What was Donald Trumps college record
Executive summary
Donald J. Trump attended Fordham University for two years before transferring to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1968; contemporaneous reporting and archival checks show he was not listed among Wharton graduates with honors or on the Dean’s List that year [1]. Concrete numeric details commonly sought—his undergraduate GPA and SAT scores—are not publicly verified because schools and testing agencies declined to release records and because, by law, such records are private unless the student authorizes disclosure [2] [1].
1. The basic record: schools, graduation year, and honors (what is documented)
Public reporting establishes that Trump began college at Fordham and finished at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1968, a fact he frequently cites himself and that contemporary sources confirm [1]. Multiple independent checks of Wharton materials show his name does not appear among graduates listed with Latin honors nor on the 1968 Dean’s List published by the Daily Pennsylvanian, and journalistic fact-checks therefore conclude he did not graduate with academic distinction [1].
2. What is contested or missing: GPA, SATs and sealed transcripts
The numeric measures most listeners mean by “college record”—GPA and standardized test scores—are not public: colleges and the College Board refuse to release them without the student’s consent and University and testing officials declined comment when pressed [2] [1]. Reporting repeatedly notes that efforts were made to suppress or hide earlier school records; for example, the New York Military Academy transcript was reportedly hidden in 2011 under pressure from allies of Trump, and Michael Cohen testified that Trump instructed legal threats to schools and the College Board to prevent any release of his records [3] [2].
3. Eyewitness and archival color: classmates and faculty impressions
Beyond formal lists, memoirs and interviews supply anecdotal context: critics and some former Penn faculty have offered blunt assessments of his academic engagement and performance, with quotes in archival reporting describing Trump as a poor student and not on the Dean’s List, though those recollections are anecdotal and do not substitute for a transcript [4] [1]. At the same time, Trump and his allies have long promoted the narrative that he “did very well” and emphasize his Wharton diploma as evidence of academic competence; that claim rests on the degree itself rather than published grades [1].
4. Why the absence of numbers matters and how it has been politicized
The lack of publicly available grades opened a political theater: Trump publicly challenged others to release transcripts while simultaneously working to block his own, creating an asymmetry that commentators and reporters note as politically charged and factually limiting [2] [3]. Journalists point out that the legal protections under FERPA make release by third parties illegal without consent, so the controversy is as much about perception and selective disclosures as about hidden factual revelations [2].
5. Bottom line assessment: what can and cannot be said with confidence
With confidence: Trump graduated from Wharton in 1968 and is not listed among that year’s honors graduates or the Dean’s List, and there is reporting that his earlier school records were shielded from release [1] [3]. With limited certainty: his exact undergraduate GPA and SAT scores remain unavailable in the public record because of institutional refusals and legal privacy protections, and therefore any claim asserting precise grades is unsupported by the cited sources [2] [1]. Competing narratives exist—Trump’s own public claims of strong academic standing versus multiple archival checks and testimonies indicating unremarkable university honors—and the absence of hard numeric data means the dispute is unlikely to be fully resolved from public sources cited here [4] [1] [2].