You will not find a legal theory that’s done more damage to this country in the last half century than the idea of “disparate impact.” Whether you realize it or not, this is a legal concept that has almost certainly impacted your life at some point, along with the lives of millions of other people. In short, disparate impact allows people to sue whenever a policy — whether it’s a government policy, or the policy of a private business — has a disproportionate effect on certain demographics. It doesn’t matter if the policy is intended to be discriminatory. It doesn’t matter if the policy is completely neutral, on its face. All that matters is whether the policy affects some demographics more than others.
To give just one example: If a written test for a police academy contains basic math questions — questions which are not racist in any way — the test is still considered to be illegal under the disparate impact theory if, say, 80% of black applicants fail it. The only way to survive a lawsuit under this theory is to prove that, in reality, the disparate impact is strictly necessary for some important purpose of the business or organization.
In practice, especially in places like New York and California, this is extremely difficult to prove. After all, we’ve been told meritocracy is now a racist concept. Why do police officers need to understand that two plus two equals four, anyway? A lot of jurors actually think like this, especially the ones who won’t venture outside unless they’re wearing two masks and a portable ventilator. Therefore, most companies and government agencies, in the end, have decided to simply water down their standards, in order to avoid the possibility of litigation. Disparate impact was the precursor for affirmative action and “equity”, as it’s called today. Mediocrity has become the norm because it’s enforced by law.
We’ve all been conditioned to accept this status quo since the 1960s, even though it’s obviously contrary to basic principles of fairness and morality. Several administrations have come and gone, both Democrat and Republican, and disparate impact has remained untouched. But very abruptly, that changed yesterday, when the Trump administration issued an executive order formally ending disparate impact in this country, in all contexts.
The order is called “RESTORING EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY AND MERITOCRACY” and, among other things, states: “disparate-impact liability has hindered businesses from making hiring and other employment decisions based on merit and skill.”
Therefore, according to the order signed by the president:
It is the policy of the United States to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible to avoid violating the Constitution, Federal civil rights laws, and basic American ideals.
Yes, there will be inevitable legal challenges to this executive order. Yes, Congress should immediately pass this executive order into law in order to insulate it, as much as possible, from Obama-appointed judges in Washington. But even as it stands, already, this executive order is a major step towards reforming America’s failing institutions. It’s part of a broader effort by this administration to end the era of racial grievance, which has made a husk out of everything it touched. In particular, it’s helped destroy the educational system in this country, which is now fixated on spreading propaganda instead of teaching students the skills they need to survive and function in society. Universities currently spend most of their time administering affirmative action programs, and teaching students about the evils of white supremacy and colonialism. It’s a complete waste of time — actually, it’s even worse than a waste of time — and everyone knows it.
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Now the Trump administration, with this executive order on disparate impact, is doing something about it. And it’s clear that the administration had the education system in mind yesterday when they issued this executive order, because on Wednesday, the administration also took several other actions aimed at reforming America’s colleges. One of those executive orders, for example, is called “REFORMING ACCREDITATION TO STRENGTHEN HIGHER EDUCATION.”
The text of this order points out that the national six-year undergraduate graduation rate in this country currently stands at just 64%. Yes, just 64% of undergraduates currently finish college on time.
Additionally, roughly 25% of undergraduate programs and 40% of graduate programs ultimately yield a negative return on investment for students. The Trump administration is therefore requiring an overhaul of the process through which schools are accredited. If schools can’t demonstrate a commitment to merit, instead of racial discrimination, then they won’t be accredited anymore. And for many universities, that would be a death knell. They’d immediately lose access to billions of dollars in federal funding for Pell Grants and student loans.
This is why, during the campaign, Donald Trump referred to the accreditation process as his “secret weapon.” It’s a way to use the established powers of the federal government to compel schools to start upholding basic educational principles. For generations, the government hasn’t used these powers. We’ve allowed pretty much every school — from community colleges to Harvard — to get away with scamming their students, discriminating along racial lines, and teaching useless classes about “decolonizing Shakespeare” or whatever. At the same time, tuition has increased exponentially because the federal money has kept flowing, in the form of easy student loans. Then, to make matters worse, college students — many of them Left-leaning — have taken this loan money and refused to repay it. In other words, people who didn’t go to college are directly subsidizing people who spent four years earning useless degrees, and then became deadbeats who are unable (or unwilling) to pay their debts.
This fraud was enabled by the Biden administration, as you probably remember. In fact, even when the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden administration was breaking the law, they still refused to compel college graduates to pay off their loans.
