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Can You Create a Diverse College Class Without Affirmative Action?

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Can You Create a Diverse College Class Without Affirmative Action?

After the Supreme Court effectively ended affirmative action in 2023, many selective colleges said they still prized racial diversity and planned to pursue it. But how might they do that?

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To grasp the challenge, let’s look at one oversimplified illustration. These 10,000 dots represent the standardized test scores of a class of high school seniors nationwide, arranged by their parents’ income.

On average, students from families with more resources tend to do better on measures like the SAT.

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Black and Hispanic students, who tend to be poorer and have less access to opportunity, often do worse.

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If selective colleges admitted students by score alone — using, say, a 1300 cutoff — the pool would not be very diverse, by race or class.

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Six percent of this hypothetical admitted class are low-income students, and 10 percent are Black or Hispanic.

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Affirmative action policies helped colleges admit more Black and Hispanic students.

But admissions preferences based on race are no longer legal. To create a more diverse class, colleges could …

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… move that cutoff line …

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… or change the slope of it …

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… or rethink it entirely.

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“Low-income” refers to students in the bottom quarter of parent income distributions.

Selective colleges and universities can no longer use race-based preferences in admissions to create a more diverse student body. But what if they gave a break instead to lower-income students? Or those from high-poverty schools? Or those who do relatively well academically despite challenges all around them?

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To explore those questions — and how much racial diversity is possible without “race-conscious” admissions — the Upshot worked with Sean Reardon, a professor at Stanford, and Demetra Kalogrides, a senior researcher there, to model four alternatives to affirmative action.

The scenarios shown here are based on the real-life academic and demographic characteristics of the high school class of 2013 in America, the most recent tracked over time by a large nationally representative survey. We used this data set, further adjusted to reflect the rising diversity of students in the decade since, to simulate a representative class of 10,000 high school seniors. We then modeled their admissions prospects to the group of colleges (Barron’s Tier 1 schools) that rank as the most selective in the country — and that have also been most affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Throughout, we use SAT scores as a simplified measure of academic merit (after test scores fell out of favor with many colleges during the pandemic, several of the most selective schools have recently returned to requiring them).

Our models simplify the complex and often opaque ways that selective colleges craft admissions (we also reserve no seats for athletes on scholarship or legacy students). But even a stripped-down exercise shows why some approaches to admissions would probably yield more diversity than others, by both race and class.

Let’s start with the simplest model and build from there:

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Scenario 1 of 4: A preference for poorer students

Here again is our simulated class of 10,000 high school seniors, further identified by race.

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Only some apply to the most selective colleges, a relatively small tier of about 80 schools like Stanford, Penn and N.Y.U.

Here’s where the admissions policies kick in. First, we admit 500 students, roughly in line with admissions rates at selective colleges.

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Now let’s give a 150-point SAT boost to the lowest-income students.

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Use the buttons to explore what happens in this scenario as well as the ones below.

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In this scenario, we give a moderate boost to applicants on a sliding scale according to their parents’ income: from an extra 150 points for students from the poorest families, to 0 points for students from the richest ones. This creates the slope of the cutoff line you see above.

Because each of our scenarios admits a fixed class of 500 students, the results are zero-sum: As some students are newly admitted, others who might have been admitted under different policies no longer are. The magnitude of that effect — and whom it touches — differs depending on the criteria.

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In this case, as more low-income students are admitted, some high-income students with SAT scores just above 1300 no longer get in. That trade-off creates significantly more economic diversity, as this table shows:

Change in admitted class in Scenario 1

Percentage point shifts in admitted student demographics, compared with test-only admissions

Show shares

Race Bottom 25% 25th–
50th
50th–
75th
Top
25%
White
Asian
Black
Hispanic
Other

Figures are rounded. Other includes American Indian, Alaska Native and multi-racial students.

The share of admitted students from the top income quartile falls by about 12 percentage points.

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But the shifts toward racial diversity are modest. The Black student share rises by just one percentage point. Why? Black families are over-represented among poorer households in America, but in terms of total numbers, there are still many more poorer white households.

