Why Americans Don’t Trust Higher Education

Higher education has been buzzing about a new report from Yale University on the decline of public trust in colleges and universities.

The report is unexpectedly self-flagellatory, which is why it’s earned hyperbolic headlines since its release. (“Yale report savages Ivy League schools for destroying trust in higher education,” blared Fortune.)

Many of the report’s recommendations, drafted by a 10-member committee, will no doubt improve Yale’s internal operations. Despite the breathless coverage, however, the report falls short of a broader remedy for higher education’s woes. It also unfortunately exemplifies the self-centeredness that has earned elite colleges public disdain.

The Yale report pinpoints three factors for declining trust in higher education: (1) soaring costs; (2) opaque admissions processes; and (3) “free speech, political bias, and self-censorship.” It also claims an outsized role for itself and other elite schools in driving public perceptions of higher education. “No sector of higher education faces greater public skepticism than the Ivy League,” the authors write.

While it’s noble of Yale to shoulder so much of the blame (or credit) for Americans’ views of higher education, this perspective is fantastically, myopically, solipsistically narrow. Sure, Yale reported its largest-ever applicant pool this year—50,015 hopefuls—but consider that nearly 3 million students will enroll as first-time college students this fall. For the overwhelming majority of students and their families, schools like Yale simply aren’t relevant. Yale may have rejected 95 percent of applicants this year, but more than 99 percent of high school seniors rejected the idea of applying to Yale in the first place.

Nevertheless, the Yale report interprets the problem of distrust in higher education through the narrow prism of itself and its equally cosseted peers. The result is a grave misdiagnosis of what’s gone wrong with the public’s perceptions of higher education.

For instance, Yale’s principal defense to the issue of cost is to argue that an Ivy League degree is, in fact, affordable. Despite the eyeball-popping sticker price for one year’s attendance ($94,425), “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,” the report protests. That’s great for the vanishingly few students admitted—and meaningless for everyone else.

The perceived price of an Ivy League degree is not what’s driving students’ distrust. Rather, it’s the actual cost of buying a degree, typically from a local college or university, the value of which is increasingly uncertain. More than 40 percent of recent college graduates are “underemployed,” according to the New York Federal Reserve, casting doubt on whether a college diploma is worth the sacrifice and the debt to acquire it.

At the University of Missouri-Columbia (my undergraduate alma mater), the average net price for a full-time incoming student in 2023-24 was $22,169, according to the federal government’s College Navigator. The median debt for graduates is $20,500. That’s not bad, comparatively. A new NerdWallet study projects that the average student heading off to college this fall will borrow $43,000 to earn a bachelor’s degree. (By comparison, Yale says, 90 percent of their students graduate debt-free.)

Yale’s recommendation for tackling costs is to make its tuition free for higher-income student. But that doesn’t help the kid aspiring to Mizzou—nor does it help Mizzou. As much as Yale would like to “lead by example,” few schools can afford its generosity, enabled by its $44 billion endowment, the second-largest in the country. In contrast to Yale, most institutions are staring down budget cuts and financial pressures, thanks to demographic shifts and the Trump administration’s funding cuts. The University of Missouri, for instance, slashed $40 million from its 2026 budget, and the rating agency Moody’s slapped a “negative” rating on the outlook for higher education this year.

Granted, college affordability is a much bigger problem than Yale alone or even the elite schools together can solve. These schools can, however, do more to fix their own reputations and their broader role in society. Sadly, the Yale report falls short on this front too.

The problem confronting elite education is not so much public distrust as public resentment. Many Americans rightly see elite universities—and their graduates—as co-conspirators in a scheme to hoard the nation’s wealth and power for themselves. Kids in the top 1 percent are twice as likely to attend an “Ivy Plus” college compared to middle-class kids with the same test scores, according to Harvard University’s Opportunity Insights.

These elite graduates then go on to run the world. At Harvard, for instance, more than half the class of 2025 entered careers in tech, finance, or management consulting. The overwhelming majority of policymakers and politicians—including President Donald Trump and many in his administration—are also products of elite education. All but one Supreme Court justice went to law school at Harvard or Yale (the sole exception being Justice Amy Coney Barrett, an alumna of Notre Dame). From the perspective of many Americans—the majority of whom do not have four-year degrees—a cozy cabal of the ultra-privileged are the dictators of law, policy, and the economy. Is it any wonder that so many people, feeling powerless and pissed, seek solace in a transgressive red hat?

The Yale report doesn’t acknowledge any of this (though it does include a recommendation for encouraging public service careers). Rather, it largely treats trust as an internal problem. Hence, it spends a lot of time talking about grade inflation, which matters only to the small number of people who either bestow or receive grades at Yale. Other aspects of the report tend to reinforce the elitism and exclusionary culture that underpin public disgust with the Ivy League.

