A potential settlement between Harvard University and the Trump administration could call for the college to invest about $500 million to build vocational schools, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Thursday in a CNBC interview.
“If Harvard settles with Donald Trump, you know what he’s going to do with the $500 million? He’s going to have Harvard build vocational schools. The Harvard vocational school, because that’s what America needs,” Lutnick said.
Lutnick’s comments come after a stretch in which the administration and the school appear to have made little progress toward a settlement. The White House has alleged Harvard did not do enough to tamp down antisemitism on campus and has fostered political bias, while Harvard contends the government is overreaching.
Trump has said he wants “nothing less than $500 million” from Harvard. The school has previously signaled that it was open to investing that amount in workforce programs as part of an eventual deal to restore more than $2 billion in federal funding, Bloomberg has reported.
There is precedent for such a deal: Brown University’s agreement with the administration included a $50 million commitment to invest in workforce development in its home state of Rhode Island.
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Harvard did not have an immediate comment.
Harvard said earlier this week it has received notice that some of the federal research funding frozen by the Trump administration is being restarted, although the money hasn’t started flowing yet. That notification followed a victory in federal court for Harvard last week in which a judge ruled that the US illegally froze more than $2 billion in research dollars for the school. The government has said it would appeal.
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The Trump administration has positioned career and technical education programs as a cultural and economic foil to elite universities, and has called for an increase in federal money for workforce development, sometimes at the expense of traditional colleges.
In April, Trump signed an executive order to “refocus young Americans on career preparation” instead of “an economically unproductive postsecondary system.” The next month, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he was considering slashing funding for Harvard and giving it to trade schools instead.
The White House’s sweeping tariff policy is aimed at fostering more manufacturing work and construction activity in the US. But industrial and construction companies frequently complain they can’t find enough labor for the factories and building projects they already have. There were 437,000 open jobs in the manufacturing industry in July, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
With assistance from Jennifer A. Dlouhy.