For this reason, income is a relatively weak proxy for race in admissions. A preference for lower incomes produces just that: students with lower incomes, not necessarily a much larger share of Black or Hispanic students.

In this scenario, a total of 13 percent of students in the admitted class are Black or Hispanic. For context, Americans of high-school-graduation age today are about 38 percent Black or Hispanic.

It’s also worth emphasizing that we are modeling who gets admitted, not who enrolls. And Black and Hispanic students are less likely to take that additional step — enrolling in a selective college that might be expensive or far from home, even if they get in.

Scenario 2 of 4: Adding school poverty

In addition to a preference for low-income students, what if we added a preference for those who attend higher poverty schools?

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Admit students using …

This scenario takes the 150-point income preference in Scenario 1 and adds a second 150-point preference for students in higher-poverty schools, as measured by the share of students in that school receiving free or reduced-price lunch. A low-income student in a high-poverty school could get as much as a 300-point boost.

This produces even more economic diversity than the preference for parental income alone. And it further nudges up the share of admitted Black and Hispanic students.

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Change in admitted class in Scenario 2

Percentage point shifts in admitted student demographics, compared with test-only admissions

Show shares

Race Bottom 25% 25th–
50th
50th–
75th
Top
25%
White
Asian
Black
Hispanic
Other

Figures are rounded. Other includes American Indian, Alaska Native and multi-racial students.

We know that students with equally low family incomes differ from each other in many ways. For example, low-income Black and Hispanic students are more likely than low-income white and Asian students to live in high-poverty neighborhoods and attend high-poverty schools.

And so if one goal of an admissions policy is to account for the compound disadvantages minority students often face, it may help to pull in more information: not just about their parents’ incomes, but also about their households, schools and neighborhoods.

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Colleges could further hone a preference like this by pulling in more factors, including neighborhood poverty rates, parental education levels and parental wealth.

Do something like that, and “now you have a group of students who have overcome a lot more in life than the ones who have just been handed everything,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher at the Progressive Policy Institute who has argued for this kind of robust class preference. He also served as an expert witness critiquing race-based admissions in the litigation that led to the Supreme Court decision.

Scenario 3 of 4: Finding the outliers

It’s possible to take the underlying idea in Scenario 2 and dial it up further, by identifying students who outperform their peers with similar disadvantages (or similar advantages).

Admit students using …

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Here, we’re not just giving a boost to students who come from disadvantage. We’re rewarding students who perform better academically than other students with similar backgrounds.

This strategy identifies, for example, a student who has an 1100 SAT score — but whose score is 250 points above the typical student who also goes to a high-poverty high school and who has low-income parents who didn’t attend college. This strategy also discounts some of the wealthiest students whose 1400 scores look less impressive when compared with their equally well-off peers.

Students who outperform their peers are academic outliers, and that may indicate something special about them: “We’re admitting students on the basis of striving: students whose academic achievement exceeded expectations based on the access to opportunity that they had,” said Zack Mabel, a Georgetown researcher who has modeled admissions scenarios similar in concept to this one.

Of the scenarios tested so far, this one does the most to produce both economic and racial diversity, compared with admitting students on test scores alone. It also produces significant shifts among high-income white students; their share of the admitted class is 27 percentage points lower than it would be in a test-only environment. The resulting average SAT score of the admitted class is also the lowest of the scenarios so far, at 1340.

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Change in admitted class in Scenario 3

Percentage point shifts in admitted student demographics, compared with test-only admissions

Show shares

Race Bottom 25% 25th–
50th
50th–
75th
Top
25%
White
Asian
Black
Hispanic
Other

Figures are rounded. Other includes American Indian, Alaska Native and multi-racial students.

To gauge how we’d expect students to perform in this scenario, we take into account their parental income, school poverty level and a socioeconomic index that includes parents’ education levels and occupations. We use that data to predict each student’s SAT score. Then we admit the students who outperformed those predictions by the largest margins (until we’ve admitted 500 of them).

