2025-04-20
17 分钟Hey, What's News listeners, it's Sunday, April 20th.
I'm Alex Ocilla for The Wall Street Journal.
This is What's News Sunday,
the show where we tackle the big questions about the biggest stories in the news by reaching out to our colleagues across the newsroom to help explain what's happening in our world.
On today's show,
the Trump administration is threatening to pull grant funding from institutions like Columbia and has already done so for Harvard.
And it's also taking aim at individual students,
pulling hundreds of student visas and even moving to deport some.
What's the impact on universities' bottom lines, their reputation, and their culture?
At the end of the day, universities are businesses.
Their budgets are made up of student tuition,
endowments, philanthropic donations, and government grants.
Just how big their budgets are depends on a number of different factors,
including, say, how much research the university does.
For example, Harvard spent $6.4 billion in fiscal year 2024.
Later on in the show, we'll speak to Fanta Av, the executive director and CEO of NAFSA,
the Association of International Educators,
about where international students fit into balancing these budgets.
But first,
let's zero in on the Trump administration's threats to freeze billions of dollars in grants from institutions and how it's unsettling universities across the country.