On Oct. 1, the Trump administration sent a compact to nine universities — including Penn —promising preferential funding treatment in exchange for their compliance with a set of sweeping guidelines.
With less than a week remaining before the Oct. 20 deadline for universities to provide feedback on the draft document, The Daily Pennsylvanian examined the potential University-wide implications of signing it. Drawing on past enrollment data, current institutional policies, and interviews with higher education experts, the DP’s analysis found that several provisions in the compact may have far-reaching consequences for Penn’s admissions, governance, and finances.
As of the time of publication, the federal government has not yet clarified what, if any, consequences an institution may face for refusing to sign the document. While schools are “free to develop models and values other than those listed in the document," those institutions will “forgo federal benefit.”
Last week, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — one of the original schools asked to sign the document — rejected the offer in a letter addressed to Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
“Fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth wrote on Oct. 10.
The decision received swift condemnation from White House spokesperson Liz Huston, who told the New York Times that “any university that refuses this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform higher education isn’t serving its students or their parents — they’re bowing to radical, left-wing bureaucrats.”
On Oct. 5, Penn President Larry Jameson wrote in an email that the University was orchestrating its “review and response” to the compact and will “seek the input of our Penn community.”
A Penn spokesperson declined multiple requests to comment on the University’s review of the document.
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The seven other universities that received the Oct. 1 proposal have not disclosed how they are considering the compact and did not respond to requests for comment.
Federal benefits to higher education institutions — including student loans, research relationships, and international student visas — are traditionally provided as a standard practice, according to the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Kermit Roosevelt.
“It seems like now they’re saying the baseline is no federal funding, and if you do what we want, then you might get this kind of support,” Roosevelt previously told the DP. “They’re shifting it from general support with exceptions for bad behavior to no support with exceptions for what they consider a good behavior.”
Michigan State University professor Brendan Cantwell — whose research focus is the political economy of higher education — told the DP that enforcement of the compact lacks legal basis.
“If any of this were actually required by law … then they wouldn't need the compact,” Cantwell said. “They would just enforce the law.”
According to Bloomberg, the offer for preferential funding treatment has been extended to all institutions of higher learning following MIT’s rejection of the proposal.
Tuition freeze and endowment regulations
The compact’s seventh clause — titled “Financial Responsibility” — requires “freezing the effective tuition rates charged to American students for the next five years.”
If universities choose to offset losses due to the freeze, Cantwell argued that they have two options: to “reduce their selectivity” by increasing overall enrollment, or “reduce their affordability” by decreasing financial aid offerings.
The tuition freeze is also likely to impact Penn’s admissions process, according to 1986 Wharton graduate Laurie Kopp Weingarten, who also works as the president and chief educational consultant at One-Stop College Counseling.
While Weingarten acknowledged that tuition reductions are “always going to be met with cheers,” she wrote in a statement to the DP that it is “unclear how colleges will sustain operations if their budgets keep increasing.”
“Families are asking me whether paying for an expensive private university is still worth it when excellent, more affordable options exist,” she added. “If colleges start cutting their resources, families will notice.”
A second point in the document’s seventh provision mandates that “any university with an endowment exceeding $2 million per undergraduate student will not charge tuition for admitted students pursuing hard science programs.”
According to the University’s enrollment data from fall 2024 and an endowment evaluation conducted in June, Penn would exceed that threshold. Of the original nine schools listed in the document, only two other institutions have endowments totaling more than $2 million per undergraduate student: MIT and Dartmouth College.
University of Tennessee professor Robert Kelchen — whose research focuses in part on higher education finance — described the arbitrary nature of the $2 million figure.
“I think it's a number that sounded good,” he said in an interview with the DP. “It's a pretty high number. It doesn't affect that many institutions right now.”
Universities over the proposed endowment cap will only be required to waive tuition costs for students pursuing degrees in “hard science programs.”
At Penn, roughly 1,700 undergraduates study at the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Several other traditional STEM majors — such as biology, chemistry, and mathematics — are offered by the College of Arts and Sciences, which accounts for the majority of Penn undergraduates.
It remains unclear what programs the White House considers “hard science.”
Enrollment and admissions changes
A clause in the document’s “Foreign Entanglements” section limits undergraduate international student enrollment to 15% for schools who sign.
Over the previous two admissions cycles, international student enrollment in Penn’s undergraduate classes has remained at 15%.
“I’ve already had many students and parents ask whether it might become easier to be admitted to Penn and other Ivies this year,” Weingarten wrote, adding that some students believe international students will be less inclined to apply.
Nat Smitobol, a college admissions counselor at IvyWise, wrote to the DP that the compact might “affect [Penn’s] ability to determine whom they admit and how they govern their academic community.”