A college that cares more about keeping a higher average SAT score could use a limited version of a preference like this one. A school that believes students who beat the odds in high school are likely to succeed in college could embrace a fuller version.

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Remember that in this scenario and each of the preceding ones, we’ve considered only students who apply to highly selective colleges (the national study we use as a reference shows which students actually did). We have effectively ignored all of the students shown below who don’t apply, including some with pretty good grades and test scores:

Students who didn’t apply to top colleges

Next, let’s think about that group, too.

Scenario 4 of 4: Casting a wider net

What happens when colleges try to expand the applicant pool?

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Admit students using …

To create this scenario, we expanded the pool of applicants to selective colleges by modeling a recruiting strategy targeted at predominantly minority high schools.

First, we pull into the applicant pool all students of any race with SAT scores above 1000 at high schools where at least three-quarters of students are nonwhite. Then we rerun the preference for beating the odds from Scenario 3 with this larger applicant pool.

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This strategy most notably captures more Hispanic students, and it produces by far the biggest shift toward lower-income students. It broadly redistributes seats held in an SAT-only scenario by high-income white students and, to a lesser degree, high-income Asian ones.

Change in admitted class in Scenario 4

Percentage point shifts in admitted student demographics, compared with test-only admissions

Show shares

Race Bottom 25% 25th–
50th
50th–
75th
Top
25%
White
Asian
Black
Hispanic
Other

Figures are rounded. Other includes American Indian, Alaska Native and multi-racial students.

Although colleges can no longer employ racial preferences in admissions, several legal scholars said they believe schools can still consider race in recruiting strategies. The Supreme Court, in turning away another recent legal challenge, has also signaled — at least for now — that it’s permissible for colleges to pursue diversity as an end goal so long as racial preferences aren’t the means to achieve it.

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Of the scenarios we’ve shown, an expanded recruiting strategy requires the most work from colleges. But it’s also “the big overlooked gold mine here,” said Richard Sander, a law professor at U.C.L.A. who has worked on admissions strategies at the law school level.

Such a recruiting strategy would mean not just tweaking statistical preferences, but also building relationships with high school counselors, traveling to college fairs, and perhaps developing dual-enrollment courses that introduce high school students to college work.

This kind of outreach — “to me, it’s everything,” said Jill Orcutt, the global lead for consulting with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. She was previously the associate vice chancellor for enrollment at U.C. Merced, the most diverse school in the University of California system.

Comparing our scenarios

In evaluating the impact of the scenarios shown here, we’ve compared each one with the SAT-only baseline in which colleges consider a form of academic merit and nothing else. But it’s also helpful to think about these scenarios in another way — in comparison to the world as it might look if affirmative action were still legal.

To make that comparison, we also created a model approximating the effects of affirmative action. We took the same 150-point boost we’ve used in earlier scenarios, and we applied it to Black and Hispanic students. Real-world affirmative action policies were more complicated than this. But studies have found that such policies gave Black and Hispanic students higher odds of admission equivalent to an SAT score boost of a few hundred points.

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Across all our models, Scenario 4 — rewarding students who are academic outliers given their life circumstances, while targeting a wider pool of recruits — comes the closest to creating the Black and Hispanic student shares you might get by giving a boost directly to those students:

Black and Hispanic students in each scenario

Alternatives to affirmative action

Other comparisons

Low-income students in each scenario

Alternatives to affirmative action

Other comparisons

“Low-income” refers to students in the bottom quarter of parent income distributions. Figures are rounded and show the share of students who are admitted in each of our models, under simplified assumptions.

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Notably, our simple affirmative action model produces far less economic diversity than all of these alternatives. That was also a frequent criticism of such policies: Yes, colleges used them to admit more Black and Hispanic students, but those were overwhelmingly middle- and upper-income students. In our affirmative action model, just 6 percent of admitted students come from the bottom quartile of the income distribution. That’s almost identical to the share of such students who were enrolled in the real world across these selective colleges, according to a 2017 report.

