The Department of Education Just Published Its Scorecard on 'Ending Gender Extremism' at Universities. Here's What's Actually on the List

The U.S. Department of Education published a press release on April 9 titled "Victories for Higher Education: Ending Gender Extremism and Cutting Underused Programs" — providing the most comprehensive official accounting to date of the changes the Trump administration is claiming credit for across American colleges, universities, and university-affiliated hospitals.

The document is explicitly a victory lap, framed in the administration's own language and presenting its preferred interpretation of a set of changes that have been deeply contested at the institutions where they occurred. University Herald is reporting its contents factually, alongside the context those institutions and their critics have provided.

The Women's and Gender Studies Program Closures

The press release names eight universities as having closed their women's and gender studies programs, attributing the closures to "increasing employer concerns about the lack of workforce-benefiting skills." The institutions named are East Carolina University, New College of Florida, Texas A&M University, Towson University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Iowa, the University of Toledo, and Wichita State University.

The framing of these closures as purely market-driven omits a significant part of the picture that has been reported extensively by higher education journalists. At Texas A&M, the women's and gender studies program was eliminated as part of a broader conservative restructuring driven by the state legislature and the board of trustees, which has faced political pressure from Republican legislators. At the University of North Texas, which is not named but is among the most high-profile cases, the elimination of women's and gender studies — along with LGBTQ Studies, Mexican American Studies, Africana Studies, and other programs — was officially attributed to low enrollment and a $45 million budget deficit, but critics have noted the eliminated programs closely track those targeted by conservative legislators. The press release cites a Washington Times report attributing the closures to "Trump's DEI purge."

The administration is presenting these closures as cultural victories. University faculty, students, and academic freedom advocates have consistently characterized them as politically coerced eliminations of legitimate fields of scholarly inquiry.

University Hospitals That Have Ended Transgender Care for Minors

The press release's most extensive section lists more than 20 university-affiliated hospitals that have ended or suspended gender-affirming care for minors — including puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and gender transition surgeries. The list as published includes:

Denver Health and Children's Hospital of Colorado (University of Colorado), Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine (including Lurie Children's Hospital and Northwestern Memorial Hospital), NYU Langone Health, Oregon Health & Science University, Penn State Health, Phoenix Children's Hospital, Rush University Medical Center, Stanford Medicine, University of Chicago Medicine (UI Health), University of Illinois Chicago Health, University of Michigan Health, University of Southern California (CHLA), University of Pennsylvania Health System (Penn Medicine), University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), University of Utah Health, UVA Health, University of Wisconsin Health, Yale New Haven Health, and Virginia Commonwealth University Health and Children's Hospital of Richmond.

The press release presents these changes uniformly as victories. The reality at each institution is more complex. Many of the hospitals cited federal funding pressure as the explicit reason for their decisions — not a change in their clinical assessment of these treatments. Major medical organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the Endocrine Society continue to endorse gender-affirming care for minors as evidence-based medicine. Families of transgender youth at many of these institutions have publicly described losing access to care their children had been receiving for years.

State Laws Mandating Program Elimination

The press release also highlights legislation passed in Indiana, Ohio, Utah, and Texas requiring universities to eliminate degree programs that graduate few students over a defined period, with limited appeal options. Florida's State University System is cited for eliminating 18 academic programs due to low enrollment — a list the press release notes includes bachelor's degrees in African American Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, among others.

The administration frames these laws as accountability measures ensuring taxpayer dollars are invested in programs that produce employment outcomes. Critics, including the American Association of University Professors and the American Historical Association, have argued that the laws effectively use enrollment metrics to eliminate fields of study that legislatures find politically objectionable, regardless of their scholarly value — and that the specific programs most frequently targeted under these frameworks are not coincidentally the ones covering race, gender, and global cultures.

What This Means for Students

For students currently enrolled in any of the programs mentioned in the press release, or considering enrollment, the document serves as a useful — if partisan — index of where changes are underway.

Students in women's and gender studies programs at institutions not yet named in the press release should monitor their program's status through their institution's academic affairs office. Students at university-affiliated hospitals seeking gender-affirming care should contact their institution's health system directly, as policies vary and some have been modified or partially reversed following legal challenges or changes in federal funding conditions.

For students researching which programs and institutions have been most directly affected by the Trump administration's higher education agenda, the Department of Education's full press release provides the administration's own curated account — one that should be read alongside the reporting from the institutions themselves.