Where Did Donald Trump Go to College?
Credit: Carvalho / Contributor / FilmMagic / Getty Images- Trump, who began his second presidential term in January 2025, went to Fordham University before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania.
- He earned an economics degree from Penn’s prestigious Wharton School.
- Trump has received several honorary degrees, though some have been revoked since he entered politics in 2015.
While President Donald Trump didn’t say much about his higher education agenda on the 2024 campaign trail, his actions in the opening months of his second term give insight into what he wants to accomplish in the next four years.
Trump opposed student debt forgiveness plans put forward by the Biden administration and celebrated the defeat of Biden’s widespread debt relief plan in the Supreme Court.
Trump has also spoken about overhauling the college accreditation system and is an outspoken opponent of affirmative action, critical race theory, and diversity, education, and inclusion (DEI) programs in higher education.
At several 2024 campaign rallies, he vowed to combat what he referred to as “wokeness” in schools, specifically calling out transgender issues, saying he would “get it out of our schools very fast.” He also on the campaign trail said that universities could lose accreditation and federal support over what he described as “antisemitic propaganda.”
In the first months of his second term, Trump began to make good on those campaign promises by freezing funds to several colleges and universities for alleged antisemitism and allowing transgender athletes to play women’s sports.
When it comes to his own college career, however, Trump over the years has touted his academic record which includes a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School.
The business school is considered among the top in the world. But in his 1987 bestseller “The Art of the Deal,” Trump wrote, “Perhaps the most important thing I learned at Wharton was not to be overly impressed by academic credentials.”
Trump’s East-Coast Private School Education
Donald Trump attended East Coast private schools throughout his life. First the private Kew-Forest School, from kindergarten through seventh grade, in the New York City borough of Queens. Concerned about his behavior, Trump’s parents next sent him to New York Military Academy, a private boarding school in upstate New York.
During his senior year, Trump was promoted to captain among the student cadets. After graduating, Trump returned to New York City. He enrolled at Fordham University, a Jesuit and Catholic college in the Bronx.
After two years, Trump transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, an Ivy League school.
“In my opinion, [my] degree doesn’t prove very much, but a lot of people I do business with take it very seriously”
— Donald Trump, The Art of the Deal
Trump graduated from Penn in 1968 with a bachelor of science in economics from The Wharton School, then called Wharton School of Finance.
While Trump’s performance as a student remains highly contested, for Trump himself, it’s mostly about what a high-powered degree signals to others.
“In my opinion, that degree doesn’t prove very much, but a lot of people I do business with take it very seriously,” he wrote in “The Art of the Deal.” “So all things considered, I’m glad I went to Wharton.”
Trump’s son, Donald Jr., and daughter, Ivanka, also attended Wharton.
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Honorary Degrees
Trump has received several honorary degrees, though all but two have been revoked since he entered politics in 2015.
In 2010, Robert Gordon University in Scotland awarded Trump an honorary business administration doctorate. The university withdrew the degree in December 2015, after Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
“In the course of the current U.S. election campaign, Mr. Trump has made a number of statements that are wholly incompatible with the ethos and values of the university,” a spokesman for Robert Gordon said in a statement. “The university has therefore decided to revoke its award of the honorary degree.”
Trump received an honorary doctorate of laws from Lehigh University in 1988. The university revoked the degree in 2021 after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Similarly, Wagner College rescinded Trump’s honorary doctorate of humane letters, awarded in 2004, two days after the insurrection.
Trump’s two remaining honorary degrees are both from Liberty University.
In 2012, the private, Christian university awarded Trump an honorary doctorate of business in recognition of his “unwavering and public commitment to our nation’s founding principles of limited government, individual liberty, and the free enterprise system, and in further recognition of his iconic status as one of America’s most successful visionaries and entrepreneurs.”
Additionally, in 2017, Liberty University presented an honorary doctor of laws degree to Trump after he gave the keynote speech at graduation.