To be clear, our simplified affirmative action model also suggests selective colleges would admit a far higher share of Black and Hispanic students — nearly 34 percent — than were actually in the incoming class of 2022 (23 percent across this top tier of selective schools). That’s because our model captures the upper bound of what’s possible with such a strategy.

Some schools that were already heavily investing in expanded recruiting, like Johns Hopkins, were actually close to or even above this number. Other selective colleges that devoted more seats to legacy students and fewer resources to minority recruiting or financial aid had much lower shares. Our model, in its simplicity, effectively treats all of these varied schools as if they act in unison.

The scenarios illustrated here can’t predict what will happen next — this is a model after all, if one based on real demographics. But this exercise reveals some broad lessons that probably translate to the real world: Income by itself is a weak stand-in for race. Neighborhood and school-level data can help identify minority students. And the potential of any admissions strategy is limited without casting a wider recruiting net.

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The questions affecting each admissions parameter are also murky. Does more economic diversity replace some of what colleges lose with less racial diversity? Should students be evaluated in the context of all their disadvantages? How much should colleges yield on lower measures of academic merit to gain the advantages of a diverse campus?

Individual colleges will answer these questions in different ways. And they will do so considering factors, including financial aid and legacy admissions, that are more complex than the ones we modeled. But they’ll also have access to a lot more data than we do about each prospective student in trying to fine-tune what comes next. We will soon see what they do with it.

About this project

The data behind these admissions scenarios comes from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, which tracked a nationally representative cohort of over 23,000 U.S. high school students, starting in the ninth grade in 2009. The data collected over time includes high school transcripts, standardized test scores, Advanced Placement exam results, parents’ socioeconomic status and the colleges that students applied to and attended.

In models built with Sean Reardon and Demetra Kalogrides at Stanford, we illustrate 10,000 simulated students, constructed to resemble the demographic and academic makeup of the HSLS cohort in its senior year, 2013. We further weight that group to adjust for the racial diversity of ninth-grade students in America in 2019-20, using the Common Core of Data (for public school students) and the Private School Universe Survey (for private school students). Because we begin our simulations with students in U.S. high schools, our modeled admissions outcomes do not include international students, and we exclude international students from comparisons to the actual enrolled class of 2022 across selective colleges.

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We constructed standardized test scores for each simulated student using 1) reported SAT scores 2) ACT scores converted to an SAT scale (in cases where an SAT score was not reported) 3) a predicted SAT score constructed using a standardized test given to HSLS study participants, their family income, family socioeconomic status, Advanced Placement courses taken and exams passed, and their high school characteristics.

We used SAT scores for ease of interpretation. But many college admissions offices are moving away from them. And so we also modeled the scenarios here using an academic merit index combining GPAs, Advanced Placement exam results and standardized test scores. Those models produced broadly similar results to the ones shown here.

Our models simulate admissions to Barron’s Tier 1 schools. In their simplicity, our models do not consider students admitted with legacy status or athletic scholarships, and they do not take into account the likely availability of financial aid.

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Education

Opinion | The Ugliness of the ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill, in Charts

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Opinion | The Ugliness of the ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bill, in Charts

Sam Whitney/The New York Times

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With unusual speed, and despite an armada of controversial provisions, Congress has birthed a sprawling, nearly 900-page policy bill stuffed with hundreds of changes that will bestow trillions of dollars in tax cuts on the rich and special interests while slicing deeply into social programs relied on by millions of Americans.

Much like President Trump’s 2017 tax bill, it will add substantially to the deficit and the debt without providing any meaningful impetus to economic growth. But this time, it will be much worse. This legislation will pile about $3 trillion onto the deficit over the next 10 years, double the amount its predecessor was expected to generate. And it lacks provisions that could significantly boost economic growth.

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Our Rich Keep Getting Richer

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Impact on the deficit over 10 years

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Sources: The Washington Post; Joint Committee on Taxation; C.B.O.

