Let the Left Copy Hillsdale

Since the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights continues to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as interpreted in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the discussion surrounding federal funding and its relationship with higher education has intensified.

For decades, the vast majority of American colleges and universities have grown dependent on federal funding as a means of sustaining an ever-growing administrative bureaucracy. Across the same span of time, universities have grown progressively less efficient and astronomically more expensive.

Non-subsidized colleges provide a model for how universities can function without billions of federal dollars. It is within the context of this undemanding and indulgent relationship with government that universities, especially those at the top of the academic food chain, have grown more intensely ideological. One solution to the dilemma posed by this deterioration is a higher-education sector fully independent of federal aid, as exemplified by schools such as Hillsdale College and Patrick Henry College, which have rejected government funding to offer an alternative to ideologically captured institutions.

This model, basically free to taxpayers and tailored to individual students’ desires, should be further released into the mainstream. Though these non-subsidized colleges face significant challenges, they break the monopoly on higher education and provide a model for how colleges and universities can function without billions of federal dollars.

The first challenge these institutions face is financial. Without government funding in the form of federally guaranteed student loans and grants, one might assume that alternative higher education comes at a price exorbitantly higher than other private colleges and universities.

On the contrary, private universities that do not receive government funds often cost less to attend than the average private university. The average private university’s sticker tuition and fees for 2024-25 came in at around $43,500, whereas the eight regionally accredited “independent” universities came in far beneath that number, at $23,546. This number also falls nearly $1,000 below average out-of-state tuition costs at public universities.

While these numbers represent a value for students, they also mean that the institutions in question must learn to operate with less.

Another challenge facing non-subsidized colleges is the fact that they are disproportionately conservative and overtly religious. This drastically limits the number of prospective students who might be interested in attending and raises an important question: Can an inherently ideological institution remedy the problem of ideological capture in higher education? At first glance, this seems unlikely. But intellectual diversity is more than the number of stereotypically “conservative” or “liberal” faculty members at a given institution. Intellectual diversity should mean that the nation has a patchwork of institutions free to explore ideas, methods, and projects independent of influence from the federal government.

This model, basically free to taxpayers and tailored to individual students’ desires, should be further released into the mainstream by the continued assault on university politicization currently being pursued by the Trump administration. In our current higher-education climate, hundreds of liberal-arts universities function as left-wing versions of Hillsdale, pushing their own ideological narratives onto their own student bodies. Hillsdale itself provides a model both for how conservatives can replicate and improve upon these institutions—and how even leftist institutions are perfectly capable of functioning without the staggering quantity of taxpayer dollars they currently consume. The billions of taxpayer dollars saved by promoting academic independence could enhance academic research capabilities, make trade schools more accessible, or simply return to taxpayers their hard-earned dollars.

The niche corner of the higher-education marketplace operated by non-subsidized independent schools offers more than ideological diversification; it offers a model for how private colleges and universities from a plethora of backgrounds and ideologies can freely compete without federal funding.

Harrison Hutton is an intern at the John Locke Foundation and a student at Patrick Henry College.