The State of American Higher Education in 2026

Thoughts on the Yale Report.

Photo by Richard Liu on Unsplash

I am proud to announce that this past week Drezner’s World reached over 25,000 subscribers and 1,000 paying subscribers. The hard-working staff here is most grateful to everyone who has chosen to read these musings. Thank you!

In celebration, I’m going to take a request from one of my readers: I’m gonna write something in response to a request from my Dad.

I am not joking — earlier this week he emailed me the following:

I have been waiting for you to blog about the Yale report on the failure of academic institutions to respond to the contemporary needs of students, and I am not talking about plush lounges and great food. It's time to move on from Washington for a short interval and get in to the weeds with students and the academic institutions that guide them. As an academic dean, you must have some thoughts on the subject.

My father is referring to the Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which was released with great fanfare earlier this month. The report addresses a variety of issues that have caused an erosion of trust in higher education over the last generation. Here’s a snippet:

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.

The range of topics 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.

So what do I think? I think the report does a solid but incomplete job of analyzing the trouble with how universities are perceived in the United States. The key words in that previous sentence are “incomplete” and “perceived.”

Let’s start with “perceived.” If my father’s reaction is indicative of what others thought about the document — and I’d be willing to wager that it is — then that reaction is grounded in the press coverage of the report rather than the report itself. To be sure, the Yale authors acknowledge flaws within the university system — on grade inflation, for example, the report is quite forthright.

Mostly, however, what the report acknowledges is that the choices made on tuition and admissions have eroded the trust of the public — not that the policies themselves are intrinsically bad or fail to serve students. Consider, for example, what the report says about rising tuition prices:

A notable divide exists between public perceptions of ever more out-of-reach tuition prices and what many students pay, especially at a school like Yale. In recent decades, American universities have adopted a “high tuition-high aid” model, in which the tuition sticker price bears less and less relation to the actual cost for many individual students. This system has lowered the expense of college for individual students and families, which has not risen as much as the headlines suggest. But it has had a disastrous impact on public trust. By its nature, the system is complicated, unpredictable, secretive, and highly variable. These factors tend to reduce trust rather than increase it….

Under the high tuition-high aid model, Yale and its peer institutions have raised undergraduate tuition each year while increasingly subsidizing the cost of attendance for low-income and middle-class students. Today, approximately one in five undergraduate students attends Yale on a full ride, paying nothing for four years of education, including tuition, room and board, travel, books, and personal expenses. More than 55 percent of undergraduates receive some level of need-based aid, and almost 90 percent graduate with no student loan debt. Beginning with the 2026–27 academic year, all families with incomes under $200,000 will qualify for free tuition, and those under $100,000 will have all billed expenses (tuition, housing, and food) fully covered.

In that sense, the high tuition-high aid model has done what it was designed to do: make a college like Yale accessible to a wide array of students, from a range of incomes and backgrounds. From the perspective of building public trust, though, it would be hard to design a more ineffective system. The tuition sticker price may now be a fiction for many students, but it is the first thing most families see when they contemplate paying for college. The process of applying for aid is laborious, frustrating, and unpredictable. Indeed, many families do not believe such aid exists. According to a 2023 survey by the AAU, nearly half of Americans believe that colleges and universities demand the same payments from all students, regardless of income.

I applaud the authors of this report for explaining why the sticker price of higher education is usually not the actual price of higher education — and the deleterious effect this complicated pricing schema has had on public trust in higher education. The section on admissions makes a similar point about the opacity of higher ed.

That said, the Yale report largely would disagree with my father’s contention that universities like Yale or Tufts have failed to respond to the contemporary needs of students. Even the argument that recent college grads have not done well economically does not seem to be borne out.

The Yale report has received praise in conservative quarters like the Wall Street Journal editorial page — and it’s easy to see why:

The American academy isn’t known for its self-reflection,¹ but maybe the political criticism of recent years is having a useful effect. A report last week by Yale University contains a surprising dose of self-examination that dares to agree with what many of its critics have been saying for years….

The best news here is the lack of defensiveness and arrogance that has been the typical academic response to criticism. The authors don’t indulge in the dodge of blaming Donald Trump. They essentially agree with the criticism about rising costs, admissions that lack transparency, and the failure to support free speech on campus and genuine academic freedom.

I’d quibble with whether the report agrees as much with the intrinsic critiques or the effect those critiques have had on public perception, but let’s table that for now. It’s the relief that the report did not blame Donald Trump that seems to please the WSJ’s editorial writers the most. To ignore that side of the equation, however, is to ignore half the story. And that is why the Yale Report is incomplete.

I’m not the only one to notice this — Wesleyan University president Michael S. Roth made this precise critique in a New York Times op-ed.

Amid the Trump administration’s ongoing attack on higher education, the [Yale Report’s] message is clear: Don’t worry, it says, we are staying in our narrow lane. That’s not a mission; it’s a defense strategy. And the retreat from public purpose will not enhance trust; it will further erode it. A lack of public engagement and an air of cloistered privilege are a big part of why so many people now view universities with suspicion. Retreating further behind the gates will make a bad situation much worse….

One can well imagine why a university committee might want to avoid provoking the ire of the Trump administration, which has hit higher education with more than a billion dollars of fines and has threatened schools whose campuses don’t seem to line up with its priorities.

