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Trump and The Death of Higher Education

Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley
2 min readNov 20, 2024

Victory for Trump and Victory for MAGA have made Donald Trump president-elect of the USA for a second time and marked his return to power in January 2025.

(My behind the paywall link.)

It’s time to examine what his election win will mean for the higher education system in the USA and what Trump’s reforms could mean moving forward for the USA. Let’s start by looking at the evidence.

For starters, most college students work full time to support themselves through school, and it’s a mismatch like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster that college students and colleges are packed full of upper-middle-class or rich kids.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Most college people are just trying to live their dream or a better life than their parents or grandparents.

· 64% of college students work, and 40% work full time.

· 49% of college students are financially independent from their parents.

· 6% of college students serve or have served in the U.S. armed forces.

· In May 2024, about 4.5 per cent of recent college graduates were unemployed in the United States.

For University graduates in the USA, four years after earning their 2015–16 bachelor’s degrees, 74 per cent of graduates worked full-time, and 7 per cent worked part-time.

Fourteen per cent of graduates were out of the labour force, and 4 per cent were unemployed.

Donald Trump’s educational reforms will democratically improve education by making higher education cheaper and making education in the humanities accessible to all.

However, this will also lower the job market value of those professions, which may decapitate American higher education.

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Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley
Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley

Written by Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley

I have been writing from 2014 to the present day; my writing is focused on history, politics, culture, geopolitics and other related topics.

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