Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced an end to tuition assistance and other Department of War subsidies for several top colleges.
On Friday, Hegseth announced the “complete and immediate cancellation of all Department of War attendance” at colleges including Princeton University, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, Yale University, and “many others” starting in the 2026-2027 academic year. A source familiar with the matter told CNN that this entails the cessation of tuition assistance for schools deemed biased against the U.S. military and sponsoring “troublesome partnerships with foreign adversaries,” as detailed in a memo signed by Hegseth. All graduate-level professional military education, fellowships, and certificate programs at these universities for active-duty service members will be cut.
Harvard University had recently been given a similar treatment.
In his video announcement, Hegseth railed against elite universities for replacing “the study of victory and pragmatic realism with the promotion of wokeness and weakness.”
“Senior Service colleges have always been expected to act in the interest of this principle, to transform our senior war fighters into strategic thinkers capable of mastering the complexities of modern warfare and leading our joint force to victory at every echelon,” he said. “Unfortunately, this sacred trust has been broken in this military’s professional military education system. It’s been poisoned from within by a class of so-called elite universities who’ve abused their privilege and access to this department and utterly betrayed their purpose.”
He accused the Ivy League and similar schools of having “gorged” themselves on taxpayer dollars, “only to become factories of anti-American resentment and military disdain.”
“They’ve taken our best and brightest, the men and women who pledged their lives to this nation, and subjected them to a curriculum of contempt. They’ve replaced the study of victory and pragmatic realism with the promotion of wokeness and weakness,” Hegseth said.
He also pledged to conduct an internal review of DoW war colleges, “ensuring they are once again bastions of strategic thought, wholly dedicated to the singular mission of developing the most lethal and effective leaders and war fighters the world has ever known.”
“Let’s be brutally honest about how we define our terms here. This is not education. It’s indoctrination. It’s a calculated, targeted assault on the core of our fighting force, and it is a betrayal that we will no longer tolerate,” Hegseth declared, saying the War Department will no longer subsidize the “corruption” of its war leaders and pay for “our enemies’ wicked ideologies” to be taught.
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The Washington Examiner reached out to the War Department for further comment and clarification.
The end of these subsidies will serve as another financial blow for top U.S. colleges, which have already come under heavy pressure from the Trump administration over diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and their handling of antisemitism on campuses.