But the ideals the Trump administration has been punishing are prerequisites for higher education to flourish — independent thought, a commitment to truth even when it’s inconvenient and a focus on the creation of truly democratic citizens. Endangering these ideals endangers the whole operation. Yale and other elite universities should find the courage to say so.

Roth is correct. The damage Trump and his conservative allies have wreaked on American higher education has been considerable. This is a point that the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World² has discussed again and again and again and again and again. But as a pedagogical exercise it’s worth highlighting yet again.

The business model of American higher education rests in part on international students studying in the states. Both elite schools and state schools have benefited from international students matriculating in the United States. They help ensure that elite schools remain the magnet for global talent — a key pillar of soft and hard power in the United States. International students also help to lower tuition costs for in-state students at public universities. Higher education in the United States runs a trade surplus. It’s great for America and it would take a galactic-level own-goal to kill this golden goose.

Guess what the Trump administration is doing?

Inside Higher Ed reported on these numbers as well, warning that the long-term effects could be severe:

[Professor of educational leadership and higher education at Boston College Chris] Glass said that institutions shouldn’t treat this decline as a blip that will rebound naturally, similar to previous instances when international enrollment declined.

“It should be clear to people in the field that the policy direction of the United States is to reduce the number of international students in an effort to address concerns related to the growth in international students,” he said. “This is more of a structural shift than there is a cyclical shift. COVID—there was a pandemic, but we recovered. There was a recession, but we recovered. [Sept.] 11, there was a dip, but we recovered. But the policy direction, at least under this administration, foreseeable for the next three years, is one that is looking to have more scrutiny on student flows to the United States.”

Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired immigration law professor at Cornell University, warned that the effects of these declines could be deleterious to the American economy and its status as a global leader of research and innovation.

“I don’t think Americans realize how this decline in international students will hurt them both in the short term, in terms of local economies … and in the long term in terms of stifling our innovation,” he said. “I think we’re shooting ourselves in the foot, and, unfortunately, I don’t think the Trump administration plans to change its war on immigrants.”

Let me just close with one data point that encapsulates that last paragraph. Last week Tufts Ph.D. Rümeysa Öztürk — you remember, the woman who ICE snatched off the streets of Somerville because she co-authored an op-ed and then Marco Rubio lied about it — returned to Turkey as part of a negotiated settlement with the Trump administration. Politico’s Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney explain, “The terms of Ozturk’s departure will likely end ongoing legal wrangling over her case and avoids the possibility of a 10-year prohibition on return to the U.S. if her deportation was ordered and upheld.”

The Boston Globe’s Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio reported Öztürk’s statement:

“I am choosing to return home as planned to continue my career as a woman scholar without losing more time to the state-imposed violence and hostility I have experienced in the United States — all for nothing more than co-signing an op-ed advocating for Palestinian rights,“ Öztürk said in a statement released Friday. “I invite everyone to recognize the privilege it is for any country to host international scholars, and the hole that is left in our society when that privilege is lost.”

Earlier this year, Öztürk earned her PhD from the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development at Tufts, after working on her thesis from inside a detention center more than 1,000 miles away from her campus. Öztürk, a children’s media scholar, previously earned her master’s degree at Teachers College, Columbia University.

“As I start the next chapter of my life, I stand firmly in solidarity with academic communities in the U.S. and elsewhere who live in fear for nothing more than their scholarship,” Öztürk said in her statement. “I invite all universities to do better about listening and valuing all of their students as equal community members.”

Trump administration officials like to argue that universities are stifling dissent — but as the Globe report details, the administration’s actions have done far more damage:

Some legal experts said the lasting consequences of the Trump administration’s actions in arresting Öztürk, and others like Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, are already evident.

“That Rümeysa felt she had to return to Turkey to escape the shadow of state violence says everything you need to know about the state of free speech and academic freedom in this country,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute….

Many foreign scholars and students remain fearful that speaking out on issues they care about could lead to their arrest and deportation, Krishnan said.

“The result has been a pervasive atmosphere of self-censorship,” Krishnan said. “One that has been corrosive not only to our college campuses, but to our democracy.”

This chilling effect, Krishnan added, “harms all of us.”….

In Massachusetts, Reyyan Bilge, a close friend of Öztürk’s who also taught her during her undergraduate years in Turkey, was relieved Öztürk was home with her family.

“The last year has been a nightmare for her,” Bilge said. “We never could shake fully the possibility that she could have been detained again.”

Bilge, now a psychology professor at Northeastern University, said she has seen many international students decide to leave the US out of fear of being targeted.

Bilge said she didn’t expect Öztürk would return to the US. “I wouldn’t advise her to either, at this point,” she said. “I’m really bitter and angry and sad for the future of the United States.”

If folks want to seize on the Yale Report as evidence that higher education needs to put in the work, that’s fine. Goodness knows American universities can do better. But the report doesn’t say precisely what conservatives are claiming that it says. More importantly, to analyze the state of American higher education in 2026 without acknowledging a federal government that is hostile to the very idea of higher education seems… what’s the word… incomplete.

So that’s what I think of the Yale Report.

1. I’m sorry but whoever wrote this sentence deserves an “F.” Any garden-variety faculty meeting or academic committee contains an ocean of self-reflection.

2. As well as the previous hard-working staff at Spoiler Alerts.