Efforts to re-segregate the elite professions.

How outside groups and federal policy work to advance a white-nationalist agenda through higher education.

Reporters have asked me if the Trump administration is getting smarter and, therefore, more effective at attacking higher education. More effective: yes. This second go-around, Trump is forcing higher education to do things it doesn’t want to in a way that never happened during the first administration. Smarter … There’s still a lot of chaos and noise, and some of the most effective tactics are coming from Red states advancing the MAGA agenda. Through that noise, however, I can see some clear, coordinated efforts to achieve specific policy goals. One goal is to re-segregate the elite professions. By elite professions, I mean things like medicine and law, which are associated with high incomes and social standing. What makes me think this? Ideology + policy mechanisms. Means and motive.

Ideology

The basic belief system behind attempts to re-segregate the elite professions is that genetics and culture make some people best suited to particular occupations. Chris Ruffo, an effective right-wing education activist, laid this idea out clearly in a New York Times interview with columnist Ross Douthat. Take a look for yourself:

I think most people accept that when they go to the nail salon and it’s being run by almost all Vietnamese people, they’re fine with that. When you go to a programming floor it’s mostly East Asian and South Asian males and white males. Or, let’s say athletes. You have heavily Black representation in the N.B.A.

The world is complicated, and most people have a sense that different groups, different cultures, have different priorities, different interests, different talents, and they don’t mathematically graft themselves in an artificial way onto every institution.

Ruffo suggests that people fit with certain types of jobs and don’t belong everywhere. He made the statement in the context of higher education and as part of his explanation of why efforts to diversify the sector are wrong.

The simple ideology expressed by Ruffo is that occupational and social segregation is natural, and policy efforts to interrupt what he sees as natural differences are unacceptable. From this worldview, re-segregating the elite professions would be ok and does not require overt discrimination, say, like the rules barring black or Jewish people from medical school that were common in the early 20th century.

Policy mechanism

Ideology works when it’s attached to actions that can achieve outcomes. In this case, higher education is key because it’s the gateway into elite professions. The MAGA movement (broadly defined) seems to have devised a two-pronged strategy to re-segregate the elite professions through higher ed policy. It’s a double-whammy: make it harder for students of color to get to and succeed in graduate school, and make it harder to pay for grad school for those who do get in. And if people of color can’t get the education they need, they can’t enter an elite profession.

Create obstacles for students of color and other underrepresented groups to access the education they need to become members of the elite professions.

In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA), the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, banned race-conscious practices for making admissions decisions at any higher ed program in the country. We know from previous research that affirmative action bans were more likely to be implemented when white people felt their access to the best opportunities in a higher ed system was threatened, and that affirmative action bans were effective at limiting students of color’s enrollment in graduate school.

The Court’s ban went into effect in 2022, when Biden was the president. Because the Roberts Court left the door open to use race in a very narrow way - when it was directly related to how experience contributed to a student’s qualifications, for example, in a student essay - Trump sought to expand the implications of the ruling. In February, the Trump Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” expanding SFFA by citing the ruling in a directive that attempts to ban all race-conscious activities. It’s hard for me to read the letter as anything other than an attempt to limit the extent to which higher ed can welcome and support students of color.

Create obstacles for students to pay for graduate school.

Graduate school is expensive, especially law and medical school. Students have long used student loans to finance a medical or law degree. The One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump’s enormous tax and spending law, makes it harder for students to get the loans they need to cover the cost of grad school. The law eliminates one type of graduate student loan - Grad PLUS - and puts caps on other borrowing. Students in professional programs like law and medicine are capped at $50,000 a year, and a lifetime total of $200,0000. That could make it harder for students to access the funds they need to get the education necessary to enter an elite profession.

The MAGA movement is even working to make it hard for colleges to provide financial aid! America First Legal, an activist group founded by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller, is suing Johns Hopkins University Medical School because it alleges the university is engaging in illegal DEI activities. The foundation even objects to Hopkins’ policy of providing a free medical education to all admitted students who come from families with incomes below $300,000 a year because “it is well recognized that race and ethnicity are inseparable from socioeconomic status,” adding that “Johns Hopkins masks racial preferences behind income thresholds.” In other words, Miller’s group acknowledges that there is structural racism in the economy and seeks to keep it that way.

Linking policy and ideology

The polices advanced by the MAGA movement will, if fully implemented, almost certainly have the effect of making it harder for people of color to enter elite professions. But none of them engage in explicit segregation based on race. Instead, they leverage social structure, and especially the way that race is embedded in organizations, social, and economic life, to achieve what appears to me to be the goal of segregation. This fits well with Ruffo’s ideas about how groups tend naturally to be associated with some occupations and social roles more than others. It also provides plausible deniability to accusations that the administration and its allies are pursuing racist polices. This is important because it allows MAGA supporters to cast people who say the administration is doing racist things as unreasonable. You can decide for yourself if you think my argument about segregating elite professions is reasonable or not. Are the means and motives clear and convincing? Can we see ideology + policy mechanisms at work?

Ok, enough.