On May 22, 2025, President Maurie McInnis called on every student, faculty, and alumni to help Yale’s administration secure their institution’s future. In light of the upcoming House of Representatives vote on President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, President McInnis explicitly stated that Yalies must do everything in their power to oppose this bill, since it “presents a greater threat to Yale than any other bill in memory.”
When this bill reached the headlines and email inboxes of college students, young people across the country anxiously considered how this legislation might have profound impacts on their lives. Conor Webb ‘28 was one of these students. In early June, he received a text from his friend Cayla Waddington ‘28 asking Webb how they would protect their financial aid packages in the wake of the bill. Waddington was a low-income resident of West Philadelphia and a recipient of full financial aid. Webb then passed the proposal to a group of friends.
“I told [my friends] the story of someone like Cayla, and her story with higher education,” Webb explained. In just 10 days, Webb and his group of friends reached out to advocates, secured Yale funding, created a full “Advocacy Day” schedule, and organized a press conference defending higher education on Capitol Hill. “We believed this House reconciliation bill would force higher education to take centuries to recover, and we felt we could not let that happen,” Webb stated.
Through significant changes to budgetary spending, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA) permanently extends Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which was set to expire in 2025. Introduced in 2017, Trump’s tax cuts have been a source of controversy, as they disproportionately benefit high-income earners. Trump’s bill allocates a great amount of federal dollars towards defense spending, such as “Air Superiority and Missile Defense” or “Nuclear Deterrence.” Additionally, it adds $14 billion more towards funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as well as a combined $95 billion towards border barriers and detention centers. To cover the expenses of Trump’s initiatives, the Big Beautiful Bill planned and has cut spending for social programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). H.R. 1 also tightens federal funding by cutting $18 billion allocated for cancer research and ends tax credits for clean energy usage.
But the One Big Beautiful Bill did not just have an impact on low-income families, research, and the United States’s Armed Forces, but also targeted institutions of higher education, especially universities boasting large endowments.
H.R.1 sharply increased the federal endowment tax on universities, based on the size of the institution’s endowment. Before the proposal, Yale’s endowment tax was 1.4%. H.R. 1 raised Yale and six other schools’ endowment tax to 21%. Under this proposed change, Yale would be required to send upwards of $700 million to the federal treasury each year.
Yale’s endowment was most recently valued at $41 billion. However, its endowment is often misperceived as a large checking account that Yale can withdraw money from at any time. In reality, “universities have a status as a non-profit corporation,” explains Pericles Lewis, the Dean of Yale College, where many donations or “endowments” are given with a specific long-term purpose, usually for financial aid.
“In Yale College, we spend between $260 and $270 million on financial aid annually, and about two-thirds of that money is paid from the endowments while the rest is paid for by Yale’s general operating budget,” Lewis emphasized. With a hike in the endowment tax, “we’ll have fewer dollars for financial aid.”
“I knew this was coming. It had been discussed for a while,” said Dean Lewis. In fact, President McInnis had visited Washington many times to meet with legislators since Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, not only as an advocate for Yale but as a board member of the Association of American Universities, composed of 71 research universities in the United States.
McInnis’ email to the Yale community made it explicitly clear that, beyond financial aid, this endowment tax hike would also hurt research funding and financing for other resources around campus.
In a matter of only 12 days, Webb and friends created an itinerary for an advocacy day on Capitol Hill, found advocates from all across the country, and secured Yale funding to reimburse their lodging and transportation. Twenty-five college students from Yale, the University of Connecticut, West Virginia University, as well as other institutions started their day at Yale’s new D.C. Office of Federal Relations. After a quick orientation meeting, they spent the first five hours of the day running around the labyrinth of Capitol Hill to meet with their legislators in the hopes that their personal story with higher education could provide evidence of the importance of federal and private financial aid.
While some shared personal stories in meetings, others emphasized the international implications of the bill. “We’re shooting ourselves in the foot,” commented Zachary Pan ‘27 in a meeting with Ohio Senator Jon Husted (R-OH). “We’ll destroy our ability to fund groundbreaking research and surrender the scientific battlefield to China.” Pan explained that the race to develop quantum computing and chip development will be lost if the United States government “guts its own research capacity.”
Alexandra Martinez-Garcia ‘26 took a more long- term approach in her advocacy. She advocated for the students of low-income backgrounds who aspire to a career in medicine. “When you increase the endowment task of an institution, you decrease their ability to provide financial aid to people of all kinds of backgrounds, and therefore decrease the diversity of the healthcare workforce.” Martinez argued that this development over time would result in “a shortage in physicians, nurses, and researchers that produce scientific breakthroughs for doctors to save lives.” She explained that “limiting the people that can attend these institutions will affect every single American that enjoys a vast network of medical resources.”
