Mission drift

Last October, the White House issued the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education and invited nine select American universities to sign on in exchange for access to federal funding.

The Compact would have capped international student enrollment, screened applicants for “anti-American values,” and eliminated institutional units that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

The American Association of Colleges and Universities called the Compact less an invitation than a threat to academic freedom. None of the nine signed.

What it means to spark violence against ideas may not be entirely clear. But one thing is: The Trump administration is following in a strong current of public opinion that’s become intensely skeptical of U.S. colleges and universities. About 70 percent of Americans now think higher education is heading in the wrong direction.

Why?

Julia Adams is a professor of sociology at Yale University; Sarath Sanga is a professor of law at Yale; and the two worked on the team that wrote the university’s 2026 Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education. Adams and Sanga say a whole bundle of grievances has accumulated here: that universities have failed to protect free speech; that they’ve grown intellectually intolerant; that admissions decisions are opaque; that the student experience has steadily eroded—it goes on; and underneath all of it, that tuition keeps climbing. Together, these have brought American trust in American universities to an historic low.

As Adams and Sanga see it, each of those failings has its remedy, and universities will need to work through them—yet there’s a deeper task: to recover a sense of what universities are for in the first place—not maximizing revenue, not placing graduates in high-paying jobs, but the formation of the student. And that’s not a mission universities need to invent; it’s one they’ve been on for the better part of a thousand years …

Gustav Jönsson: What’s this drop in trust look like?

Julia Adams: A decade ago, 57 percent of Americans expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education. By 2024, that number had dropped to 36 percent—a historic low.

Jönsson: Where’s it happening?

Adams: Everywhere. Across demographics. Across institutions, too—though elite research institutions have taken the steepest fall, much steeper than community colleges.