Maybe Donald Trump wants to make it harder for white men to get into college. Perhaps it is not an accident that affirmative action has come to an end in higher education institutions. Maybe none of this is the irony some people think it is.
The Trump Administration’s rollback of DEI policies has an unintended consequence: white men, the Trump Administration’s core demographic, are being excluded from college admissions. And that could be playing into the hands of white conservative elites who depend on white men and their grievances to stay in power.
The prospect of fewer white men attending school is part of a larger trend. Since 2018, enrollment among white students has dropped by 19% across all sectors: public, private, two-year, four-year, selective, and non-selective. Since the Supreme Court banned race as a consideration for college admissions, enrollment among college freshmen who self-reported as white dropped to 31% in 2025 from 40% in 2023.
Generally, in sheer numbers, more women attend colleges and universities than men. Therefore, in an attempt to secure gender balance, higher education institutions will admit more white men with lower test scores or other qualifications than women. In that sense, white men benefited from affirmative action.
However, the Trump Administration — bolstered by a 2023 Supreme Court decision banning race as a factor in college admissions — issued an executive order along similar lines. Under the order, colleges and universities that receive federal funding are prohibited from considering gender, race, ethnicity, nationality or political views in admissions or hiring.
That means the admissions office’s balancing act, which seeks diversity but actually benefits white men, will come to a halt.
But maybe that’s the point.
Consider Trump’s electoral base. According to a CNN exit poll from the 2024 election, Trump won 60% of the white male vote, and 69% of white men without college degrees — his most supportive demographic. In 2020, Trump received 70% of the vote from white men without a college degree. In 2016, it was 71%.
In all three elections, white male voters represented a third of the total electorate. For perspective, voters of color represent slightly less than a third. Securing voters for the Trump Administration is more than just splintering voters of color from the Democratic candidate; It is also keeping white men ignorant so that they can be appealed to with racism, sexism, and capitalism.
White men without college degrees love Trump, and MAGA conservatives believe colleges are bastions of liberal brainwashing. In reality, though, higher education writ large is designed to cultivate critical thinking skills in a racially and ideologically diverse setting. That reality doesn’t develop a prospective white male Trump voter; keeping white men out does.
Besides reducing opportunities for exposure to new people and different ideas, reducing the number of white men who attend college feeds the conspiracy among them that the country — and perhaps the world — is against them, and that white men are being intentionally left behind. Conservative elites can then manipulate those men into voting against their interests, helping secure political power for white people in a society that is becoming more diverse.
It’s a playbook the white power structure has followed for centuries: picking the pockets of uninformed white people.
From the racial bribe to the Southern Strategy, conservative power brokers have always put up ideological barriers between white workers and their political and economic interests, helping white elites maintain political and economic power over everyone.
White people have tacitly agreed to such strategies, in large part, because of false hope: unable to defeat the powerful, they lean on white privilege, hoping to convert it to power, influence, and wealth.
Perhaps anti-DEI hysteria won’t backfire, but the actual policies that eliminate it will, starting with the drop in white men attending college. Maybe white men will see that it’s not immigrants from the global south, or Black Americans, or women that keep them down, but the power structure that has consistently asked for their trust, only to betray them.
It will take a lot to reverse the benefit of the doubt white men have received for generations. Unfortunately for Black and brown folk, there’s not enough of that to go around. Unfortunately for white men, there aren’t enough college acceptance letters to go around.
Rann Miller is an educator, opinion columnist and author or Resistance Stories from Black History for Kids.