On a hot day in the middle of June, the nickname for the Capitol’s busy environment, “Senate Swamp,” truly lived up to its name. The press conference started at 1:00 p.m. The students stared down a conglomeration of cameras, microphones, and tape recorders. With each new speaker braving the podium, the students became visibly more confident. They stood up a little straighter and held their heads higher, as they shared their journey with higher education and how the bill would affect them personally.
Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) was the keynote speaker of the press conference. “It is the greatest assault on American higher education in history… America should be helping students, not creating obstacles for them,” he urged.
“Just because Yale’s endowment seems to be a big number doesn’t mean it’s not making an even bigger impact in the lives of thousands of students,” said Riley Getchell ‘27.
One of the speakers at the press conference was Cayla Waddington, the student whose text message sparked its own planning. In her speech, Waddington asserted, “The endowment tax isn’t just taking money from some faceless institution. It’s taking money from kids like me.”
Jackson Howe, a student from West Virginia University, spoke against the bill’s cuts to Pell grants and student loan borrowing limits. He specifically mentioned President Trump saying his proposed legislation, “is not reform—it is exclusion.”
Representative Himes’s strong words captured the frustration of an American worried about innovation and technological advancement. He exclaimed, “Innovation will not happen in a country that is trying to make itself more stupid.”
The very same day, amidst votes, modifications, and deliberations over the largest reconciliation bill in American history, a video surfaces of Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) being forcefully removed from a press conference about the Department of Homeland Security’s presence in California. While Padilla was trying to identify himself, ICE agents handcuffed him, pinned him face-first to the ground, and forced him out of Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference room.
Discussing the incident with Webb afterwards, he believed that it was not unrelated to the cause he advocated for. When asked to elaborate, he mentioned the assassination of Minnesota state senator Melisa Hortman, which had occurred earlier that same week, as well as the reaction of Senator Mike Lee on Twitter, who blamed “Marxists” for the assassination. Webb claimed a direct link between higher education and political civility. Webb argued, “It seems to me that what happened to Senator Padilla that day, as well as the cruelty tweeted by Senator Lee, is demonstrative of a political climate that could be solved by the same civility that we see evident in American higher education—the same higher education that Republicans want to weaken, undermine, and suppress.”
After a series of legislative amendments, despite the students’ efforts the Big Beautiful Bill was passed in the Senate on July 1st, then signed into law on Independence Day three days later. Many of the regulations on student loans remained the same, and although some of the threats to Pell Grant eligibility were alleviated, H.R.1’s impositions on student life remained largely unchanged. The endowment tax was passed, but reduced from the initial proposal of 21% to 8%. Dean Lewis speculates that Republican legislators made the compromise to expedite the bill’s pace. “[Republicans] were eager to get the bill out of Congress,” Lewis said.
When asked about how Yale would proceed with an 8% tax, Lewis emphasized that Yale’s administration will prioritize the needs of students on financial aid. He said, “We will probably find ways to maintain our financial aid, but that means cutting other things… hiring fewer professors or not renovating a building that needs renovation, for example.”
As Yale braces itself for the financial challenge presented in the next few years, students will begin to feel the budgetary cuts affect their everyday lives. Earlier this month, McInnis sent an email detailing new service reductions to the Yale shuttle. Some routes are being combined or terminated earlier to cut costs. Most changes are likely to come with higher wait times. Students also recently lost access to free Adobe Acrobat and cable TV subscriptions. Salary raises for Yale faculty were also lower this year, and a four-month hiring pause was enacted in June.
Most recently, the Yale administration announced on November 12th that the two awards for undergraduate students seeking financial aid for study abroad would be combined into one. Despite significant outrage from the undergraduate student body, that combination is set to take place this summer.
Lewis and his colleagues are committed, he says, to identifying university cuts that “have the least impact.” However, many more changes to student life as a result of the tax hike are yet to come, and Yale students are likely to feel the brunt of these budgetary cuts, as the Yale administration navigates the fine line between funding financial aid and research and supporting the rest of student and faculty life at Yale.
Lewis called June 12th—along with the other advocacy efforts from Yale administration—a “relative victory, instead of a total victory.” Objectively, the endowment tax has been increased by 7% instead of 20%, but there is no guarantee that funding for financial aid and innovative research will look the same as it did in previous years.
Halfway into the first semester of the 2025-2026 school year, the Yale community awaits the changes to the facilities, resources, and extracurricular activities they enjoy. The Big Beautiful Bill as a whole has been law for about five months now, and America awaits the full extent of its impact.
Perhaps success is not the most appropriate measure of the impact of the students in Washington that day. Setback is inherent to advocacy. Freedom of speech was not only meant for the “winners” of history. The students on Capitol Hill on June 12th were simply a tiny hatch mark in an expanding timeline of student advocacy. Webb and his colleagues continue the legacy of the young Americans who came before them, fighting for the present, because they know they are the future.