This week, former President Donald Trump laid out a number of policy positions should he win reelection in 2024.
According to the Washington Examiner, one of his ideas includes yanking the endowments of universities that practice affirmative action. The plan is one part of his overall plan for higher education under his administration.
In his overall goal to tackle the current issues with higher education, including the outrageous costs associated with attending a university, Trump said he'd take aggressive actions to change all of that.
Trump also said he'd lean on the accreditation standards to ensure "real standards" are imposed on institutions of higher learning.
"The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left, and we will do that," Trump said in a recent video uploaded first to Truth Social.
Donald Trump announced his plan to reform higher education and save students from “the radical left” and “Marxist maniacs” in a new campaign video. https://t.co/Fr39AoGz8V pic.twitter.com/IFhk94kfYJ
— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) May 3, 2023
"The accreditors are supposed to ensure that schools are not ripping off students and taxpayers, but they have failed totally," he said.
The former president added: "When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics."
He threatened a 100% tax on university endowments for the institutions that "persist in explicit, unlawful discrimination under the guise of equity."
"A portion of the seized funds will then be used as restitution for victims of these illegal and unjust policies, policies that hurt our country so badly," Trump said. "Colleges have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars from hard-working taxpayers, and now we are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all."
While reform is desperately needed in that realm, the idea of taxing endowments isn't popular with a large chunk of the Republican Party.
That certainly won't stop Trump from pursuing it if he wins the White House next year, and his ideas could also help secure new support from college-age voters and their parents who are sick and tired of being ripped to shreds financially to put their kids through school.
The idea was one of several policy matters Trump spoke of this week.
Only time will tell if Trump will win the nomination and the White House, but we certainly need someone like him to reverse the course of America's decline.
