Pentagon may bar tuition aid for top universities in Hegseth's crackdown on 'biased' schools

Military officers could soon find dozens of top colleges and universities across the United States abruptly off limits for tuition assistance as part of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s campaign against schools he describes as being biased against the US military and sponsoring “troublesome partnerships with foreign adversaries.”

The uncertainty about tuition assistance and eligible programs for Defense Department funding has led to confusion and concern amongst service members who have already applied or been accepted to these schools. Officials also said they were concerned it amounted to an attempt to purge diversity of thought from the military.

The policy was rolled out in a memo signed by Hegseth last week saying that beginning with the 2026-2027 school year, the Pentagon would be severing its relationship with Harvard University and discontinuing all graduate-level professional military education, fellowships and certificate programs there for active-duty service members.

Hegseth ordered the military services to “evaluate all existing graduate programs for active-duty members at Ivy League universities and any other universities that similarly diminish critical thinking and have significant adversary involvement, and determine whether they deliver cost-effective, strategic education for future senior leaders when compared to public universities and military masters programs,” according to a source familiar with the memo.

The guidance’s broad terminology has injected confusion and concern into the military branches, who have begun to compile lists of colleges and universities that may have a moderate to high risk of being impacted, meaning the Pentagon wouldn’t fund any service members’ higher education there.

A preliminary list of at-risk schools compiled by the Army for troops enrolling in law school and reviewed by CNN characterizes the following schools as being at “moderate to high risk” of being banned: American University, Boston College, Boston University, Brown University, Carnegie Mellon, Case Western University, Columbia University, College of William and Mary, Cornell University, Duke, Emory, Florida Institute of Technology, Fordham, Georgetown, George Washington University, Harvard, Hawaii Pacific University, Johns Hopkins University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, MIT, Northeastern University, Northwestern University, New York University, Pepperdine, Princeton, Stanford, Tufts, University of Miami, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Washington University in St Louis, and Yale.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/13/politics/us-military-top-universities-tuition-assistance

The Republican war on education and science continues...