The Yale Report on Trust in Higher Education

I looked forward to reading the Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, released on April 10, 2026 after a year of work, with anticipation. Pursued at the request of Yale President Maurie McInnis with a charge to “think big, tell the truth, and entertain controversial ideas,” a committee of ten faculty, five from Arts & Sciences and five from Yale professional schools, reviewed literature, convened events, and broadly conducted interviews and discussions on the subject of declining trust in higher education and what to do about it.  The report comprises 19 pages of general background material and identification and brief discussion of six issues, followed by 10 pages of recommendations. There is a 13-page Selected Biography and 6-page appendix listing committee events and conversations.

While the report communicates a sense of clear urgency regarding the issues raised and makes strong common sense statements on a few of the issues and recommendations, I found the majority of the report to be primarily a documentation of what we already know about what has become a laundry list of issues and what steps should be taken. As a piece of organizational work purportedly meant to motivate change, it is oddly shallow and pedestrian, falling short of the charge to think big and raise controversial ideas and landing rather flat, and having a political "listening tour" flavor. After a year of work I would have expected something much more compelling, specific, and tightly structured and aligned. In particular, the report lacks the analytical breakdown and representation of that year of discussions—the hard evidence that both forms the impetus and inspiration, and generates relevant solutions, for true organizational change. Narrative claims of what “many” or “some” thought are insufficient.  Root causes must be explored as a key objective of the work. While I understand not wanting to point fingers, the issues feel very disembodied; the distancing from faculty agency in particular undermines the report’s credibility.

Even the structure of the report reduces its power. There is no Executive Summary, no meaningful heading structure for two numbered lists, no wrap-up, no next steps. There’s no real hierarchy of needs, no execution arc. What is most important, and how do the pieces fit together? What progress can be made in the short-, medium-, and long-term on each issue? What is the low-hanging fruit? What are the estimates of investment for major initiatives? The recommendations section felt fragmented and rushed, and did not always align or match with the issues raised, as if it was put together by a different group than the first part, or considered a place to throw out off-the-top-of-the-head ideas: it starts to feel a little all over the place and hard to reconcile. Many of the “recommendations” were simply behavioral exhortations or existing, if not yet applied, solutions. Recommendations should be presented as implementation plans, visually, showing their relationships to each other, and timelines for progress. Their absence contributes to a feeling that it is all speculative and theoretical.

Early in the report the writers themselves noted questions about whether an internal group could do justice to such an undertaking, and the risk of having it sound like a catalog of complaints. I think both concerns were justified. What I don’t know is whether the committee was in fact understaffed and underfunded, or whether grad students without sufficient background and experienced were tasked with work that requires more depth of knowledge and skill; or whether there was simply a lack of understanding that to be effective in this kind of research, you have to design and implement every interview, conversation, survey, and event in advance  as measurable instruments in order to ensure you get hard, comparable data across samples for every question you have—including by recording and transcribing verbal material (which should never be the sole method) for statistical text analysis: otherwise you are, as I used to tell my students, nowhere. Organizational research is like any other piece of research, and only analyzable and testable evidence counts.

I also don’t know to what extent politics intruded; maybe the committee does have all the data, but aren’t publishing it (which would mean that the calls for truth and transparency did not apply), or felt that they had to be restrained (because of their insider status, or they disagreed).  The silence on the impact of the vast research enterprise on trust issues was palpable.

As both someone whose field is higher education management and whose interests are deeply connected to questions of trust as arising from institutional integrity, I expected more—more rigor, more creativity, more depth, more powerful communication. I commend the president of Yale for starting this project, and sincerely support the impulse to do something. There is a genuine need and opportunity for leadership to rebuild trust.

Following are the areas where I think the report showed strength; some further observations on the additional issues and recommendations raised in the report; and a brief closing comment.

Strengths of the Yale Report on Trust in Higher Education

The six issues outlined in the report as undermining trust are: cost, undergraduate admissions, free speech and self-censorship, politics and intellectual pluralism, the classroom, and university governance.

Governance

Although the report fails to draw the causal connection (at least in part) between the other issues and governance, I place this first because to me its raising reflects a sort of dawning awareness on the part of the committee that university governance is what I call an umbrella factor in trust. For that the committee gets extra points. Pursuing governance as the overarching issue is the route to transparency and structural change.

