Trump's Trials - Why efforts to get college students to vote may get harder

Episode Date: April 15, 2026

To figure out how to boost student voting, colleges have relied on a study about campus voter registration and turnout rates. A Trump administration investigation has cut schools off from new data, as NPR's Hansi Lo Wang reports.Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

I'm Scott Detrow, and this is Trump's terms from NPR. Every episode, we bring you one story from NPR's coverage of the Trump administration with the focus on actions and policies that take the presidency into uncharted territory. Here's the latest from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin. President Trump's attacks on certain colleges and universities around DEI and other issues have made news for months, but less well known has been the administration's focus on the effort by many colleges to boost voting by students. advocates want to engage students who are part of an age group that is least likely to vote in the U.S.

An investigation launched by the administration makes those efforts more difficult. NPR's Hansi Luong has our story. More than a thousand colleges and universities use statistics from a study by Tufts University to track levels of student voter registration and turnout on their campuses. This data is extremely powerful. Clarissa Unger of the Nonpartisan Students Learned Students Vote Coalition says the study helped change the perspective of many school administrators. Many colleges and universities had no idea how many of their students were voting,

and many, especially elite institutions, assumed that all of their students were voting. But in this midterm election year, colleges that want to increase civic engagement will have to do it without the latest student voter trends to help them develop targeted programs for their campuses. The researchers behind the study recently stopped putting out new statistics because of an investigation by the Trump administration's education department. The agency says it's looking into unspecified reports that the study is violating a federal student data privacy law. Thanks for joining us.

At an online meeting in March, some right-wing election activists revealed a backstory for the investigation, including Cleena Mitchell, a Republican election lawyer who helped President Trump try to overturn the 2020 election. Mitchell pointed to a document by Heather Honey, an activist who last year became an official at the Department of Homeland Security.

One of the things that she did was sent over her report and a proposal to the Department of Education to Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education, to say, you've got to stop this. In a statement, the DHS Public Affairs Office said Honey, quote, has not had involvement with the Department of Education's investigation. And the Honey's report is public. Brendan Fisher, who tracks the far-right election activist movement at the Campaign Legal Center, sees this as a latest connection between the activists and the Trump administration. This shows the power and influence. that a network of election conspiracy theorists are having over government policy and over the

way that elections are run and civic participation is studied. The studies researchers say they have not violated student data privacy law. Fisher says the Education Department's investigation is driven by a conspiracy theory based on a suspicion of any effort to encourage voter participation, particularly among populations that are perceived to support Democrats. Still, many college administrators are feeling pressure from a letter by the Education Department, telling schools to hold off on using the study statistics this year until the department's investigation ends. There were sort of veiled threats in there that if you do something wrong, you could lose your federal funds.

Amanda Fuchs Miller was an Education Department official during the Biden administration. It's very unusual to send out a letter like that when there are no findings, and nobody is found to have done anything wrong. I'm a political scientist, and I believe strongly that everybody should. should vote. Melissa Michelson is Dean of Arts and Sciences at Menlo College, a school in California's Silicon Valley that has participated in the student voting study. But if I have to choose between being financially responsible and ensuring that Menlo College can stay open because our students can receive telegrams or getting this data to inform our civic engagement coalition, I'm going to pick financial responsibility every time. For schools that rely on federal funding, Michelson says

it makes improving student voting harder to do, especially in a major election year. Hansi Luong, NPR News. Before we wrap up a reminder, you can find more coverage of the Trump administration on the NPR Politics Podcast, where you can hear NPR's political reporters break down the day's biggest political news with new episodes every weekday afternoon. And thanks, as always, to our NPR Plus supporters who hear every episode of the show without sponsor messages. You can learn more at plus.npr.org.

I'm Scott Detrow. Thanks for listening to Trump's terms from NPR.