This week's issue has me thinking about how higher education responds to pressure from outside the sector. First, we look at a Yale committee's self-study on public trust and why the coverage of that report matters as much as the findings themselves. From there, we turn to the Trump administration's draft regulations for accreditation reform and what campus leaders should be paying attention to as the rule-making process unfolds.

Trust in Higher Education

From Higher Ed Has a Trust Problem. Yale Thinks It Has Solutions. | The Chronicle of Higher Education

A new report from Yale University finds that higher education institutions themselves are partly to blame for the diminishing public trust in higher education.

Our Thoughts

This report is worth reading in full, but it's also important to understand how it's being covered. When a Yale self-study shows up in the New York Times, Forbes, and the general news cycle, the findings stop being about Yale almost immediately. They become shorthand for what is wrong with higher education as a whole. That is the dynamic we need to engage with, because the underlying questions the committee took on are real, and the sector does itself no favors by either dismissing the report or accepting every finding as universally applicable.

First off, rebuilding public trust is vitally important to the future of higher education, but that's hard to do when much of what happens on our campuses lacks transparency or relies on subjective processes. The committee's observation that the academy has "resisted calls to critically examine our own institutions, professions, and modes of thought" is uncomfortable to sit with, but it's accurate. For example, the 'high tuition, high aid' model that dominates at many institutions is almost designed to erode trust because the published price signals one thing to families while the actual net price tells a different story. This process makes it difficult for families to plan around a number they can only discover after applying. If we want the public to trust our pricing, we have to do more work to make that pricing legible before the application, and not after.

However, I worry about how the admissions portion of the report is likely to be covered by the media. Yale's committee is describing a problem specific to the small cluster of institutions that sit at the top of the selectivity pyramid. The Raj Chetty research they cite is specifically about "Ivy Plus" schools. Holistic admissions in that context, with its weight on nonacademic credentials, genuinely does appear to advantage wealthy applicants. That is a real finding about a real set of institutions; it is not a finding about higher education overall. NACAC data shows that four-year nonprofit colleges accept, on average, 73 percent of first-year applicants. Fewer than 50 institutions in the country have acceptance rates below 15 percent. The vast majority of American college students apply to, get into, and attend institutions that admit most of their applicants. When the public reads a New York Times story about Yale's admissions process being opaque and advantaging the already advantaged, they are not parsing that nuance. They are hearing "college admissions is rigged," and that perception attaches to every institution that isn't open admission.

I've written before about how much damage this kind of generalization does to the sector, and this is another clear example. A regional public university in the Midwest that admits 80 percent of its applicants, serves a largely in-state student body, and operates on a thin margin has essentially nothing in common with the admissions process the Yale committee is describing. Yet when the narrative hardens around "elite institutions have a trust problem," the practical consequence is that state legislators, prospective families, and opinion writers apply that frame to institutions that were never part of the story. The selective-institution problem becomes the higher-education problem, and the 99 percent of schools that are not selective in the way Yale is selective end up absorbing reputational damage they did nothing to earn.

For leaders thinking about how to respond locally, the practical question is this: where on your own campus is there a process, a decision, or a set of outcomes that would look indefensible if the New York Times wrote about it next week? That's the list to work from. You don't need a committee of ten faculty and a year of reading to start. You need to identify the two or three places where your institution's practice and its public-facing narrative are furthest apart, and start closing the gap.

Accreditation Overhaul

From New Accreditation Rules Could Open 'Can of Worms' in Higher Ed, Experts Say | Inside Higher Ed

The Trump administration's draft regulations for accreditation reform propose sweeping changes to how institutions are overseen and held accountable.

Our Thoughts

This article deserves your full attention because the proposed changes could reshape institutional oversight in ways that most campus leaders have not yet prepared for. I am going to try to keep my personal opinions out of this one, because the politics around accreditation reform are heated enough without me adding to the noise. But I do want to walk through what I see as the three things higher education leaders should be paying attention to, regardless of where they sit on the ideological spectrum.

First, the scale of what is being proposed is significant. This is not a tune-up. The draft would add new mandated standards around return on investment, completion rates, placement rates, and licensing exam success. It would require accreditors to "prioritize intellectual diversity among faculty" and to conduct cost-benefit analyses of facilities. It would remove the two-year operating requirement for new accreditors and eliminate the need for letters of support in their applications. It would also, based on the regulatory text, prohibit accreditor decision-making bodies from including current administrators, faculty, or staff at the institutions they oversee. That last change alone would require most existing accreditors to rebuild their governance structures from scratch. Any one of these changes would be a substantial shift; all of them together represent the most significant rewrite of the accreditation system in decades.

Second, the legal questions are serious and unresolved. The Higher Education Act explicitly limits the Education Department's authority in this space, stating that "the Secretary shall not promulgate any regulation with respect to the standards of an accreditation agency or association." Several of the proposed changes, according to accreditation experts quoted in the article, appear to conflict with that statutory language. Robert Shireman, who sits on the department's accreditation advisory committee, said these regulations go "way beyond what is allowed." Even if you think some of the reforms are worthwhile on the merits (and reasonable people can disagree), the mechanism by which they are being pursued raises real questions about executive authority that will likely be resolved in court. The practical problem for institutions is that litigation takes years, and in the meantime, campuses still have to operate under whatever rules are in effect.

Third, institutional change is necessary, but it's worth asking whether forced change from outside is the best path to get there. Higher education has real problems. Completion rates are uneven, costs are too high for too many students, and the sector has been slow to address public concerns about value and transparency. As I said in the first article, institutions must get better at self-examination, but the difference between institutions choosing to improve and institutions being compelled to improve is not just a matter of speed. It is a matter of whether the reforms actually fit the problem or whether they reflect the priorities of whoever happens to be in power at a given moment. The draft rules include both items that most practitioners would probably support (e.g., better outcome data) and items that many would not (e.g., political appointees replacing peer reviewers). That mix is itself a signal that this is not a reform effort driven primarily by educational expertise.

For campus leaders, the practical response right now is to read the draft, understand what your accreditor is saying about it, and start thinking through what compliance would actually look like at your institution if the regulations take effect in July 2027. That date may sound far off; it is not.

Sparks

• Sal Khan's Coming for Higher Ed (Inside Higher Ed) - In this opinion piece, John Warner argues that the new Khan TED Institute is not just bad for higher education, but bad for learning and education in general. As a teaching and learning practitioner, I believe education should stay human-centered, so the idea of reshaping postsecondary education into a set of corporate-valued skills feels icky.
• The Looming College-Enrollment Death Spiral (The Atlantic) - Jeffrey Selingo writes about the increasingly national market for higher education and how that impacts regional institutions. If you work at a regionally-based institution, this is worth a few minutes.
• Colleges find removing small obstacles can help students who dropped out to reenroll (AP News) - A look at how colleges around the country are removing obstacles to enrollment for students with some college experience. I've written about the Some College, No Credential population before so anything institutions can do to help this group get a credential is a positive to me.