What the committee discovered during their process (and most who study higher education know) is how opaque the finances and workings of the university are. The committee highlighted its own areas of frustration—the inability to get answers to simple questions, such as on administrative growth and certain costs, and puzzles of “how to account for the enormous expansion of clinical operations, particularly at the Medical School.” No matter the complexity of the topic, they felt, it should be possible to get information—indeed, the more complex, the more important.

“The difficulty, however, is itself the finding: A university committed to evidence-based inquiry and rigorous self-examination should be able to answer a straightforward question: What share of its resources is devoted to its core academic functions, and what share is not? It should be able to say, candidly, where administrative growth has served the mission well and where it has not.” (p. 21).

This is a committee that in the past, apparently, has been unaware of the way money is moved around and spent and by whom, or how people are hired and why, and who are now thinking about things like how the costs of undergraduate education are calculated (a very good question at Yale and everywhere). Their recommendations include having faculty committees involved in “all major academic and institutional reforms” as part of greater collaboration between academic and institutional authority (p.30). What is missing is a broader push for regular, line-item, combined university-wide financial reporting to the faculty on revenue and expenses.

Tied to the recommendation for more involvement are two related recommendations: a call to streamline bureaucracy, or reduce the well-known administrative bloat; and an imperative to build trust with the trustees.

On the first, the stated concern is mostly limited to reducing unnecessary government compliance. This is related presumably to the current upheaval in research and admissions, and in general the seemingly endless requests for data. The committee sees this as a collective action problem requiring working with governments, but for now a better place to start might be understanding the full costs of compliance and other administration and restructuring those functions internally. The connection of this recommendation to trust feels more tangential than others.

On the second, build trust with trustees, the committee recommends the Board always include experienced scholars and academic leaders, and that faculty should be appointed to liaison with the Board and its own committees. It is telling that this has to be even suggested; although it is tangential to the most pressing problems of public trust, if it can be arranged it could help boost the centrality of the educational mission in the minds of trustees. Yale is fortunate at least that nearly all its trustees have affiliation with the university; that is increasingly rare. (Note that the current Board includes, in addition to the president, an emeritus university president from another institution and a corporate-employed scientist specializing in AI. Definitions and level of representation matter, so the committee should flesh out what it means by “experienced scholars” and “academic leaders.”)

Focus on the Mission and Reform Undergraduate Admissions

I discuss these short recommendations together because they are so closely related (and because mission or purpose was not listed specifically as an issue). The committee recommends returning to a simple mission statement, drawn from the Faculty handbook: “Yale’s mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”  This statement pushes back on the all-things-for-all-people tendency of many major universities, and requires that Yale “understand what we are here for” and do best (p.23). It is surprising that neither the Yale Report of 1828 nor The Idea of A University was referenced in this report in this regard.

Regarding reform of undergraduate admissions, the committee makes some important if not new statements. In discussing the issue, they cite the drawbacks of holistic admissions, including its tendency to favor the wealthy (although it has also been widely criticized by opponents of affirmative action). The use of preferences for athletes, children of donors, legacies, and university-connected children, even for men over women, regardless of academic qualifications, has long been a source of mistrust.  While Yale did not, curiously, provide the percentages of students admitted for these reasons (which raises questions about their access to data or internal political pressure), the percentages at most universities are extremely high, even without including other preferences such as for band, orchestra, famous people, etc.  Few students are admitted on academics alone.

The report does clearly make the case that, while crafting a class involves judgement, there is the question of transparency and whether academic criteria can remain central. It states, “At Yale, the primacy of academic criteria should be non-negotiable”(p.13) and that if academic excellence is the mission, then its admissions process must reflect that." Yet at Yale, the process is completely open-ended, with “no stated minimum threshold of academic preparation for admission” (p.14).

The report calls for a robust accounting of how admissions works and complete candor (why this was not done for this report is puzzling). Yale “should only use criteria or admission that it is willing to describe publicly and defend openly. The top priority in admissions decisions should be academic achievement” (p.25) Preferences should be reduced.

An important addition they recommended to this is something I have long believed: that Yale should establish and publicize a minimum standard of academic achievement in order to be considered for admission, such as a minimum SAT or a Yale-specific entrance exam. I favor a focus on achievement and skills (preparedness, the biggest problem), and so favor a criterion-referenced exam. This could be accompanied by much greater public communication on how students might ensure they are prepared for an elite education, even something as simple as reading lists, concepts from math and science, writing expectations, and so on expected of high school graduates. But even better (or additional) might be to provide an essay on what kind of student Yale is looking for in terms of academic preparation and motivation: this is a discussion for faculty but might include such concepts as students who are strong, committed readers; broadly curious learners open to the respectful exchange of ideas and perspectives; willing to put the time and effort into doing their own reading, research, and writing; eager for an education with the breadth and depth designed to provide a lifelong ability to understand and navigate a changing world; committed to meeting the challenges and rigor of difficult material and requirements—or whatever. Of course, there should be an “In exchange” section of what Yale faculty promises it students.

