Within the past decade, most women’s colleges in the United States – including Smith College, a liberal arts college in Northampton, Massachusetts – have expanded their admissions policies, allowing transgender students to also attend. Many of these policies allow transgender women to apply, while policies for transgender men and nonbinary students vary more widely.

The Trump administration announced on May 4, 2026, that it is investigating Smith College for violating Title IX, a law that prohibits discrimination based on someone’s sex.

“An all-women’s college loses all meaning if it is admitting biological males,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a statement issued by the Education Department.

As a scholar of higher education who studies the experiences of LGBTQ+ students, I think it is important to recognize that women’s colleges offer a unique experience to students, including transgender and queer students. They create environments where students who are marginalized by their genders see themselves as leaders.

Women’s colleges have also long been welcoming places for lesbian and queer relationships, offering community and support as attitudes about gender and sexuality have changed.

A prior focus on trans athletes

Up until now, the Trump administration’s policy agenda on transgender rights and education has primarily focused on whether universities should let transgender students participate in college sports.

The Trump administration froze US$175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania in 2025 because it objected to how the school allowed transgender students to participate on women’s sports teams. One trans woman athlete named Lia Thomas, in particular, gained recognition for her strong performance on the women’s swim team at Penn.

The administration released the frozen funding after Penn agreed in July 2025 to block trans athletes like Thomas from participating in women’s sports.

Some of the sports-related lawsuits the administration filed in 2025 – like those targeting Penn and the University of Maine for allowing trans women to participate in women’s sports – have been settled out of court.

Other Title IX investigations into San José State University and the University of Nevada-Reno, for example, are still ongoing.

Understanding role of women’s colleges

Women’s colleges were created in the mid-to-late 1800s, when women were largely not allowed to enroll in most colleges. Women’s colleges became places where these students would be taken seriously as women and leaders.

As more colleges went coeducational, women’s colleges had to explain their purpose and evolving missions over time.

After World War II, for example, people said that American women who were working jobs outside the home should stop. Women’s colleges again explained their mission to the public, stating they could prepare women for the workforce and home. So, while women’s colleges were created to respond to the gendered exclusion of women, their missions have shifted as societal understandings of gender have evolved, too.

Transgender students didn’t suddenly appear at women’s colleges or other higher education institutions. But in the early 2000s, more students began to openly identify as transgender, and colleges increasingly had to decide how to adjust their policies.

Some older alumni of women’s colleges have expressed concern about admitting trans students, including whether allowing them affects a women’s college’s reputation, traditions or identity. These debates can matter a lot because most women’s colleges in the U.S. are private liberal arts colleges that depend on tuition payments and donations.

But some alumni have supported more expansive admissions policies consistent with the broader mission of women’s education.

While women’s schools have presented their own challenges for some queer and transgender students, they have long remained significant to the LGBTQ+ community.

What should women’s colleges be?

The number of women’s colleges has declined sharply over the past few decades.

In 1960 there were about 230 such colleges. In 2023 there were 30 women’s colleges in the United States. As more colleges became coeducational, women had more options, and many women’s colleges either closed, merged or began admitting men.

This decline in women’s colleges helps explain why debates over admitting trans students to women’s colleges are so charged. Each decision becomes part of a broader question about what women’s colleges are and should be.

The conversation around transgender and nonbinary students attending women’s colleges became more public in the 2010s. In 2013 Smith College denied admission to a trans woman because the student indicated that she was male on her federal financial aid forms.

This resulted in a big debate between Smith alumni and students about what the school’s admission policy should be. Leading up to this point, several women’s colleges – including Barnard, Smith, Mills and Wellesley – treated trans student applicants on a case-by-case basis, or in an informal way.

In 2014, Mount Holyoke, a women’s college in western Massachusetts, created one of the most expansive early policies on this issue. It allowed applications from transgender women and from some applicants who identified as transgender more broadly, while continuing to exclude cisgender men.

Smith also announced a new policy in 2015 that allowed anyone who identified as female to apply and be admitted.

Today, most but not all women’s colleges have their own policies regarding the admission of trans students. These policies vary: Some admit transgender women and some nonbinary applicants, while others are more restrictive. Many do not admit applicants who identify as men, including transgender men.

Mixed experiences for trans students

Some research finds that students overall at women’s colleges report higher levels of support – including from faculty – than students at coeducational colleges. Some transgender students arrive expecting these colleges to offer a safe and accepting atmosphere.

But some transgender students have negative experiences at women’s colleges and can feel like they are being watched too closely, ignored or both. These problems aren’t just because of interactions with other people. They can also occur when trans students encounter student records, bathrooms, housing and campus rules that assume everyone is either a man or a woman, or identifies with the sex they were assigned at birth.

Transgender students often report that college can feel less welcoming to them. Research on trans college students shows that academic, cocurricular, peer and institutional contexts shape how welcoming or alienating campus feels.

My research with other colleagues also examines how trans and queer students thrive in college, whether at co-ed or women’s colleges. Many form close-knit communities and are vital members of their campuses. The difficulties trans students face are not inherent to being trans. I believe they are produced by policies and systems that marginalize them because they are trans.

Barring transgender people from attending women’s colleges would block a higher education pathway for transgender and queer students.

Women’s colleges were created in response to gender inequality. I believe this history should push them to keep making college more open and supportive for students excluded because of gender.

Alex C. Lange receives funding from the Spencer Foundation.

