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When the Obama administration sent its Dear Colleague letter to college presidents across the U.S. in April 2011, many of us felt something we hadn’t felt in a long time: relief.
For decades, campus sexual assault had been an open secret—pervasive but largely unreported and often mishandled by institutions more invested in protecting their reputations than their students. The letter changed that. It specified, in unambiguous terms, that colleges had a legal obligation under Title IX to investigate sexual violence and protect survivors, and that they would face consequences—including the loss of federal funding—if they failed.
Over the next five years, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which enforces Title IX, opened investigations into more than 300 colleges and universities. Campuses took action. They built sexual assault resource centers, trained Title IX coordinators and established affirmative-consent policies, while the It’s On Us campaign brought the issue into mainstream culture.
It truly felt like we were making progress.
Unsurprisingly, the first Trump administration systematically rolled back these changes. Then Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos narrowed the definition of sexual harassment and reinstated live cross-examination hearings that many survivors found retraumatizing.
The roller coaster continued when the Biden administration released a rule to restore and expand protections in April 2024, only to have it struck down nationwide by a federal judge in January 2025, reverting campuses to the 2020 Trump-era rules. Now, in Trump’s second term, the Department of Education has seen its staff cut roughly in half and the OCR has been significantly reduced in capacity—resolving just 1 percent of pending civil rights cases in 2025, the lowest rate in more than a decade, and not a single complaint of sexual harassment or violence.
Despite these regulatory fluctuations, the latest evidence does show some progress. According to the 2024 Higher Education Sexual Misconduct and Awareness survey, the most comprehensive campus sexual assault survey in years, the percentage of undergraduate women reporting nonconsensual sexual contact involving force or inability to consent since entering college fell from approximately 26 percent in 2019 to 19 percent in 2024, a statistically significant decline.
That decline is meaningful. But it nevertheless means that in 2024 nearly one in five undergraduate women reported nonconsensual sexual contact since entering college. We can do better.
Over this same time period, the percentage of students who said they knew their university’s definition of sexual assault also declined across genders—for men, women and gender-nonconforming students alike—including a 7.2-percentage-point decline in the number of undergraduate men who said they were “very” or “extremely knowledgeable” about sexual assault and sexual misconduct definitions at their institution.
A separate 2022 study at one large university found that cisgender heterosexual men’s understanding of consent had not improved at all since 2017, despite years of affirmative consent education and Me Too awareness campaigns. The researchers concluded bluntly: The approach is not working for the group most likely to perpetrate assault.
This gets at something I’ve spent more than a decade studying: the gap between what consent frameworks can do and what we ask them to do. Affirmative-consent policies require a clear verbal agreement before sexual activity—certainly an improvement over a world where silence was treated as permission.
But a yes can be given through fear, social pressure or the coerced calculation of how to exit a situation safely. While technically consent can be withdrawn, there are times it can feel unsafe to withdraw it. And there can be a difference between the verbal act of saying yes and authentic internal willingness. Affirmative-consent policies aim for an expression of consent, while assuming that internal assent is also there. Sometimes, that’s not the case.
It’s time to have a more honest reckoning with what a yes actually means. Research suggests that many students—mostly women but even men—have encounters that meet the legal standard of consent while experiencing something closer to coercion. While a lot of emphasis has been placed on affirmative consent in campus policy, the fact is that a yes can still be coercive. Students need to understand these nuances of consent—that what one says might not match what one feels—and the best practices to avoid ambiguous consent situations.
We already know that K–12 sex education in the U.S. is woefully inadequate. In many states, students can arrive at college without having had a single substantive conversation about how desire, power, fear and communication interact in intimate situations. We might think college is no place to teach sex education, but if not here, then where?
After 15 years, repeated regulatory upheaval and continuing confusion about consent, we have to be honest about what the policy fight alone can and cannot do. Consent frameworks, however carefully designed, cannot substitute for meaningful education and culture change that would actually reduce harm.
The next administration will rewrite the rules again. That’s almost guaranteed. So, let’s focus on the changes we can make despite them.
