Just 10 years ago, almost 60 percent of Americans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education. By last year, that number had fallen to 42 percent. Seventy percent of Americans told Pew last fall that higher education is moving in the wrong direction. The disdain has become so difficult to ignore that, over the past year, several universities and higher-education organizations set out to study how they lost the public’s trust—and how they might restore it.
Three reports—from Yale, from Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, and from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, a higher-education advocacy group—were released this spring. (Cornell is working on a study of its own.) The reports differ in their diagnoses of where higher education went wrong and, by extension, of what should be done now. But their mere existence proves, if nothing else, that America’s universities have finally gotten the message: People don’t like them very much.
Some insiders, granted, seem to view universities as mostly the victims of factors beyond their control. The AAC&U report lists a number of them. People around the world in recent years have turned against all kinds of institutions, not just higher education. The racial-justice movements of the past decade spawned a virulent backlash, and colleges’ “visible commitment to diversity initiatives” made them “an easy political target.” A decline in state funding forced universities to compensate with higher tuition; government regulations around civil rights and financial aid led them to hire more administrators. Through it all, political actors seized on these larger forces to further erode trust in higher education.
Because the report does not identify much in particular that universities did to deserve the public’s contempt, it’s light on concrete ideas for reform. It advises universities to break down bureaucracies that hinder innovation, become more involved in their surrounding communities, and work with peers to defend against government overreach. And it’s teeming with the kind of bureaucratic jargon—for example, it urges universities to “recommit to inclusive excellence” and “tell a clearer and more resonant story that aligns with the lived experiences of individuals from diverse backgrounds”—that has helped make higher education so alienating to so many people.
[Listen: Colleges are at a breaking point]
The report released by Vanderbilt and WashU, and written by a committee of humanities and social-science scholars from a number of prestigious universities, focuses on a much-discussed problem that’s notably absent from the AAC&U report: political slant. The authors dismiss the critique, common on the right, that academic departments employ too many liberals and not enough conservatives. The real problem, they argue, is that the pursuit of knowledge in certain fields in the humanities and humanistic social sciences has been subordinated to achieving “social justice.” The report quotes a statement by the former president of the American Anthropological Association, who argued that its discipline was meant to “challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.” (The association published a statement saying that the committee misrepresented the state of scholarship in the field.)
Ideological commitments—for example, the notion “that there are no behavioral differences between men and women traceable to biology”—can lead to shoddy scholarship or the suppression or obscuring of contrary findings. As evidence, the authors cite a paper that challenges the idea of gendered divisions of labor in hunter-gatherer societies; the paper was later criticized by experts in the field. They are particularly concerned by what they see as the widespread belief that objective evaluation of scholarship is impossible, and that therefore political criteria are as worthy as evidentiary ones. They build a case that some academic journals and scholarly associations have been captured by relativism.
The report concludes like so many other academic papers: with a recommendation for further study. It does hint at the possibility of more aggressive measures down the line. For decades, faculty have had authority over all academic matters. The report suggests that, in rare cases, administrators might be called upon to rescue the disciplines. “If and when the department of astronomy morphs into the department of astrology, it will at some point make sense for the administration to object.”
But can administration be trusted? The upshot of Yale’s report, which is by far the most self-critical of the three, is that administrators bear much of the responsibility for higher education’s current predicament. “Trust is earned by doing what you say you’re going to do—and, ideally, doing it well,” the faculty committee writes. “In recent years, however, universities have been expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable.” These vague and often contradictory aims have made it difficult to judge whether universities are living up to their own standards, and have led to confusion about what universities are even for. The report, released in April, is nominally about Yale, but it could just as well be about the Ivy League in general. It identifies three main areas where elite universities have fallen short.
First, according to the report, these schools lost trust because of their convoluted pricing system; many set exorbitant tuition and use revenues from the richest families, who pay full price, to subsidize the cost of attendance for everyone else. The sticker price of attending Yale, for example, is $94,100 in annual tuition and fees. But families making less than $200,000 receive free tuition. The problem is that many Americans—according to one survey, 48 percent—wrongly assume that everyone pays full price. This contributes to the overwhelming, but incorrect, sense that college keeps getting more and more expensive. (On average, Americans are paying less for college than they were a decade ago.)
[Rose Horowitch: The college backlash is a mirage]
Then there’s the opaque and at times seemingly arbitrary way that elite universities determine whom to admit. Although Yale shields most details of how it makes its decisions, the available evidence suggests that the university often privileges wealth, status, and athletic ability over purely academic considerations. Finally, the report argues that Yale has strayed from its focus on rigor and academic excellence. At the college, the median grade is an A. “Grades, like colleges and universities, no longer seem trustworthy,” the committee observes.
The Yale report advises, among other things: reducing preferences for legacy and donor applicants, setting a default device-free-classroom policy, establishing a 3.0 mean or similar college-wide grading standard, and creating a civic-education initiative for undergraduates.
Yale President Maurie McInnis issued a statement accompanying the report that takes responsibility for the university’s role in losing public trust. “We were certainly more than mere bystanders,” McInnis writes. Not long after, she narrowed the university’s mission statement to focus solely on the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge. (The previous mission statement, adopted in 2016, had focused on “improving the world today and for future generations” and emphasized fostering an “ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.”) McInnis also created a number of committees to figure out how to implement the report’s recommendations. Now comes the hard part: Any changes to admissions or classroom policies would almost certainly be met with fierce resistance.
Both the Yale and Vanderbilt-WashU reports share a glaring omission: Donald Trump. The collapse in public trust in higher education over the past decade surely has something to do with Trump polarizing Republican voters against the sector. Indeed, the Trump-era Republican Party has made antipathy toward elite universities a pillar of its brand. J. D. Vance once gave a speech titled “Universities Are the Enemy.” Last year, only about one-quarter of Republicans felt confident about higher education, compared with 66 percent of Democrats. Leaving Trump out of any investigation into the trust crisis means that the reports are, at best, incomplete.
But ignoring Trump—probably to avoid charges of partisan bias—did keep two out of the three reports, at least, beneficially dedicated to internal failures. “The only way you’re going to resolve this constant pressure from the political side, which is now coming from the right, is to fix your shop,” Daniel Diermeier, the Vanderbilt chancellor, told me. Universities might not be able to prevent their critics from attacking them, but they’ve now acknowledged that they’ve been supplying the ammunition.
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