Comments on Other Issues and Recommendations

The remaining issues discussed were cost; the classroom; free speech and self-censorship, and politics and intellectual pluralism. Although some of these have been among the most durable critiques of higher education, the recommendations presented here do not offer much either new or specific.

Cost: “Make higher education affordable”; “Deliver educational value”

While some of the discussion reads like an apology for high tuition (and the subject of “merit aid” is never explicitly raised (how much of that free tuition or high aid is going to students who can afford to pay?), in the end the committee agrees that college costs too much.

There is nothing new in the recommendations, however, and it was disappointing not to see more thinking around the subject than increasing affordability for more people (higher income thresholds) and more transparency. This is just an expansion of high tuition/high aid (which does not work for everyone); it is more of the same.

The committee does not support free tuition; neither do I (although Yale acknowledges that 20% currently receive full rides, and it would have been illuminating to have some data on who that is for and to know whether they recommend it stop). For graduate and professional students, they support increased aid and in some cases free tuition at some schools, citing in particular that many professions do not necessarily yield high salaries. It is unclear what their stance is on the non-tuition portion of graduate study (e.g., PhD stipends, and living expenses for others).

Just as the committee raised the question of how much of university resources goes to the academic core, it is important to try to parse and calculate the true cost of an undergraduate education itself per student (which may vary a little by major). This is a task for each individual university to do, and any model developed from the effort would be of lasting utility for calculating and monitoring costs and setting tuition. The most complex part is determining what really is an educational expense—to really allocate that portion of salary (0%-100%) that goes to undergraduate (not graduate) instruction and that portion of buildings (assessment, usage, and maintenance) dedicated to classroom teaching (this can vary considerably), as well as accounting for the distribution of teaching among different levels of faculty (adjunct to tenured), implying a course-by-course calculation. System and administrative allocation are a little easier. Libraries are tricky due to varied use by varied populations. But flat-fee systems and subscriptions help streamline some of the parsing job. The underlying principle is that—and I can’t stress this enough—students should not be paying for research or the fact that a professor hired for his/her research might teach one course a year. This includes not paying for the costs of state-of-the-art facilities that they will never enter or directly benefit from.

As of the 2026-2027 year, Yale tuition is $72,500, or 9,065.50/course based on 8 courses/yr.  The apparent revenue from a 20-student course is thus $181,250; from a 250-student course $2,266,375. Total tuition for the 1550 students is $112,375,000/yr (that’s 620 20-student courses per year).  The question is: can you justify the costs to students? Is revenue falling short of costs, breaking even, yielding an excess? Knowing precisely gives you a basis for demonstrating why college costs what it does—or giving you good grounds for rethinking tuition in a way that does not put the costs of research on the backs of students as well as where to make adjustments in administration and faculty.

The call to deliver educational value should go without saying—it makes me wonder: are you not? The report provided no data on the significant underemployment and unemployment of college students (possibly not as severe at Yale for a variety of reasons, but every institution should monitor this). National estimates are easy to obtain by major, both broadly and in specific fields such STEM, and can be eye-opening. (I used to start my first day of innovation class with these statistics; great for starting a discussion about what employers want and how to be that person.). There was also no discussion in the report of public concern over work readiness (a broad concept that does not mean preparing for specific jobs). This was an oversight; an understanding of what it means to be ready to go work has implications for everything done in the classroom

The committee’s recommendations on delivering educational value include recruiting and funding public-serving careers, and to reaffirm Yale’s “commitment to the undergraduate liberal arts and work actively to help students translate a liberal arts education into successful professional and civic life” (27). I completely concur. But you have to make the case; you have to demonstrate how you will do this; you have to connect the liberal arts to everything else you say in this report; you should have made this part of your research and provided outcomes. Without that, it’s one of the report exhortations that feels a little pablum. 

The Classroom: “Re-center the classroom”; “Pay Attention”; “Grade like we mean it”; Be human”; Create common knowledge.”

