Overview
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a halt to military attendance at graduate programs at schools including Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Brown and MIT beginning in the 2026–27 academic year, following an earlier cutoff at Harvard.
- A reported Department memo details the elimination of roughly 93 Senior Service College fellowships across 22 institutions, extending beyond universities to think tanks such as CSIS, the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council, the Council on Foreign Relations and CNAS.
- Proposed replacement partners include Liberty University, Hillsdale College, George Mason University, several state universities and senior military colleges, with some reports indicating currently enrolled personnel may finish their programs.
- Hegseth also ordered a top-to-bottom review of the military’s own war colleges to refocus professional military education on warfighting and strategic realism.
- Implementation remains unsettled as Pentagon databases still listed some affected schools as eligible, and questions persist about effects on defense collaborations such as the Army’s AI center at Carnegie Mellon and Space Force programs at Johns Hopkins SAIS.