Was Barron Trump Rejected By Harvard? Inside The Rumors

Thanks to his president father, Barron Trump cannot get away from the spotlight. So much so that even his college life at NYU has been the subject of multiple rumors. The university freshman picked the comfortable school choice to continue his private life in the Trumps' Manhattan residence, but according to Donald Trump, Barron had a variety of colleges to choose from. "He was accepted to a lot of colleges," the Republican politician told the Daily Mail in September 2024. However, internet rumors suggest that he was denied to just as many.

Claims have been circulating on social media that the first son was rejected from a number of Ivy League schools, including Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia. Barron has broken the Trump family tradition of going to a prestigiously ranked university; his father and siblings all went to the University of Pennsylvania, except for Eric Trump, who went to Georgetown University. Netizens seem to believe that the son of Donald and Melania Trump only attended NYU because he failed to get into one of the more elite institutions.

One X (formerly Twitter) user found it hard to believe that, given how Donald has boasted about his own education, he wouldn't push Barron to apply to an Ivy League. They said: "You know he made Barron apply to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton." Another speculator wrote: "It must be an embarrassment to Donald Trump that money can't buy Barron an admission to any Ivy League school."

The purported evidence of Barron Trump's college rejections is Donald Trump's takedown of many high-profile universities. The president is targeting schools nationwide, threatening to cut federal funding to appease his fight against supposed collegiate antisemitism and liberalism. For instance, in addition to the $2.2 billion that was previously slashed from Harvard's grants, the federal government's Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced on May 13, 2025 that they would be stripping the university of another $450 million because it "failed to confront the pervasive race discrimination and anti-Semitic harassment plaguing its campus" — a response to the tolerance pro-Palestinian protests on many college campuses, of which the administration has been exceedingly critical.

Social media users, however, think that Trump's cutthroat agenda is secretly retribution for his son. "Any college [Trump] is attacking-are the ones that with all of his money they said 'no endowment will let [Barron] in,'" a comment said on Facebook. On X, another speculated: "NYU had as many pro-Palestinian protests that resulted in "incidents," yet he never mentions them." Even so, there is no sufficient evidence to prove Barron even applied to the aforementioned schools, let alone was denied.