majority of workers only paid/contracted for the 2-6 on-campus hours each week to teach their class (in contrast to being paid/supported to be more deeply involved in campus life through multiple classes and other extracurricular channels), has a huge ripple effect on campus/student experience.

Teachers who care deeply (like myself) want to create a safe space for students, but we often don't feel safe ourselves that we can speak up about certain topics inside or outside of class and retain job security. Not to mention the untold hours of unpaid labor for the love of students and learning. This connection between (financial) precarity/safety and the environment(s) being cultivated at universities (the alienation/fragmentation of intellectual workers) seems under-investigated overall.

I run a college scholarship program here in Vermont. I've been a part of helping over 160 kids, mostly low-income, go to college.

This is terrifying. I'm talking to parents and kids about gap years, recommending they start at community college and then transfer in, find the least expensive school they can, do more wait and seeing if they are not sure. What's going to happen to Pell grants, and student loans?

The pandemic and phones have radically changed the educational experience for many young people, and even without the current Trumuskian help, many kids are really struggling in college. All the adults in the room need to think about — and plan for — the best ways to help support young folks to grow when college becomes impossible.