Yesterday, however, the Trump administration ended this state-sanctioned fraud. They’re now beginning the collections process on these deadbeats — including federal employees who are about to have their pensions frozen. Watch:
White House press sec. Karoline Leavitt on defaulted student loan payments being sent to collections on May 5: “The government can and will collect defaulted federal student loan debt by withholding tax refunds, federal pensions and even their wages.” https://t.co/40ymqY435M pic.twitter.com/NbEgvs9o2h
— ABC News (@ABC) April 22, 2025
It’s a simple principle that everyone understands: If you borrow money, you should repay it. But Democrats attempted to suspend this principle during the last election campaign because they thought it would resonate with voters. And in some areas of the country, it did resonate. There’s a reason Joe Biden won the state of Virginia, where all of the so-called “public servants” live. But as it happens, the rest of the country wasn’t happy about assuming the debts of these alleged “public servants.” So they won’t have to assume those debts anymore.
There were other executive orders and actions that the Trump administration took yesterday concerning universities. For example, one order requires that universities disclose any foreign funding they might be receiving. The attorney general is tasked with overseeing compliance with this requirement as a matter of “national security.” This is a measure that’s obviously long overdue, especially after we learned that Joe Biden was stashing classified documents in his office space at the University of Pennsylvania’s “Penn-Biden Center,” which was funded extensively by the Chinese. Everyone knows that, for a long time, major universities in this country have been openly operating like de facto embassies for various countries that hate us. And now they could face criminal prosecution for doing so.
Another order that the president signed yesterday implements new procedures to improve the quality of education at so-called “historically black colleges and universities,” which have struggled significantly in comparison to most other schools in the country. For many years, the federal government has simply flooded these schools with money, without any concern for how they’ve been wasting it. Now, pursuant to this executive order, the Trump administration will seek to “increase the private-sector role, including the role of private foundations” in funding these schools. In other words, the taxpayers won’t have as big a role.
All of these changes are necessary because, under the current arrangement, the university system in this country is failing. As a result, a lot of people — myself included — have made the rational decision to forgo college altogether. Bloomberg just published a lengthy report on this trend. Their report focuses on an 18-year-old student who just graduated from high school in Madison, Ohio, which is 45 minutes east of Cleveland. According to this student, neither he nor any of his male classmates will attend a four-year-university. They’re opting out of going to college, for one reason or another.
In this corner of the Midwest—where the median household income is $78,000 and the largest city is 47,000-strong Mentor—the share of men age 18-24 enrolled in college dropped by more than 15 percentage points in the decade through 2023, the biggest decline in any large county in the US. The average slide, by comparison, was about 3 percentage points. In 2013 half of the young men in Lake County were enrolled in college; 10 years later, that number was only 1 in 3, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek analysis of US Census Bureau data. Men opting out of college isn’t a new phenomenon: Women have outnumbered men in undergraduate enrollment for about 40 years, and the gap continues to widen. Almost half of women age 25-34 have earned a bachelor’s degree, according to Pew Research Center data; for men the rate is 37%. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of Americans attending college dropped by 1.2 million, with men accounting for almost the entirety of that drop. …. When Jennifer Schuller became president in 2023 of Lake Erie College, the only four-year college in Lake County, the drop in enrollment was palpable: She inherited a $5.6 million deficit. In the previous decade, the student body—which is majority men—had decreased by almost 20%.
As much as I may criticize the university system and as much as I encourage young people to not see college as the necessary default option right out of high school, I still maintain that this is not a decline worth celebrating. It’s a completely understandable decline, of course. Universities and colleges have done this to themselves. They’ve wasted hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, and all they’ve done is churn out a useless product that more and more people are foregoing because it’s too expensive and pointless. It’s completely rational for millions of students to stop attending these schools. That’s true. But ultimately, that’s not the outcome we should want. A functioning country should be able to offer 18-year-olds a variety of good schools to attend, if they want to master some highly specialized skill — whether it’s engineering or programming or medicine or whatever. That should always be an option for certain students. But we don’t have that anymore.
We have a system where, even if you’re a very smart individual who could theoretically become a doctor, you stand a very real chance of being denied admission to a medical school simply because you’re white, or because you have the wrong political beliefs. And if you’re confronted with that possibility, and you’re 18 years old, why would you bother with the whole process? Why not take a guaranteed job where your skills will pay you, right away? Why subject yourself to hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and years of indoctrination, especially if it may not pay off — for reasons that are both completely unfair and completely outside your control?
Young people are asking these questions. And the only correct answer is to tell them that this insanity is coming to an end. Otherwise, the education system will continue to fail.
The good news is that finally — for the first time in a very long time — some action is being taken on this front. The other day we talked about efforts by elementary schools to indoctrinate children into the gender cult, and how it looks like the Supreme Court is about to put an end to those policies. Now we’re talking about how the Trump administration just issued an all-out blitz of executive orders that are designed to restore merit and competence to all of America’s institutions, including its universities. This is progress. It’s not a guarantee that these institutions will be saved — Harvard in particular is fighting back, as you’d expect — but it’s a start.
The truth is that the education system can either teach students, or it can attempt to brainwash them into the religion of leftism. Those are the options. There is no middle ground. And if there’s one thing this week has made clear, it’s that the current administration — unlike every other administration in recent history — understands that choice very well.