Its signature and most expensive components make a slew of individual tax cuts — cuts instituted in 2017 that primarily benefit wealthy Americans — permanent. To help pay for them, the bill makes student loans more expensive, slashes incentives for clean energy and reduces funding for and access to Medicaid. Missing yet again, despite Mr. Trump’s promises, is any effort to raise the tax rate on carried interest earnings, a major win for private equity. But the bill does deliver on one of his campaign promises: serving up tax deductions (albeit not permanently) for overtime pay, tips, car loan interest and for seniors.

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Millions Lose Access to Medicaid

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Sources: KFF; C.B.O.

Note: Minor changes at the end of the Senate process may result in a slightly smaller increase in uninsured. Projections do not include other potential changes in the number of uninsured.

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The biggest and most damaging cuts are those to Medicaid — cuts that got only more draconian as the bill moved from the House to the Senate. About a third of the savings come from the imposition of a work requirement on recipients. While Republicans claim they are only attacking waste, fraud and abuse, the resulting paperwork to comply with the requirement is expected to daunt many and result in lost coverage. All told, these changes will cost over 10 million Americans their health care, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The Cost of College Will Soar

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Average monthly student loan payments

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Source: Student Borrower Protection Center

The legislation largely guts the Biden administration’s student debt repayment program that offered lower- and middle-income families generous terms. As a result, average monthly obligations for borrowers will surge, with a typical loan recipient with a college degree and an annual income of $80,300 paying an additional $2,929 per year.

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What Climate Change?

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Clean energy investments announced since the Inflation Reduction Act

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Source: Clean Investment Monitor

Note: Data is from the third quarter of 2022 through the first quarter of 2025. Excludes roughly $14 billion where the congressional district is unclear or the seat is vacant.

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The bill rolls back many of the clean energy tax incentives and investments created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, throwing a major roadblock in the way of combating climate change. Since the passage of the act, the United States has been experiencing a boom in clean energy investments, with $321 billion spent and $522 billion more on the way. Many of these projects will very likely be abandoned. Most Republican legislators are supporting this despite the fact that a vast majority of these investments have taken place in Republican congressional districts, where permitting is generally easier and weather can be more conducive to solar and wind power generation.

Trump’s Biggest Budget Buster

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The relative scale of Trump’s domestic policy bill

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Sources: Center for a Responsible Federal Budget; the Budget Lab

The package adds to our national debt in a way that dwarfs any of the other packages passed in the eight years since Mr. Trump first took office. His signature 2017 tax cut added a relatively modest $1.5 trillion to the 10-year deficit projection, but it did so by scheduling some of its provisions to expire after eight years, thereby setting the stage for the current legislation, which makes those changes permanent. (The bill uses the same gimmick with some of its tax breaks to keep costs down.)

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Spending Has Drifted Out of Balance

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Federal revenue vs. spending

The resulting deficit puts our economy in a perilous place. Over the past 50 years, federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product averaged 21.1 percent. But since ballooning during the Covid-19 pandemic, spending has remained stubbornly above this average. With tax increases politically off the table, this means larger deficits.

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How the Budget Fits Together

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The biggest pieces of the budget

The bill is just the latest, and worst, example of a policy followed by both Republicans and Democrats in recent years: Take the easy way out and let deficits climb. The costs of Medicare and Medicaid are rising relentlessly and are now just over 5 percent of G.D.P., compared with 1.2 percent in 1975. Social Security’s outlays have also grown. And now, because of increasing debt and higher interest rates, the cost of servicing the national debt has begun to soar. Allowing the 2017 tax cuts to expire, which effectively would have raised taxes on 62 percent of Americans, could have been highly unpopular. But it was also necessary.

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One Big Borrowing Bill

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Sources: The Budget Lab; C.B.O.

Note: Data from estimates released July 1, 2025.

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Instead of growing to $2.7 trillion in 2035 from $1.9 trillion this year, this legislation will boost the deficit to $3.08 trillion a decade from now, according to one estimate. Exclude the gimmick of scheduling certain tax breaks to expire — an unlikely event, as demonstrated by Congress’s unwillingness to let the 2017 cuts fade — and the projected deficit climbs to $3.21 trillion. This puts total publicly held national debt at as much as 130 percent of G.D.P., materially higher than at any other time in our nation’s history. These higher deficits put upward pressure on interest rates, weakening the economy, and even more important, create an enormous debt burden for future generations to deal with.