The document’s first section, titled “Equality in Admissions,” additionally requires universities to mandate SAT or similar standardized test scores from undergraduate applicants.
The University reinstated its standardized testing requirement for all undergraduate applicants on Feb. 14 for the 2025-26 admissions cycle.
A separate clause under the compact’s “Student Learning” section bars the consideration of “sex, ethnicity, race, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity, [and] religious associations” throughout the admissions process.
In February, Penn announced changes to its University-wide nondiscrimination and affirmative action policies in response to an executive order from 1968 Wharton graduate and President Donald Trump.
Campus speech and institutional neutrality
Penn Carey Law professors Amanda Shanor and Serena Mayeri outlined several legal and constitutional concerns over the compact’s second provision in a legal brief provided to the DP.
That clause requires institutions to commit to “fostering a vibrant marketplace of ideas on campus” by “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
“All viewpoints—conservative, liberal, or otherwise—are afforded the same constitutional protection and cannot be selectively favored or censored by the government,” Shanor and Mayeri’s brief read.
The plan to enforce the provision — “rigorous, good faith, empirical assessment of a broad spectrum of viewpoints among faculty, students, and staff at all levels” — also raised concerns for Shanor and Mayeri.
“Universities could be required to hire epidemiologists who do not believe in vaccines, or scientists who think climate change is a hoax, for example, so as to ensure the government’s preferred ‘spectrum of ideological viewpoints,’” the brief read.
Smitobol also noted that the focus on conservative ideas may “reshape applicant behavior” due to a “perceived loss of institutional independence and open discourse.”
“That’s significant for Penn, whose appeal has long stemmed from its Quaker-inspired values of inclusivity, intellectual exchange, and freedom of thought,” Smitobol wrote. “A move away from that ethos could have lasting effects on its applicant pool and reputation.”
The section of the compact also includes a provision on protests and demonstrations on college campuses. Universities that sign the agreement will be required to restrict demonstrations that “delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations,” “heckle or accost individual students or groups of students,” or “[obstruct] access to parts of campus.”
Signatories would additionally commit to “using lawful force if necessary to prevent these violations and to swift, serious, and consistent sanctions for those who commit them.”
In spring 2024, a 16-day Gaza Solidarity Encampment took place on College Green after months of student protests. Penn’s response — which included the arrest of nine students and the placement of six on mandatory leaves of absence — drew strong criticism.
“Calls for murder or genocide or support for entities designated by the U.S. government as terrorist organizations,” are similarly prohibited by the clause.
A September executive order designated “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization. After signing the order, the Trump administration published a national security memo that outlined a new strategy aimed at combating “domestic terrorism.”
“It opens up this idea that the President could declare just about anything a terrorist organization and prevent students on campuses that have signed this compact from engaging in protest or speech about these organizations at all,” Cantwell told the DP.
Also included in the compact’s fourth clause is a requirement for university employees to exercise institutional neutrality, which Shanor and Mayeri wrote would constitute an “unconstitutional condition on speech.”
“It is one thing for universities voluntarily to adopt institutional neutrality policies,” they wrote. “It is quite another to impose them by government fiat.”
Penn’s own institutional neutrality policy — which prevents the University and its leaders from making public statements in response to external events — was introduced by Jameson in 2024.
How Penn could enforce the compact
The document’s final section, titled “Enforcement,” outlines how the federal government will monitor universities’ compliance with the compact.
“The university annually shall conduct, or hire an external party to conduct, an independent, good faith, empirically rigorous, and anonymous poll of its faculty, students, and staff, providing them the opportunity to evaluate the university’s performance against this compact,” the compact states.
In an interview with the DP, History professor Kathleen Brown — who also chairs Penn’s Faculty Senate — described the limitations of an external survey, including how “an outside metric” might impact Penn.
Brown also pointed to the “legal burden” that could fall on administrators “whenever there’s a kind of a government condition attached to money.”
Cantwell highlighted the ambiguity of the requirement and questioned what proportion of students would have to voice disappointment to be considered a violation.
“Would one person responding to this saying that be enough to kick off some kind of investigation?” he asked. “If you hit 5% of people saying this, are you then found out of compliance? It's not at all clear. It creates the potential for a climate of uncertainty and fear.”
According to the document, violations — which will be monitored by the Department of Justice — would result in a loss of “access to the benefits of this agreement for a period of no less than 1 year,” and force universities to refund private donations upon request.
“The compact leaves the federal government to define and enforce such overbroad terms,” Shanor and Mayeri wrote. “[It] would put universities in an impossible, no-win compliance position.”
