American universities are cutting women’s scholarships even when they don’t have to

Universities and companies are scaling back or eliminating women’s scholarships as a way to avoid scrutiny from the Trump Administration, even though officials haven't explicitly barred single-sex scholarships.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will stop awarding a women’s scholarship this fall. Middlebury College has ended a program that offered up to $25,000 a year to female students. And Duke University recently opened its Alice M. Baldwin Scholars Program — named for the first dean of its Woman's College — to all undergraduates, instead of just women.

Major employers, including Palantir Technologies Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, have also dropped scholarships and initiatives aimed at increasing female representation. A database of more than 38,000 scholarships maintained by the National Scholarship Providers Association shows the number of grants with women-specific eligibility criteria has declined 19% since 2023, according to Jackie Bright, the group’s chief executive officer.


The impact has been especially pronounced in math- and science-related fields. Although women earn the majority of college degrees, they account for less than a quarter of degrees in engineering and computing. Some economists worry that the pullback could stymie efforts to grow the pipeline of scientists, engineers and technologists needed to the keep the US competitive.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is intensifying efforts to set aside decades-old legal precedent about how organizations may foster diversity. Although laws or regulations governing gender-based scholarships haven’t changed, colleges and companies increasingly see such programs as posing greater legal risk. Those concerns, which grew after the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling barring colleges from explicitly considering race in admissions, escalated following President Donald Trump’s executive orders against diversity, equity and inclusion last year.

“People feel like pulling back from everything is safest in the current environment, no matter what it is,” said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at New York University. “Increasingly on the right, there's this sort of view that doing anything at all to benefit any group, whether it's about race, gender, LGBTQ, whatever it might be, is in and of itself bad.”

Contributions to the Society of Women Engineers’ scholarship fund fell by almost $400,000 last year to about $1.3 million, according to CEO Karen Horting. Universities have in some cases pushed SWE chapters off campus or barred them from accessing college funds, even though membership and scholarships are open to everyone.

“I haven’t heard a good logical explanation as to why it makes sense other than ‘there’s this executive order and we feel it’s a risk,’” Horting said. Trump’s anti-DEI orders have created confusion about exactly what types of programs are permissible. Defense companies and other employers with large government contracts accounted for most of the pullback, she said, though private donors and new corporate contributors have offset some of the losses this year.

In many cases, corporate scholarships have vanished quietly, with once-touted annual awards simply failing to return. Data-analytics software firm Palantir, for example, no longer offers its Women in Technology scholarship, which once awarded as much as $7,000 and was promoted as recently as 2024 in a UK filing. Google stopped offering scholarships specifically for women in the US and Canada between 2022 and 2023, though it continued them in other parts of the world, according to archived records accessed through the Wayback Machine. Palantir didn’t respond to requests for comment; Google declined to comment.

Olaoluwaposi Oshinowo, an employment and labor attorney at Wiley Rein LLP, is advising corporate clients to review contributions to identity-specific programs, even if they don’t appear to violate the law. Such initiatives, he said, can draw scrutiny from federal or state regulators, as well as legal activists looking to capitalize on any appearance of favoritism for one group.

“The government is willing to go pretty far, but the reality is there’s a ton of these private activist organizations that I think are really driving these challenges,” Oshinowo said.

The elimination or overhaul of women’s scholarships and programs has at times sparked backlash on campus. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a science- and engineering-focused university, more than 800 students signed a petition after administrators discontinued the Women’s Leadership Scholarship for freshmen starting this fall. The program, which provided $20,000 a year to female undergraduates, was part of an effort to narrow the university’s roughly 7-to-3 male-to-female enrollment ratio and improve the campus climate for women.

When students pressed administrators about the decision, they received conflicting explanations, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions. University officials initially cited a Supreme Court ruling, then later Trump’s executive orders on DEI, the person said.

In a statement, RPI said it regularly reviews scholarship programs to ensure they reflect student needs and priorities, while emphasizing that its overall scholarship funding hasn’t changed. “We remain deeply committed to recruiting and supporting women” in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) through financial aid, mentorships and resources, the university said.

Single-sex scholarships administered by colleges have long created legal hurdles under Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination at federally funded schools. Even before the current Trump administration, programs that weren’t carefully administered had drawn federal scrutiny.

To comply with the law, many colleges have used a “pool and match” approach. Schools first identify scholarship recipients without considering protected characteristics such as sex or race, then match identity-specific donor funds to eligible students so that no qualified recipient is excluded. Such scholarships can help recruit students from underrepresented groups who might otherwise have enrolled elsewhere, or encourage them to pursue majors they might not have considered, according to education and legal experts.

Beth Gellman-Beer, an education law consultant and former regional director at the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, said the division has signaled that scrutinizing single-sex scholarships is a priority. In the past year, OCR has completed at least 10 investigations into single-sex scholarships, resolution agreements show. In some cases, investigators required that schools pull advertisements for externally-funded female-only scholarships from their websites. In others, it directed schools to change or scrap the programs.

Still, Gellman-Beer said the legal standards for women-only scholarships haven’t changed, even as rules for race-conscious programs have. “There are a lot of schools that are now eliminating these single-sex scholarships, particularly for women in the STEM fields, when they don’t have to,” she said.

While most legal activists have focused on challenging race-specific initiatives, William Jacobson, founder of the Equal Protection Project, lodged 26 complaints last year over scholarships, clubs and programs he argues unlawfully exclude men by limiting eligibility to women or female-identifying students.

“Sex discrimination is an area of expansion,” Jacobson wrote in an email. “Now that the Supreme Court definitively has determined that ‘sex’ in Title IX means biological sex, we see expanded opportunity moving forward,” he added, referring to the court’s recent ruling in a case involving girls’ sports.

One complaint targeted members of the Claremont Colleges. After the filing, Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate University removed preferences for female students in descriptions of endowed scholarships. Other colleges in the consortium also scrapped mentions of race from their grants.

Claremont Graduate University said in an email that OCR dismissed the complaint in March and added that it “continually reviews” scholarship descriptions and eligibility language for legal compliance. Pitzer said it “remains committed” to educational access, inclusion and opportunity.

Some universities have broadened eligibility for women’s programs. After a complaint from the Equal Protection Project, Fordham University updated its website to say membership in a women-in-business club was open to all students. A physics organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did the same.

Duke University opened its Alice M. Baldwin Scholars Program, previously limited to female-identifying students, to all undergraduates last year, according to the Duke Chronicle. Drexel University likewise announced its Executive Leadership in Academic Medicine Program — a fellowship providing leadership training, coaching, networking and mentoring for women in health sciences — would begin accepting participants of all genders in spring 2025. Neither Duke nor Drexel responded to requests for comment.

Middlebury told OCR that it concluded the BOLD Scholars Program, which provided networking, training and scholarships of as much as $25,000 a year for junior and senior women, as of this past February. It had been one of the first schools to join the network, established by a nonprofit in 2016. Middlebury did not respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear how the erosion of women’s scholarships will change the environment for women in higher education.

For students like Avaya Wijesinha, a rising senior at RPI, the Women’s Leadership scholarship was a game changer. The award, along with other financial aid, cut her tuition costs by half. She worries that eliminating it sends an unwelcoming message to would-be students, especially given the heavily male student body.

“When I got my financial aid package and I saw the Women’s Leadership scholarship, I felt like RPI did care about having women there,” she said.