These comments are limited to those items related to the subject of trust.

In raising the issue of the classroom, the committee stated, “There is arguably no greater threat to devaluing higher education than the devaluing of teaching and learning” (p.18). And yet, this is precisely what has occurred over the past 50 years.

The committee calls for bringing the Yale community together to “make the classroom experience more rigorous and rewarding, with the goal of cultivating sustained attention, intellectual curiosity, and disciplined habits of mind” (p. 27). They go on to call for a number of actions that make one wonder where have the Yale faculty been on these issues all these years—and in the case of some proposals, is this really relevant to the issue of trust?

“Pay attention”

This is about distraction. They “recommend that Yale affirmatively support a classroom environment conducive to full presence, focus, and interaction. That begins with a device-free policy—no phones, laptops, or tablets—as the default classroom settings.”

As someone who always had this policy in my own classroom (no phones, laptops/tablets only when required for in-class, mostly group, work), OK, about time. But recognize that students pay attention and interact when the methods, materials, projects, and professor come together to inspire that. This is as much about faculty as students.

“Grade like we mean it.”

Again, why hasn't this been regular practice? Grade inflation has been recognized as a problem for decades, one that starts in grade school and permeates all levels of education, including grad and professional school. Higher education faces an input problem, in that their application pool already has inflated grades: by 2022, in a trajectory of inflation spanning nearly 60 years, 84% of high school students had an A-range average; fewer than 2% a C. Yet college students are increasingly unprepared, disengaged, and in need of costly remediation, even at selective schools. Grade inflation is perpetuated at the college level for reasons such as institutional competition, faculty self-defense, and use of grades in employment decisions.

Recent university responses include a variety of remedies, such as putting caps on As, reintroducing forced curves, and with Yale’s recommendation, setting “a 3.0 mean, or some other college-wide standard, so that letter grades can once again be used in a reliable and comparable way.”

Either I don’t understand this or I don’t see how this changes anything; indeed, isn’t that actually raising the mean (or what is considered average) from a 2.0 on a 5-grade scale? Or a different way of expressing a cap on As? Is this for a course, a student, the school? Almost no information was provided.

In any case, whatever it means is meaningless and arbitrary. The key is to make grades less subjective by making grading itself (and coursework) more rigorous and authentic—by having each grade for a course component calculated according to its own rubric; this can be done for any subject. The grade becomes a number: an 87.3 is a B (or B+ if used); a 94 is an A-. Using  spreadsheets for weighting and running calculations faculty will always be able to tell students where they stand at any point in the course, and show them where in the assignment/requirement or test their grade was lowered or raised—returning grades to their diagnostic purpose and showing students where improvement is needed. At the end of the semester, their grade is the weighted average of all components; it is what it is. No grade changes, no arguments, expectations set, fair to all (in my classes, you had to have .7 in the final calculation to get bumped up to the next final grade, which built in; I found students started creating their own spreadsheets when they realized what I was doing and they would proactively see that if they worked harder to meet certain requirements they could raise their grade. This virtually eliminates requests for grade changes—which students quickly learn is not going to happen). Even in an elite university, and open-ended subjects, grading rigorously yields a reasonable distribution. The trick here, as with everything in the classroom, is knowing how: grading is one of the high-skill/high-experience tasks of teaching, as is creating rigorous, rich assignments.. Faculty training in grading is remarkably productive, and even early-career instructors can become confident in the role of evaluator and standard-holder.

The committee also recommended using percentile rankings (presumably for each course), a return to old practices, which is easily done in the grading spreadsheet (or Registrar as suggested). This is good information but does not really account for “easy majors” (nothing really does except reputation), so calculating the averages across courses by major as opposed to the entire class is more equitable; or have two, one for the full class, one for major. More rigorous and uniform grading practices also helps nullify the gut-course/easy major problem.

Other possibilities beyond the framework of traditional grades include the development of alternative assessment measures; redesigning or terminating end-of-course teaching evaluations (there is substantial research to back this up); and working to eliminate GPA as a factor reported in job applications (it was grade inflation that contributed to this practice in the first place). This latter could involve public communication, work with major industry associations, and development of a more creative “push” system of presenting your graduates as individuals in a form publicly accessible to all employers. Institutions should also work with K-12 to nip grade inflation at the bud. There is vast room for different thinking on this subject, particularly now when it is impossible to evaluate graduates across institutions on the basis of their grades.

"Create Common Knowledge."