U.S. politicians have perhaps never been more divided, including when it comes to their views on higher education.

Republicans are pushing for more control over the day-to-day work at colleges and universities. Some Republican politicians say that universities are elitist, woke organizations that are out of touch with the general public and lack value for most people. In step with this rhetoric, they have cut funding to higher education, including slashing grants to universities with ethnically and racially diverse student bodies.

Democrats, meanwhile, broadly support higher education, praising it for its role in improving people’s lives. They are challenging these cuts and the Trump administration’s mounting interference into how colleges are run.

Despite these differences, both Democrats and Republicans invest billions in higher education and issue billions annually in federal earmarks. Federal earmarks are taxpayer-funded spending provisions that Congress members allocate, with minimal oversight, to projects or organizations that typically align with their priorities.

For fiscal year 2026, spanning October 2025 through September 2026, Congress allocated US$16 billion in earmarks to a range of causes – approximately $2 billion of which went to colleges and universities across the country.

We are scholars of higher education who have analyzed federal earmarking patterns in recent years. Our May 2026 study considers how party affiliation shapes universities’ earmark outcomes.

Where do Republicans and Democrats funnel academic earmarks? Does either party put this money where their mouth is? The data tells a story of partisan preferences that are predictable in some ways and surprising in others.

Understanding federal earmarks

Some critics call federal earmarks “congressional pork” and describe them as wasteful pet projects used to curry political favor.

However, Congress has long leveraged earmarks to fund expensive and important infrastructural projects, like airport updates. Earmarks can also help colleges pay for expensive construction projects they might not be able to otherwise afford, especially as college enrollment declines and state and local funding to higher education decreases.

Current federal guidelines cap federal earmarks to 1% of total federal discretionary spending. Currently, each member of Congress may issue 15 earmark requests to the House Committee on Appropriations each fiscal year.

The House and Senate appropriations committees ultimately negotiate and decide which projects receive funding, and how much.

Not all schools receive the same

Our 2024 study showed that Congress, as a whole, earmarked far less funding to minority-serving institutions and community colleges compared with what it gave to well-endowed research universities.

Minority-serving institutions,like historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges and universities, serve large shares of students of color and low-income students. They are generally underfunded.

Recent reports indicate that Congress members may also favor their alma maters when doling out earmarks.

Twenty-four senators – 13 Democrats and 11 Republicans – collectively requested approximately $636 million for projects at their alma maters in fiscal year 2026. But Republicans were responsible for nearly three-fourths of those requests, or $470 million.

For example, Senator Jim Justice, a Republican from West Virginia, requested nearly $60 million across seven earmark projects for his alma mater, Marshall University.

Republicans’ earmark tendencies

Contrary to their largely fiscal conservative rhetoric and critiques of universities as overly woke and elitist, Republicans generally sponsor earmarks with gusto across the board, including for colleges and universities.

Eight Republicans were among the 10 most generous earmark sponsors in fiscal year 2026. Republicans also made up 27 of the 31 representatives who requested $50 million or more from that year’s budget.

Based on our analysis, from October 2021 through September 2023, Republicans sponsored $230 million more in earmarks to colleges and universities than their Democratic colleagues did.

Republicans also tended to send less in earmarked funding to colleges and universities serving large numbers of students who receive need-based federal financial aid, per our findings. Rather, Republicans were more likely to earmark money for whiter, wealthier universities, like the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill or the University of Michigan.

For example, Senator Mitch McConnell directed just shy of $60 million in earmarks to two large research universities, University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky, for fiscal year 2026. McConnell attended both of those schools.

Nearly 70% and just over 75% of the undergraduates at the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky, respectively, identify as white.

That same year, McConnell sponsored a $2 million earmark project for a single community college in the state – Madisonville Community College.

He did not sponsor any earmarks for the state’s two historically Black colleges and universities: Simmons University and Kentucky State University.

Democrats’ earmark tendencies

Democrats, meanwhile, generally walk the talk in terms of which colleges and universities they fund, generally supporting minority-serving institutions and campuses with large numbers of students who receive Pell Grants. Pell Grants are a form of federal financial aid for low-income students that they do not have to repay, unlike loans.

Our analysis specifically shows Democrats gave these schools an outsized share of the pot of earmarked dollars, relative to what they gave overall to colleges and universities.

Some Democrats also sponsored earmarks to minority-serving institutions beyond their own districts.

For example, while Florida International University is in Republican Representative Mario Diaz-Balart’s district, he did not request earmark funding be sent their way in 2022. Rather, that year, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat from another district in Florida, secured a $2 million earmark for the university to support its public health and social work programming.

However, Democrats’ earmarks are much smaller than their Republican counterparts and generally far too small to level the playing field for minority-serving institutions, which are chronically underfunded.

So, while Democrats direct more earmarks to minority-serving institutions than Republicans, the comparatively small size of those awards cannot close the funding gap these schools face.

In 2026, for example, the Democratic senators from California, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, secured a $3.5 million earmark to support the University of California, Merced’s medical school. This is a Hispanic-serving institution, meaning a college or university where at least 25% of undergraduates are Hispanic.

At the same time, Republican Senator John Boozman from Arkansas secured $45 million in earmarks to upgrade the University of Arkansas Medical Center, which is a predominantly white school.

Based on our research, it seems that both parties have real, if different, work to do to fully leverage earmarks to support higher education.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.