For example, while acknowledging the noxious effects of preferential admissions for alumni children and recruited athletes, the report falls short of calling for a ban on these practices. Rather, it timidly suggests that Yale “reduce preferences for special classes of applicants.” Its big idea for making admissions more transparent is to publish “a minimum standard of academic achievement necessary for consideration,” which could potentially involve a “minimum SAT score or Yale-specific entrance exam.” This public standard, the report says, would “spare a meaningful number of applicants time and emotional investment in an application that will not succeed.” It would also likely discourage applications from low-income, high-achieving students, among whom “undermatching” is already a concern. According to one estimate, as many as 200,000 low-income students enroll in schools below their academic potential each year. A “Yale-specific entrance exam” would impose further burdens for these students while giving wealthy students with access to pricey test prep another advantage. The result would be to calcify Yale’s role in perpetuating privilege, rather than promoting mobility.

Ironically, the report’s best recommendation is self-examination. “Those of us in higher education have too often resisted calls to critically examine our own institutions, professions, and modes of thought,” the report states. “As we move forward, we must be willing to admit where we have been wrong and where we might improve.”

Good advice.

New at the Monthly…

Amazon’s illusory discounts. Turns out that the “low” prices you pay on Amazon compared to other websites might be the product of clever technology and market manipulation. According to a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission against the company, Amazon’s “anti-discounting algorithm” would match competitors’ prices but never undercut them, explains Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. But “when rivals raised prices, Amazon’s algorithm followed.” As a result, prices went up across the market, shoppers had little incentive to buy elsewhere, and Amazon scooped up more and more market share. Policymakers are starting to fight back. Read here.

Aren’t assassinations illegal? The answer, startlingly, is no, says former federal prosecutor James Zirin. And that makes Trump’s threats to assassinate foreign leaders even more troubling. As James explains, the only domestic legal constraint on Trump is an executive order (which he can override any time). Killing heads of state is also permissible under international law if done so for reasons of national defense or as part of a legally predicated war. That’s dubious in the case of Trump’s attack on Iran, but as James also points out, international law may not apply to the United States anyway. It is not a party to the International Criminal Court. The only real check on Trump might be the fear of retaliation. “If it’s legitimate for you to do it to them, then it’s open season on you,” he writes. Read here.

Why you should take a pass on the peptide craze. Maybe because they can kill you. “Two people fell desperately ill during a Las Vegas ’anti-aging’ event after injecting peptides and had to be intubated,” writes health care expert and journalist Merrill Goozner. “Widespread allergic reactions to the shots, some of which were life-threatening, forced regulators in Australia to issue a safety alert. Health Canada has issued a warning that unauthorized peptides can cause blood clots and liver and kidney damage.” But the scariest part, Merrill writes, is the tolerance for these harms under RFK, Jr.’s regime as secretary of Health and Human Services. Read here.

About Tucker Carlson’s “apology.” Don’t get too misty-eyed about Carlson’s apparent late-stage conversion, warns Politics Editor Bill Scher. Carlson is still a conspiracist and an anti-Semite. His apology for championing Trump is what got the most attention from the press, but “what he said after the apology shows he is as creepy and manipulative and misleading as ever,” Bill writes. Read here.

Plus…

• Meredith Kolodner of The Hechinger Report dissects the opacity of college financial aid offers.
• Politics Editor Bill Scher makes the case for why last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner should have been canceled.
• Monthly President and Publisher Emeritus Markos Kounalakis recommends Marc Bennetts’s powerful new book, The Descent, on the collapse of Russia under Vladimir Putin.

Coda (AI-pocalypse edition)

It’s hard not to be an AI skeptic when there’s scary news everyday about its perils. Take, for instance, the current brouhaha over the world-ending hacking capabilities of Anthropic’s new model, Mythos. On the other hand, we should probably be grateful to Anthropic for not unleashing Mythos on the world willy-nilly. Other companies are not nearly as responsible:

• Bus Patrol. Bloomberg Businessweek has a great investigation into Bus Patrol, an AI-powered company that’s raking it in issuing automatic tickets to motorists who pass stopped school buses illegally. Districts are supposed to benefit from the revenues, but they’re apparently getting shortchanged (while the company profits handsomely). Many of the tickets are also allegedly being issued in error, and improvements in school safety aren’t materializing.
• Mercor. This company is harvesting the expertise of lawyers, scientists, and other white-collar professionals so AI models can learn to do these jobs. The Verge interviewed some of the workers training their AI replacements. The future is bleak.
• Palantir. Billionaire CEO Alex Karp recently released a 22-point summary of his 2025 book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, which critics are calling a terrifying techno-fascist manifesto. As commentator Leah McElrath posted on Bluesky, “Palantir’s vision is the philosophy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt dressed up in jeans and a hoodie.” Palantir, remember, is the company whose AI is helping to direct the U.S. war on Iran. If you’re thinking Skynet from the Terminator series, you’re probably not far off.

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Have a great week!

Anne Kim, Senior Editor