The More You Make, the More You Benefit

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The bill’s impact on household finances, by income quintile

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Source: The Budget Lab and C.B.O. calculations

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Note: Data from estimates released June 30, 2025.

The legislation will be far more beneficial for the wealthiest, at the expense of those farther down the economic ladder. The bill makes permanent a regime in which the richest fifth of American households — those with annual incomes of $120,390 and above — will get an average benefit of 2.3 percent of their income, or $6,055. In contrast, the fifth of Americans with the least wealth will suffer an estimated loss of $560, largely because of the effect of the cuts to Medicaid and food stamps.

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The Economic Benefit Is Negligible

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The White House predicts much more growth from this bill than other models

Source: Center for a Responsible Federal Budget

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Note: Tax Foundation and C.E.A. estimates are based on the Senate version of the policy bill. All other estimates are based on the version passed by the House.

As for the impact of the legislation on economic growth, the White House is operating in its own universe. Private forecasters generally expect only a small bump to gross domestic product, with the Budget Lab at Yale University projecting even less growth. The White House Council of Economic Advisers, on the other hand, asserts that growth could reach 4.9 percent in 2028, multiples higher than other estimates.

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In my 50 years of following tax and budget policy, I don’t believe I have seen another piece of legislation that would have such broad and deep impacts on virtually every American. No important social welfare program like Medicaid has ever been rolled back to this extent. The tax changes will also exacerbate income inequality. It is a result that should embarrass the Republicans — and may well come back to haunt them in 2026 and 2028.

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Here Is All the Science at Risk in Trump’s Clash With Harvard

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Here Is All the Science at Risk in Trump’s Clash With Harvard

The federal government annually spends billions funding research at Harvard, part of a decades-old system that is little understood by the public but essential to American science.

This spring, nearly every dollar of that payment was cut off by the Trump administration, endangering much of the university’s research.

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Grants terminated at Harvard

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This picture represents nearly every grant the government has canceled at Harvard.

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This one has tracked the health of 116,00 American women continuously since 1989.

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This one supported domestic Ph.D. students training to be America’s next neuroscientists.

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This one studied the role of telemedicine in treating opioid addiction.

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These two probed how salamanders regenerate their legs, to eventually aid human amputees.

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These sought advances that could one day enable Navy divers to breathe underwater without oxygen tanks.

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This one funded work with rural school districts to test ideas to lift student outcomes and attendance.

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Now all of these projects are in jeopardy.

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The New York Times was able to identify more than 900 terminated grants, using court records, government databases and other internal university sources — a near-complete accounting of the cuts in the Trump administration’s escalating campaign to cripple the university.

The White House and Harvard have resumed negotiations to resolve the government’s claims that the nation’s oldest university has “failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.” But while researchers await the outcome — or that of a parallel lawsuit brought by Harvard — the federal support for every one of these projects remains halted.

The Trump administration has canceled research grants at other universities, too, ending studies related to racial diversity and equity, scaling back the reach of federal science agencies, and sometimes attacking universities it views as ideological foes.

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But Harvard is unique both in the volume of its research output and the extent of these cuts — the government has threatened to end every research dollar to the university. The canceled grants accounted for here add up to about $2.6 billion in awarded federal funds, nearly half of which has already been spent according to government data.

“Even ‘grant’ is a problematic word, because people think they’re just sort of handing this money out for us to do what we want with,” said Marc Weisskopf, who directs a center for environmental health at Harvard that lost its funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

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On the contrary, the government is much more explicit in competitive research applications and grant reviews: It wants more neuroscientists. It wants better opioid treatment. It wants to know how lightweight origami-inspired shelters and antennas can be unfurled in war zones.

The money the government sends to Harvard is, in effect, not a subsidy to advance the university’s mission. It’s a payment for the role Harvard plays in advancing the research mission of the United States.

