Politics / December 23, 2025

Trump’s Anti-DEI Crusade Is Going to Hit White Men, Too

Under the Trump administration’s anti-DEI directives, colleges would be forced to abandon gender balancing, disadvantaging men.

Kali Holloway

ne of the best-kept secrets about DEI is that it helps men—that includes white men—get into college. If you do not work in admissions, you are likely unaware of this fact, and that’s by design; one admissions officer even told The Wall Street Journal it’s “higher education’s dirty little secret.” But it’s been true for decades. Women’s college enrollment surpassed men’s all the way back in 1979, and the gender gap has only widened in the interim. Over just the last five years, as college enrollment numbers plunged by roughly 1.5 million students, men have accounted for more than 70 percent of that decline. In an increasingly difficult effort to maintain something approximating gender parity, admissions officers at private universities have for years used “gender balancing,” accepting male applicants at higher rates than female applicants. The Supreme Court ruled that race-consciousness in college admissions is unconstitutional in 2023. That means affirmative action is technically illegal, just not if it benefits men.

Under the Trump administration’s anti-DEI directives, schools would be forced to abandon gender balancing, leaving fewer men in college. More specifically, fewer white men, since they make up the majority of male applicants.

And the most precipitous drops would happen at America’s elite institutions of higher education. Private schools are the only colleges allowed to practice gender discrimination, which has been legally banned at public colleges since 1971’s Title IX passed. But the Trump administration, using federal funding as a bargaining chip, is pushing colleges to sign its Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. The plan specifically names “gender identity” as one of many traits that cannot be “considered, explicitly or implicitly, in any decision related to undergraduate or graduate student admissions.” And while there have been few signatories to that plan, the administration has succeeded in having Brown, Columbia and Northwestern sign agreements that state students will be accepted “solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”

Even as they use that language, which is deliberately crafted to imply unqualified women are getting away with something, right-wingers are well aware that men are increasingly turning away from college. Anti-anti-racist activists including Christopher Rufo have groused for years about the “feminization” of higher education, a complaint that makes sense only if said complainer understands that men are the ones quietly being advantaged. Their endless chatter about ending gender DEI in education is just right-wing PR—a way to keep grievances simmering instead of acknowledging who’s actually being given a hand up.

Take, for example, Brown University. Hechinger Report education journalist Jon Marcus finds the school had 18,960 men apply for the 2024–25 academic year, a pool dwarfed by the 29,917 women who applied. The Ivy League admitted nearly equal raw numbers of each gender—1,326 men and 1,309 women. But that’s not so equal proportion-wise, with roughly 7 percent of men getting in, but just 4.4 percent of women accepted. Columbia, the University of Chicago, Vassar, Tulane, Yale, Boston University, Swarthmore, and Vanderbilt also admit men at higher rates than women. Again, a lot of selective colleges do.

Not that any of them are shouting about this from the rooftops—and to be fair, admissions is opaque on every front. So how do we actually know men are being given an advantage—and not that, say, “women are more willing to apply to long-shot schools than men are,” as libertarian outlet Reason posits? There are clues. We know that women earn higher GPAs in high school, are almost twice as likely to graduate within the top 5 percent of their class, and are more likely to take AP courses—all things schools take into consideration. In addition, admissions officers sometimes just come right out and tell us. Shayna Medley, a former Brandeis University admissions officer who penned a 2016 Harvard legal paper on gender balancing, told The Hechinger Report that “standards were certainly lower for male students.” An ex-Wesleyan admissions officer told The New York Times that gender balancing required being “more forgiving and lenient” with male applicants, adding, “You’d be like, ‘I’m kind of on the fence about this one, but—we need boys.’” (“The process sometimes pained him,” the article notes, “especially when he saw an outstanding young woman from a disadvantaged background losing out to a young man who came from privilege.”) ”Probably nobody will admit it,” the former president of a small liberal arts college confessed in a 1998 Times piece, “but I know that lots of places try to get some gender balance by having easier admissions standards for boys than for girls.” (snip-MORE on the page)