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In recent weeks, colleges and universities have found themselves at the center of the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape American society and culture. As the administration extracts concessions from universities and seeks to deport students based on their participation in protests, experts are raising questions about the future of the American academy and the country’s larger place on the world stage.

A lot of rising college freshmen have a different, more basic anxiety, however: They just want to know if they’ll be able to pay for school.

The Trump administration’s highly publicized efforts to dismantle the Education Department have some students questioning if federal student aid even still exists, according to nonprofits that support college access. “Students are wondering if the FAFSA is still available,” Marcos Montes, policy director of the Southern California College Attainment Network, told me.

Others are concerned that they won’t be able to get federal Pell grants or other financial aid they need to attend college, said Karla Robles-Reyes, chief program officer at OneGoal, a nonprofit that helps low-income students with college access.

As of now, both Pell grants and the FAFSA, or free application for federal student aid, remain available. But some students fear that if they use the FAFSA to apply for federal aid, information about their families’ immigration status could be shared with ICE — a concern that college counselors and advocates cannot fully dispel. That fear is contributing to a drop in federal financial aid applications, Montes said.

Graduating seniors are concerned about other issues too, like whether they’ll be able to exercise their freedom of speech on campus. But a lot of young people’s biggest worries are about “the critical resources that they need to pursue their higher education,” Robles-Reyes said — and whether those resources are still available under Trump.

It’s a reminder that although colleges and universities have become a topic of heated political debate — and students and professors a symbol of decadent liberalism to many on the right — postsecondary education is also just an increasingly necessary career step that a majority of Americans undertake at some point. And for this year’s high school seniors, especially those who........

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