By Ruth A Pagell*
(2 Dec 2025) The U.S. government’s shutdown during October and November resulted in similar topics for the October and Novembers webinars. The presenters for these two webinars updated the September presentation, focused on Trump’s “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education”, and covered questions from participants based on pervious discussions. The speakers for both webinars were the Chronicle’s own reporters, Sarah Brown and Rick Seltzer, while Francie Diep reported only in October.
One example of how universities were coping with the government shutdown was the University of Hawaii which announced that it would pay faculty and researchers who had been receiving government funding (Caires). Other universities have engaged in private conversations with the administration.
As a result of the shutdown, the official international student numbers remained the same as the September report. Diep spoke to individual universities, including Arizona State, which reported a five percent drop in international students. New data were released after the November webinar as reported below.
Most of the discussions centered around the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. Signing the Compact meant that the university would be aligning with the Trump administration’s priorities. In exchange for signing, the university would receive preferential access to federal funds. Originally, nine universities received the mailing, including three Ivy League universities Brown, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania, three other private universities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Southern California (USC) and Vanderbilt, and three public institutions, the Universities of Arizona, Texas at Austin, and Virginia. Vanderbilt expressed concerns about academic freedom. Only the University of Texas at Austin said they were looking forward to working with the Administration although they also expressed concerns. The University of Virginia made its rejection letter publicly available (Miller).
NOTE: Universities in bold are ranked in the top 20 in U.S. New Best Colleges.
With none of the original nine signing by the deadline, Trump opened the Compact to all institutions of higher education. Three institutions responded including New College of Florida, a state liberal arts college (Evans). In 2023, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis appointed a new board of trustees for New College and modified its curriculum as a precursor to the curriculum that is part of the Compact. As of November 28, 2025, no university had signed the Compact.
While not agreeing with the Compact, universities are discussing individual arrangements with the administration to free up funding. One example is Cornell. The president of Cornell’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) expressed concern over a settlement that agreed to spending $30 million toward agriculture. He said that provision was among many that worried him and other AAUP members. He said, There’s nothing good to say about the bribe, the $30 million bribe”, adding that it was “not as bad as it could be.” (Saul & Binder). Brown, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania have also made deals to release funding.
THE COMPACT: The compact has 10 sections, listed below. Click here for a copy of the compact.
- Equality in Admissions
- Marketplace of Ideas & Civil Discourse
- Nondiscrimination in Faculty and Administrative Hiring
- Institutional Neutrality
- Student Learning
- Student Equality
- Financial Responsibility
- Foreign Entanglements
- Exceptions
- Enforcement
ACADEMIC ORGANIZATIONS
After listening to the Chronicle webinars, I was concerned that higher education organizations were not responding as one voice. Doing research on my own, I discovered many education organizations had issued critical responses. Two examples are listed below:
AAC&U (American Association of Colleges and Universities). The Association has an extensive membership list from tribal colleges to the leading universities in the U. S. In October 2025 it issued its own compact, Higher Education’s Compact with America: Shared Principles for the Common Good. There is no list of institutions that have actually signed off on this statement.
ACE (American Council on Education). ACE represents over 1600 organizations associated with education. On October 17 2025 it issued the “Statement by Higher Education Associations in Opposition to Trump Administration Compact”
https://www.acenet.edu/Documents/Statement-Compact-101725.pdf. It also offers a daily news service: https://www.acenet.edu/News-Room/Pages/Todays-Top-Higher-Education-News.aspx
INTERNATIONAL STUDENT DATA
Student data were discussed in the September webinar, with data available through August 2025. (Pagell). The November release includes the final data for the 2024-2025 academic year and a subset of data from 828 universities for the 2025-2026 academic year.
The U.S. Department of State is the home for international student data. It is managed by IIE (Institute of International Education) and released by the Open Doors project. On November 17, 2025 the Department formally announced the Open Doors data on international students for the academic year 2024-2025 and a snapshot of data from 828 universities for academic year 2025-2026.
Results vary based on the level of detail. The most widely reported 2024-2025 Open Doors data show an overall increase in the total number of new and continuing international students of 4.5 percent. The 2025-2026 data finds an overall decrease of one percent. A 17% decrease in new enrollments and a 12% decline in graduate student enrollment contributed to the decline. For more details, read the press release from IIE.
The future for international students in the U.S. is confusing. While the number of new international students entering the U.S. declined this fall, the full IIE report, including information from U.S. education organizations, tells a more positive story. For example, universities allowed students deferred enrollment for the 2026-2027 academic year. See: https://iie.widen.net/s/xd9xrsft6q/iie_fall-2025-snapshot_full-report
CONCLUSION
The last webinar of the year is mid-December. Higher education is not currently a hot administration topic. It is time to catch up on the rankings I have missed before immersing myself in integrity.
RESOURCES
Caires, E. (22 Oct 2025) University of Hawai’i is paying affected employees out of pocket during shutdown. Hawai’i Public Radio https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/local-news/2025-10-21/university-of-hawaii-pay-out-of-pocket-government-shutdown
Evans, T., Wolf, A., Linehand, P.F. et al (12 Nov 2025). Client Alerts, Steptoe, https://www.steptoe.com/en/news-publications/update-on-the-compact-for-academic-excellence-in-higher-education.html
Miller E.(30 Oct 2022025). UVA rejects Trump administration compact for preferential funding. Virginia. https://uvamagazine.org/articles/UVA_rejects_Trump_administration_compact_for_preferential_funding
Pagell, R.(31 Oct 2025). Ruth’s Rankings monthly update on higher education in the United States…Access. https://librarylearningspace.com/ruths-rankings-monthly-update-on-higher-education-in-the-united-states-trump-and-higher-ed-series-understanding-the-latest/
Saul, S. & Binder, A. (7 Nov 252025) Cornell reaches a deal with Trump administration to release research funds. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/us/cornell-deal-trump-administration.html?unlocked_article_code=1.0E8.0D0z.DMbylkYTSvr8&smid=url-share
Ruth’s Rankings
A list of Ruth’s Rankings and News Updates is here.
GUIDELINES ON USING RANKINGS – Users of rankings have a responsibility to understand the rankings they are using:
CWTS Leiden Responsible Use https://www.leidenranking.com/information/responsibleuse
IREG Observatory on Academic Rankings and Excellence (2023)
https://ireg-observatory.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/IREG-guidelines2023.pdf
*Ruth A. Pagell is emeritus faculty librarian at Emory University. After working at Emory, she was the founding librarian of the Li Ka Shing Library at Singapore Management University and then adjunct faculty [teaching] in the Library and Information Science Program at the University of Hawaii. She has written and spoken extensively on various aspects of librarianship, including contributing articles to ACCESS – https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3238-9674
