Yale University is considering major changes to its admissions, cost, grading and other areas in a sweeping effort to combat the stark erosion of trust in higher education.
Maurie McInnis, the school’s president, told the campus community Wednesday that the university would ensure people can take intellectual risks at Yale, confront grade inflation and redirect more money to teaching and research, among other changes.
Recent public dissatisfaction with higher education — especially elite schools — has been well documented. Seventy percent of Americans say higher education is generally going in the wrong direction, up from 56 percent in 2020, according to a Pew Research Center poll published in October.
McInnis had seen polling data to that effect in her years as a university leader, she said in an interview Wednesday, and also had heard concerns from families, legislators and community members. She said she could see that loss of trust was a serious issue for higher education.
Last year, McInnis convened a group of 10 faculty members to confront the issue head-on.
After a year of research and interviews with critics, skeptics and supporters — months that overlapped with the Trump administration’s unprecedented assault on higher education — Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education identified causes for the loss of public confidence and recommended 20 wide-ranging solutions. Those included the need for more dissent and less self-censorship on campus, more human connection and less screen time, more efforts to streamline bureaucracy and to share Yale’s resources more widely.
“For higher education to serve the public good, we need the public’s trust,” McInnis wrote to the campus Wednesday. “We need the American people to believe fully in the power and purpose of higher education.”
And trust, she said, must be earned. “We must acknowledge how we have fallen short.”
The committee worked from a set of first principles, Beverly Gage, a history professor and co-chair of the committee, said in an interview Wednesday. “What is it that we’re here to do? What are the fundamental things that universities need to protect and enhance at all costs? And then within that, where are places that we see room for productive change?”
The committee’s work led them to recommend re-centering on the university’s academic mission, said Julia Adams, a sociology professor and the committee’s other co-chair.
In many ways, elite higher education is opaque; it’s hard for people to know what it takes to get in and how much it really costs. Committee members wrote that they had trouble trying to determine something as fundamental as how much of the budget goes to core academic functions.
The committee noted that almost everyone agrees the cost of higher education is too high. Yale’s estimated full cost of attendance for a year is $94,425 — and the median income for a family of four in the United States is roughly $84,000. “Asked in a national poll to reflect on fifteen phrases that might describe Yale,” they wrote, “nearly everyone — a full 86 percent — agreed that ‘too expensive’ belonged at the top.”
But many top universities, including Yale, are generous with aid. Starting next year, students from families with incomes under $200,000 can attend Yale tuition-free, and those with incomes under $100,000 won’t have to pay for housing and food, either.
The committee recommended that Yale, over time, substantially raise the income limit for the no-tuition guarantee for undergraduates. McInnis said affordability for undergraduates will remain a focus and pledged to fundraise to help address the higher debt burden among students at some of the university’s professional schools.
Elite college admissions is another area of frustration for many. In 2026, Yale rejected almost 96 percent of applicants. The holistic admissions used by Yale and many other selective universities is subjective and difficult to explain, they wrote, and appears to disproportionately favor wealthy applicants.
The committee recommended that Yale make admissions more transparent, only using criteria it is willing to describe openly, make academic achievement the top priority, communicate a minimum standard of academic achievement necessary and reduce preferences such as those given to athletes and children of alumni and donors. “A floor such as a minimum SAT score or a Yale-specific entrance exam would ensure that no student is admitted without the requisite academic preparation and ability,” they wrote. It would also spare many students from time and emotional investment in an application doomed to fail.
McInnis signaled support for ensuring they apply the highest standards of academic rigor in who is admitted and why, and said she had shared the committee’s recommendations with Yale’s presidential council on undergraduate admissions to consider as it finalizes recommendations.
The committee addressed grade inflation, a concern at many universities that has been difficult to solve. Faculty at Harvard University are considering a proposal to cap the number of A grades given to undergraduates, and may vote on the measure next month.
Yale’s committee recommended a 3.0 mean for grades — a B average — or some other standard across the college. It also recommended including course percentiles or another means of contextualizing the grade on transcripts. McInnis said she has asked another committee to confront undergraduate grade inflation.
“Raising the bar for ourselves,” she wrote, “will also raise trust in our university.”
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