The Yale Report and the State of Higher Education

Yale commissioned its own report on why trust in American higher education has declined so much. I want to emphasize, first, that trust in EVERY American institution has declined, and some polls find that higher education is not doing worse than average. But other find that universities are drawing an unusual degree of scorn. From the report:

Just a decade ago, 57 percent of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. By 2024, that number had dropped to a historic low of 36 percent. While trust improved slightly in 2025, seventy percent of Americans still say that higher education is heading in the wrong direction. . . .

Our committee identified three immediate factors behind the rise of public distrust. The first involves the soaring price of higher education in the United States, along with the perception that college, graduate, and professional school are no longer worth the money and sacrifice they demand. The second focuses on the college admissions system—specifically, the question of who gets in and why. The third includes an array of issues about what is said and taught on university campuses, including matters of free speech, political bias, and self-censorship. We also found important problems related to trust within the university itself, including concerns that grade inflation, new technologies, and bureaucratic expansion have undermined the university’s academic mission.

And here is an important point that bears repeating: complicated, opaque schemes bread distrust. From the NY Times:

For example, Yale and many other schools now rely on a model that regularly dilutes high tuition prices with generous aid packages. Although many students pay nowhere near sticker prices, the committee wrote that the approach had exacted “a disastrous impact on public trust.”

“By its nature, the system is complicated, unpredictable, secretive and highly variable,” the report said. “These factors tend to reduce trust rather than increase it.”

The same thing has happened in American health care, with the crazy-quilt system of charges and costs driving the overall lack of trust in medicine.

Here's an interesting paragraph on the issue of free speech:

Yale’s data suggests that self-censorship is a real problem. In a 2025 survey by the university, nearly a third of undergraduate respondents disagreed with the statement that “I feel free to express my political beliefs on campus,” up from 17 percent in 2015. Students who selfidentified as conservative reported lower rates of comfort, but discomfort appears to be rising across the spectrum. A recent Buckley Institute survey suggested that more than half of college students nationwide feel “intimidated in sharing their opinions, ideas, or beliefs in class.” Meanwhile, post-doctoral fellows and international students at Yale report that they now hesitate to speak out, even about their own research, for fear of government retaliation.

I think this is a hard problem because here the university only reflects the broader society. We just have fewer consensus beliefs and more issues of intense political disagreement than we had when I was in college. Many professors try to create a space for disagreement within their classrooms, but on the other hand most subscribe to some limits, and where to draw the line is just hard; given the ambiguity, many students might feel silenced even when their beliefs would be widely accepted. But it never hurts to try!

But as I always say, the root of the problem is the lack of any agreement on what universities are supposed to teach, and what a university degree is supposed to mean. The range of topics taken up in the report, the authors say,

revealed another challenge related to declining trust: widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education. Trust is earned by doing what you say you’re going to do—and, ideally, doing it well. In recent years, however, universities have been expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable. Rather than build public support, this diffusion of purpose has contributed to distrust. Without a clear mission and purpose, it becomes difficult to judge whether colleges and universities are living up to their fundamental commitments.

Is it ever.