White House offers preferential federal funding to colleges adopting compact for academic excellence

The White House has laid out a proposal to nine top U.S. colleges and universities offering preferential access to federal funds in exchange for agreeing to a set of demands. Among the requirements in the document, titled “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” the administration requires a ban on considering race, sex or gender identity in admissions and financial support. It also calls for banning considering those factors in faculty hiring. In addition, signees would be required to freeze tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years.
The memo said, schools that adopt the agreement are promised a number of benefits, including priority treatment for grants, they would also be prohibited from having any more than 15 per cent of the undergraduate population be international students. There is also a requirement for the universities to prioritize merit and share all known information about international students upon request to the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.
The nine recipients of the memo were Vanderbilt University, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, the University of Southern California, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas, the University of Arizona, Brown University and the University of Virginia.