This is the science model the U.S. has developed over 80 years: The government sets the agenda and funds the work; university scientists design the studies and find the answers. The president’s willingness to upend that model has revealed its fragility. There is no alternative in the U.S. to produce the kind of scientific advancements represented by these grants.

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Foundational discoveries and future cures

Much of what the government funds at universities is “basic” research — the foundational knowledge that lays the groundwork for technological advances, disease cures and improvements in quality of life.

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Daniel Nocera, a Harvard chemist, had four total grants terminated from the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. His lab develops new chemical methods to address practical problems, such as developing an artificial leaf that can convert air and sunlight into biofuels, or extracting oxygen from seawater so that divers could one day swim without a heavy oxygen tank.

“I have to answer these questions that a company doesn’t have time to answer,” he said.

That’s because basic research takes years. And it produces insights that aren’t profitable on the time scale of corporate quarterly earnings.

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Stephen Buratowski’s project to understand how genes are expressed and regulated is in its 25th year of federal funding. An early discovery in his lab used yeast cells to reveal how different steps are coordinated in the formation of messenger RNA, a mechanism later confirmed in human cells by researchers at other universities. Today, 20 years later, several companies are testing potential cancer treatments built on that knowledge.

Such long-term federal investments are inherently risky and expensive (a single tube containing a teardrop size of purified enzyme used in Professor Buratowski’s lab costs $400 to $500). And some ideas don’t prove as fruitful. But the government can bear this risk better than industry or individual universities can.

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“It’s almost as if the government is acting as a venture capitalist,” Professor Buratowski said. “They’re putting out an ad saying, ‘We’ve got a pool of money, send us your best ideas.’”

Dragana Rogulja’s Harvard lab studies how chronic sleep deprivation harms the body. Her lab discovered that when fruit flies or mice are deprived of sleep, it damages their gut, which can be fatal. But when sleep-deprived flies were then treated with antioxidant drugs, they had normal life spans.

She received a grant from the Department of Defense’s health agency to detect biological signals in samples of blood, urine or saliva that warn of organ damage from sleep loss in mice. “If we are right,” her research proposal stated, “this would be a major breakthrough that would offer practical ways to mitigate health damage caused by poor sleep.”

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Without researchers at Harvard or other universities doing this foundational work, it’s not clear who would. The government doesn’t have the expertise. Companies don’t have the luxury of time. And this same research would cost far more outside academia, where it runs on graduate students working long hours at relatively low cost.

Evidence for public policy

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Other grants at Harvard produce something different from a lab discovery or a medical cure. This research provides evidence that shapes public policy, like nutritional guidelines, federal laws or local education initiatives.

A federal rule in 2018 banned artificial trans fats, following the findings of a decades-long longitudinal study of women’s health based at Harvard.

“A lot of things we take for granted — ‘Oh, everybody always knew that’ — no actually, we published those findings,” said Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition who leads that study.

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Of similar direct interest to the government, other Harvard researchers are trying to determine how well telemedicine appointments — sometimes paid for by Medicaid and Medicare — connect opioid use disorder patients with lifesaving treatments. (Some of the National Institutes of Health funding for that research goes right back to the government, in the form of fees to access Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services health data).

Other researchers are studying how well community college students have fared amid remote learning, after a pandemic boost in federal support for community colleges. Others are working on how to implement smoke-free policies in low-income housing after a move by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to curb secondhand smoke.

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“We are directly informing the government’s capacity to work to serve its constituents,” said Vaughan Rees, the lead investigator on that HUD-funded research.

Just as much of basic research couldn’t be done in corporate labs, this kind of work — often relying on large-scale surveys, or partnerships that cross universities, hospitals and countries — couldn’t be funded by Harvard alone.

“No university could do that,” said Lisa Berkman, a professor of public policy and epidemiology who works on international studies. “This is science that rests on a public investment.”

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Training the next generation of scientists

Federal funding also fosters not just science, but scientists. Grants pay the salaries of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Grant terms regularly require that lead researchers incorporate student training into their work.

