The Trump administration’s effort to end “wokeness” in the military is reshaping the Pentagon’s ties with U.S. higher education, breaking long-standing connections with some top universities while redirecting new attention toward Christian colleges and public universities, according to an Associated Press report.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved last week to realign where the military’s Senior Service College Fellowship will send mid-career service members for advanced study, expelling more than a dozen elite colleges from a program described as a pipeline to upper leadership ranks, according to the report. College leaders said the shift—though limited in size—could be a signal of additional cuts affecting the opportunity for service members to take classes and pursue advanced credentials.
So far, the Pentagon’s changes have been more targeted than some of Hegseth’s broad rhetoric, the report said. Hegseth has made sweeping statements about canceling military attendance at some schools he denounces as anti-American, but the fellowship restrictions have focused on a defined set of graduate study opportunities, not on the broader Tuition Assistance program that pays part of the cost for many service members.
Tuition Assistance, the report said, allows active-duty or reserve service members to seek financial support for studies at nearly any U.S. college. The funding flows to hundreds of campuses, and it continues to cover a large share of service members—about 200,000 active-duty or reserve personnel, the report said—while the benefit pays a maximum of $4,500 a year. The report also said that, based on an Associated Press analysis of 2024 data, about 350 service members used Tuition Assistance to attend Harvard, Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University and other colleges being targeted in the fellowship.
The same AP analysis found that more than 50,000 service members studied through Tuition Assistance at the American Public University System, a for-profit online education provider, and that more than a third of the Tuition Assistance recipients attended for-profit colleges, surpassing the number who attended any private, nonprofit colleges. It also said public universities take in the most military students under the program, with about 4 in 10 choosing those campuses.
Some educators and higher-education leaders questioned the precedent the Pentagon’s cuts represent. Lindsey Tepe, who advises on military learning at the American Council on Education, said the Pentagon is setting “a bad precedent” by taking a stance on where service members should enroll, and she said the change was the start of a broader effort to reshape military education.
The Pentagon memorandum last week identified the Senior Service College Fellowship as the focus of the first set of restrictions, the report said, and it did not mention other military education programs that can pay for schooling in fields such as law, medicine and engineering. The fellowship itself is described as small: the Pentagon said it involves fewer than 80 students across 15 universities being carved out this fall. Alongside several Ivy League campuses, the Pentagon said the fellowship will ban schools including Georgetown University, Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In addition to the fellowship cuts, the report said Harvard faces separate, deeper restrictions. The Pentagon said it will bar all graduate-level professional military education at Harvard, along with fellowships and certificates. Harvard’s school of government said it is allowing active-duty service members to defer admission for up to four years and is arranging “expedited consideration” at other colleges, including the University of Chicago and Tufts University, the report said.
While proponents of the changes framed them as steering military education away from schools they criticize, others argued the Pentagon may be sacrificing technical expertise. William Hubbard, a vice president at Veterans Education Success, said removing access to selective campuses could undercut experience in areas such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum computing. Hubbard said, “I’m not sure our enemies would be too upset about this,” adding that he would see such developments as a benefit if he were in Beijing.
Hegseth’s memo also listed 15 colleges the Pentagon would use as replacements for those being removed from the fellowship, the report said. The top choice was Liberty University, a Christian school that enrolls 16,000 students on its Virginia campus and another 120,000 in online programs. The report said Liberty already has a strong military presence, enrolling more than 7,000 students using Tuition Assistance, and it noted the school’s recent leadership changes amid scandals, including the 2020 departure of longtime president Jerry Falwell Jr. Liberty said it had not yet coordinated with the Pentagon regarding a potential partnership but expressed support for service members.
The replacement list also includes Hillsdale College, another conservative Christian institution. Hillsdale President Larry Arnn said too many other colleges have abandoned the nation’s founding principles, and he said officers seeking serious education in those principles should look to Hillsdale. The report said the Pentagon’s replacements further include major flagship state universities such as the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina, with Hegseth saying the plan is meant to ensure a “more rigorous and relevant education” to prepare officers for the complexities of modern warfare.