The Heritage Foundation has released sweeping model legislation aimed at giving state lawmakers a ready-made tool to enact conservative higher education priorities — going even further than the Trump administration’s own attempt to reshape colleges through its widely rejected “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.”
The think tank unveiled the bill on August 4, just one day after Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent college leaders a letter urging them to voluntarily commit to a similar set of reforms. Together, the two moves represent a renewed push by the federal government and its allies to force changes on campuses after last year’s compact was almost universally rejected by the nine universities it was originally sent to.
Rather than appealing directly to university administrators, the Heritage Foundation’s approach targets state legislatures, giving them template language to tie public funding to institutional compliance. The bill covers an extensive range of policy areas: admissions, faculty hiring, curriculum oversight, campus speech, immigration enforcement, foreign funding disclosures, and DEI restrictions.
Among its provisions, the bill would require public colleges to accept the Classic Learning Test as equivalent to the SAT and ACT, and would bar institutions from using factors like ZIP code, neighborhood, school, or family income as proxies for race or ethnicity in admissions decisions. It also mandates “institutional neutrality,” barring colleges from taking official positions on political or social issues, and would eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion offices entirely, along with any DEI-related programming operating outside a formal office.
The legislation goes further than Trump’s original compact in several respects. It would financially penalize colleges that admit students deemed statistically unlikely to graduate on time, requiring institutions to pay off a portion of those students’ remaining federal loan debt if they fail to graduate within eight years. It would also lower the reporting threshold for foreign gifts and contracts from the current federal standard of $250,000 down to $50,000, and would require colleges to enter into formal agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, deputizing campus police to carry out certain federal immigration enforcement functions.
The bill’s “Deportable Offenses” section would compel colleges to immediately suspend or terminate any student or employee whose visa is invalidated by federal notice — a provision that, had it been law during the Trump administration’s mass visa revocations earlier this year, would have forced schools to unenroll students whose legal status was later restored just weeks afterward.
Other measures include prioritizing faculty hires in “underrepresented” academic subfields, mandatory free expression training for incoming students, and giving university governing boards or state regulators authority to strike courses from general education requirements for failing to represent a “broad spectrum of viewpoints.”
The Heritage Foundation has defended the effort as necessary given what it describes as insufficient voluntary adoption of these principles by universities. Critics, however, have characterized the broader compact strategy in far harsher terms. Macalester College president emeritus Brian Rosenberg described McMahon’s letter as “a threat packaged as a gift” that differs from the compact “only in the sense that it attempts to achieve through subtlety what it failed to accomplish through direct assault.”
A 2024 report from the American Association of University Professors found that Heritage and similar think tanks, backed by wealthy donors, have played a significant role in shaping a broader political backlash against K-12 and higher education, in part through drafting model legislation like this bill.
Whether the legislation gains traction will likely depend heavily on which party controls a given statehouse, with Republican-led legislatures seen as far more likely to embrace its restrictions than Democratic-led ones.