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Jessica Whited, a professor of stem cell and regenerative biology, was the first in her family to become a scientist. As an undergraduate, she earned a scholarship at the University of Missouri and worked part-time under the federal work-study program. As an early-career researcher, her research was funded by competitive N.I.H. grants.

“I wouldn’t be sitting here today without the government,” she said.

Her lab studies how the axolotl, a salamander species, can regenerate its limbs, producing insights that could lead to treatments for human amputees. In 2019, President Trump awarded her the Presidential Early Career Award, the nation’s highest honor for early-career scientists and engineers. Last month, the government canceled the grants that provided nearly all of her funding.

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The canceled grants highlighted below are specifically designed for training and professional development. They include National Science Foundation fellowships for undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and early-career researchers, and similar training opportunities from the N.I.H. Together, these awards cover about a tenth of the total funding cut by the government at Harvard.

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Terminated grants for training and career development

Paul Bump, a postdoctoral fellow, was just awarded one of these grants — the first of his career — in January. He wants to uncover the fundamental mechanisms of where stem cells come from in certain animals that, unlike humans, continue to produce them throughout their lives. (He works, in particular, on the three-banded panther worm, which can regenerate into two worms when cut in half.)

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“What are the grand biological processes that explain that?” he said, describing what amounts to nature’s solution for making stem cells. The public’s down payment on the answer was about $75,000 a year to fund Mr. Bump’s work for two years.

Harvard is trying for now to provide stopgap funding for many of these researchers and students, but it can’t permanently replace the government. That’s also because federal funds support much of the infrastructure that researchers rely on. Grants also cover the indirect costs Harvard pays to maintain facilities and research support staff. And some larger grants directly fund research hubs that assemble shared resources and facilities for many scientists from different specialties working on related topics.

For 18 years, Harvard has hosted a center studying worker safety, health and well-being funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an arm of the C.D.C., where researchers from multiple institutions have studied the health of construction workers, Sept. 11 first responders, health care workers and warehouse workers.

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The center’s canceled grant jeopardizes its active research projects, but also the partnerships with hospitals, insurance companies and employers that have taken years to develop, said Glorian Sorensen, a Harvard professor who co-directs the center.

“This is larger than any individual grant,” she said. “What we are losing is a future.”

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Explore the data

Click on the chart below to explore the canceled grants for yourself:

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About the data

To account for Harvard’s terminated grants, we used data from multiple sources: letters from government agencies included in court filings by the university; lists of terminated grants provided by the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation; a crowd-sourced list of grant terminations at Grant Watch; and some additional data from internal university sources. We interviewed 23 researchers whose grant funding was terminated, who confirmed those specific cancellations.

Our charts show the total obligated amount for each grant using data from USAspending.gov, which reflects the funds that the government has set aside for each project. In cases where a grant was extended or renewed, this figure typically accounts for the entire lifetime of the grant to date, and not just the most recent renewal. Obligated funds for multiyear grant awards are typically paid out gradually over a number of years. Our charts do not account for this outlayed spending — the portion of these obligated funds that have been paid by the government so far — because there are substantial lags in this spending data for some agencies. This analysis did not include the $100 million or so in federal contracts, separate from grants, much of which also fund scientific research.

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Judge Delays Ruling on Trump Efforts to Bar Harvard’s International Students

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Judge Delays Ruling on Trump Efforts to Bar Harvard’s International Students

A federal district judge on Monday delayed a ruling on whether to continue blocking President Trump’s proclamation that barred international students from attending Harvard University.

A temporary injunction on implementing the proclamation remains in place until next week.

Judge Allison D. Burroughs said she would rule by next week on the White House proclamation, after hearing arguments from lawyers for both Harvard and the Trump Administration on Monday morning.

About 5,000 international students are enrolled at Harvard. Another 2,000 recent graduates are in the United States on visas permitting them to work temporarily.

Losing those students could deliver a disabling blow to the campus’s finances, curriculum and identity.

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This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

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