Higher Ed Is Very Sorry

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