A+ diagnosis, C+ prescription: Evaluating Yale’s Higher Ed Trust report
In April, a faculty committee at Yale released a 58-page report on why the public has lost trust in higher education, with 20 recommendations and unanimous sign-off. President Maurie McInnis accepted the conclusions, called the project “pivotal,” and told the campus Yale had been “more than mere bystanders” to the collapse in trust.
The report is unusually honest about some of the biggest challenges in higher education. It admits, for example, that:
admissions disproportionately benefit the top 1%, despite claiming to attract the best talent regardless of need or background
the median Yale student now receives an A, despite holding themselves as a bulwark of academic rigor
registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 36-to-1 across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, and the School of Management, despite proclaiming diverse viewpoints
Self-criticism is rare enough from an Ivy League institution, or any institution. We should take it seriously. However, the report was meant to guide the sector, with President McInnis framing it as Yale’s contribution to a national challenge. Here, they fell short.
Actions speak louder than words
The report sharply diagnoses the state of higher ed and why it has lost the public’s trust. Its prescriptions don’t meet the same high bar. Recommendations get vaguer as the proposed solution becomes more complex or unpopular.
There are some genuinely insightful analyses that produce a small set of concrete recommendations: admissions reform, the 3.0 grading mean, device-free classrooms, and narrowing the mission statement back to “research and teaching.” Yale will struggle to implement these recommendations. Donors expect large legacy preferences, and students may shudder at being told to put away their phones and laptops. But these changes are hardly more courageous than others it has already implemented in recent years (e.g., the recent expansion of free tuition to families under $200K, the 2024 institutional voice policy).
The report produces candid and challenging analyses on the hardest issues, like affordability, administrative bloat, and ideological homogeneity. Yet on recommendations, the report either prescribes procedural shifts or generic aspirations without a clear timeline, measurable outcomes, or specific actions. The committee says cost is the single biggest driver of public distrust, then recommends that Yale “substantially raise the income limit on the no-tuition guarantee” over time. The committee says administrative bloat corrodes the academic mission, then recommends a “transparent review” with no target, no deadline, and no more than a guiding principle (”it should be hard to expand and easy to contract”). The recommendations to “take responsibility,” “govern collaboratively,” and “resist self-censorship” read well in a report, but they do not commit the administration to anything you can measure in 12-18 months.
Recommendation 17 made us chuckle. It calls on Yale to streamline its administrative bureaucracy. Meanwhile, just one Trust Committee produced 6 subsequent committees to evaluate and recommend further action (based on President McInnis’s response letter). To put that more clearly: a report on rebuilding trust through governance reform has, as its most immediate and concrete output, the launch of six new governance bodies.
Who is this report even for?
The report explicitly positions itself as guidance for the sector. The Chronicle and Fortune wrote it up as a model of self-examination that other institutions should emulate. The committee itself says it hopes “they may prove useful to others in higher education as well.”
So, we tested if that was true - and found the report comes up woefully short. We considered the report’s most concrete recommendations for a more typical institutional profile than Yale’s: a tuition-dependent regional private with a $200M endowment, a 65% admit rate, and an enrollment trajectory that has been negative for five years. Those recommendations do not work for the typical institution.
Here are three examples:
Reduce legacy and athletic preferences. At Yale, you can drop these preferences because demand for seats vastly exceeds supply - i.e., 96% of applicants are rejected. More typical institutions need recruited athletes to improve their student yield and legacy admissions help them bring in donor revenue that they cannot replace. This recommendation is structurally incompatible with schools’ economics.
Raise the free-tuition income threshold. This requires endowment-per-student in the range Yale itself sits at (roughly $2.7M), a level fewer than ten institutions in America have reached.
Set a 3.0 grading mean. This one could work at schools other than Yale, but it will hurt those schools and their graduates much more. Yale graduates get jobs even with lower grades because they went to Yale. Graduates have a brand and network with which few others can compete. More typical schools’ graduates can’t get a job with a 3.0 GPA, especially if their peers at other schools continue receiving an unearned 3.6.
What the sector should do with this report
Don’t dismiss this report. Yale’s analyses are serious, and the diagnostic chapters are among the most candid sector-level descriptions we have seen come out of an Ivy in years. The report is a useful artifact: a wealthy, demand-saturated institution announced in writing what its peers have refused to say for a decade. Sector leaders, board members, and senior administrators should absorb that courage.
However, the report is not a template. For the Ivy Plus, it is a useful jumping-off point, particularly paired with the public reform agenda Sian Beilock has laid out at Dartmouth: Commit to affordability for middle-income families. Reinstate requirements for standardized testing. Exhibit institutional restraint in political statements. And acknowledge, openly, that higher ed has a trust problem that “won’t solve itself,” as President Beilock did in her January WSJ op-ed.
For everyone else, the regional publics, the tuition-dependent privates, and the professional schools burdening graduates with untenable debt, it would be more useful to borrow the diagnostic frame and build your own plan to fix those challenges.
It is still an open question whether Yale itself follows through. President McInnis has accepted the recommendations, but she has also referred most of the hardest ones to more committees. Historically, this is how universities have buried the recommendations they cannot stomach, even if they admire them from afar. The next 12-24 months will tell us whether Yale has the courage in action that they had in diagnostics this April.