In the labyrinth of American higher education, the present threat of budget cuts and salary slashes continues to plague the Western mind.
Subsidies, grants, and student loans issued through the Department of Education advertently fuel university budgets, shape campus policy, and quietly dictate the ideological architecture of academia. These are seemingly the grounds that most modern universities—public and private—are built with.
But what if a college, hoisting up its metaphorical bootstraps, chose to walk away? What if it said no to the sprawling apparatus of federal largesse? What if it chose freedom and evolution over ease?
The new president of Grove City College, a private Christian school in Pennsylvania, suggested that rejecting state dollars “imposed financial discipline and forced the college to control costs, find alternative sources of funding, and avoid the administrative bloat that plagues many universities.” This is regarded as the simultaneous hardest and best decision ever made at Grove City College by their students.
Though rare, this decision to forego federal funding highlights a college’s responsibility to do what many of its cousin state programs refuse: live within its means, articulate a mission with clarity and integrity, and resist the tide of bureaucratic conformity.
Milton Friedman observed that, in the sphere of contemporary education, “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” This aphorism rings especially true for colleges and universities. In exchange for federal money, institutions must comply with an expansive body of regulations, including Title IV, Title IX, Clery Act requirements, and more.
By opting out of federal aid, a college must do what few others even attempt: operate within its actual financial and disciplinary boundary markers.
A 2020 report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) noted, “Administrative spending at public and private nonprofit universities increased by 60% and 44%, respectively, between 2003 and 2012—outpacing growth in instructional spending.” Much of this surge is driven by compliance obligations and efforts to access and manage federal aid.
Schools thus must form partnerships with private donors, expand work-study opportunities, and reimagine affordability without relying on the promise of student debt. And that debt is staggering: According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, student loan debt in the U.S. reached $1.6 trillion as of Q1 2024.
As Richard Vedder, professor emeritus of economics at Ohio University, warns, “The availability of federal aid programs has enabled schools to raise tuition far faster than the rate of inflation, knowing students can borrow to cover the difference”
Perhaps no single factor has transformed or influenced the ballooning of the American college as much as the administrative explosion in the past few decades. In 1975, there were roughly twice as many faculty members as administrators in U.S. higher education. By 2015, the numbers had reversed. Benjamin Ginsberg offers: “In many universities, administrators have come to dominate the management and direction of academic programs.”
The mechanism of federal compliance remains a perennial factor behind this shift into the modern era. Accepting federal aid brings with it obligations to create reporting apparatuses, grievance procedures, DEI offices, campus security protocols, and policy review committees all staffed by professionals whose jobs depend on the expansion and interpretation of regulatory demands.
When a college chooses to reject federal funding, it unshackles itself from this growing administrative burden. It doesn’t mean it lacks standards—it means its standards are self-governed. It can prioritize faculty governance, lean operations, and the preservation of academic freedom. It resists becoming, in Ginsberg’s phrase, “a bureaucratic university.”
Skeptics argue that rejecting federal funding undermines access, especially for those students such as myself who rely on Pell Grants and subsidized loans.
However, federal aid is not the only path to affordability, and in some cases, it exacerbates the very problem it claims to solve. A 2024 Brookings Institution study revealed that institutions with high dependence on federal loans tend to show steeper tuition increases and lower return-on-investment for students in the long term.
“Aid has enabled colleges to raise tuition, knowing students can pay more,” explains Andrew Gillen, senior policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
When colleges take ownership of affordability, they often turn to private scholarship funds, tuition caps, donor-supported grants, and endowment-based financial aid. They also tend to offer more predictable tuition models and avoid sudden spikes in cost, as they are not feeding the same debt-driven machine.
At the heart of the matter lies a philosophical question: What is higher education for?
Christopher Dawson once wrote that the university “is not simply an instrument for economic advancement or social engineering, but a community of learning dedicated to the pursuit of truth.” This ideal is difficult to maintain in a system that increasingly treats students as consumers, professors as compliance risks, and ideas as liabilities.
Denying federal aid is fundamentally a decision that forces every member of the college community to engage in the hard work of self-governance. Fundraising becomes existential, tuition pricing is no longer abstract, and strategic choices are dictated by alignment with the school’s mission. Yet, these tasks come with many benefits. The colleges that dare to disentangle themselves from federal dependency will be the ones free to innovate. They will be free to teach with courage, to govern with consistency, and to build trust with their students and faculty.
Wendell Berry proposes the alternative, “If you start a business or institution with borrowed money … you are, from the start, working for someone else.”
Saying no to federal aid is one of the hardest decisions a college can make. It will cost. It will challenge. But in the long arc of institutional life, it may be the only decision that restores what higher education was always meant to be: a space of truth, freedom, and responsibility.
In other words, freedom isn’t free. But neither is dependence.