While unable to match it with an issue, I put discussion of "create common knowledge" in this Classroom section. The committee recommends three day-long programs for first-year undergraduates on informed citizenship—the structure of US government, quantitative reasoning in public life, scientific and technological challenges in the coming decades. Aside from the fact that this is largely high school material (not that it is necessarily being taught there as it was when I was in school), it was a surprising proposal for creating “a common intellectual foundation” after hearing the committee talk about the lack of a single book, class, or experiment that students must share, and the description of the “intensive, interdisciplinary” Directed Studies program that is available and rewarding but not required.  It begs the question of what obstacles are seen to extending this proven experience to all freshmen and how a three-session civics colloquium was seen as a meaningful alternative at the college level.

It seems more work needs to be done on this valid interest in creating common knowledge, and perhaps designing a free curriculum for high schools so that students might come into college with the citizenship and reasoning components is way to start. Presumably, scientific and technological challenges are discussed in many classes across the curriculum, and in any case it’s important for a common experience not to have an expiration date/be too presentist. The history and future of science and technology might work.

Free Speech and Self-Censorship: “Protect Free Speech”; “Support Academic Freedom”; “Resist Self-Censorship”

The committee highlighted Yale’s own Woodward Report of 1974 on free speech and its continuing affirmation, but finds nevertheless that “self-censorship is a real problem,” not only within the campus community but due to “mounting pressure” from government and other external authorities that may affect their careers or job security. Yale has taken additional steps already to support free speech and train incoming students on civil dialogue. The report recommends using the Woodward Report assertion of free speech as an essential “first principle” in the search for truth to continue to guide Yale’s as an institution. Yale is in the process of developing principles of “academic freedom for the 21^st century,” and the committee recommends their adoption and defense (it is unclear whether or not they have yet been completed or published in any form).

The committee recommends that faculty and students jointly develop principles to resist (perhaps negate the need for?) self-censorship, and to discuss them at the start of each semester and reinforce them throughout.

Politics and Intellectual Pluralism: “Open minds”

The committee pointed out that, nationwide, Democratic faculty outnumber Republican faculty by 10:1, and at Yale, between the schools of A&S, Law, and Management, 36:1. This is hardly surprising: Yale is full of educated people (who are far more likely to be educated than Republicans, and of course is part of the dyed-in-the-wool Democratic Northeast.

It is difficult to see how this is an issue of trust, and its connection to free speech and self-censorship is not shown to be a characteristic of Yale as opposed to the nation generally. The committee points out that curriculum has remained quite traditional and that Economics is the most popular major.

Yet despite not presenting any evidence of uniformity or of Yale being an “echo chamber,” the committee recommends a major investment of resources in undefined initiatives and experiments to enhance “open and critical debate” and “intellectual renewal,” beginning with broad self-scrutiny. The committee disagreed about approach, but the report averred that that only reflects “the genuine difficulty of the problem.”

That problem is not clearly stated and, consequently, neither is the proposed solution.  If this is primarily about free speech, that should be clarified. If a problem has been identified with curricula and teaching methods themselves that threaten the intellectual foundation of a university, that needs to be established. It has not.

Though not tied directly to trust or to any particular evidence, a similar recommendation to generously fund explorations—in this case on how to make Yale’s resources more available to the public—is “Open the Gates.”

It is not that you might never want to do these things, but it is good to have some evidence of need relative to other investment alternatives and trust issues, and some early projection of what is to be expected in terms of outcomes. It is possible that there are already funds available for community outreach. Consistent with recentering education and reestablishing trust, one priority might be to develop robust ways to connect and engage with public and private pre-college education to communicate and support expectations (e.g., on grade inflation); help cultivate preparedness for higher education, including ideas for skill development and assignments; and communicate understanding to students of what it a liberal arts education can offer as well as what it takes. This is something that offers opportunities for shared effort with other institutions, and would also provide valuable insights to Yale.

Closing Comments

To decide what an institution stands for is a philosophical, and in many ways a moral, exercise. It is about choice making, and those choices and their outcomes will determine whether the institution is trusted or not. It is useful to think of trust as an asset, built from continuous attention to a portfolio of activities, that is difficult to acquire but readily lost—and once lost, slow and uphill to recover, if it all.  Because trust is made up of the sum of the integrity of all the institutions parts, it is actually quite powerful. With trust comes support, and with support comes independence and protection from external forces that seek to exploit and manipulate institutions that lack clarity and integrity of purpose and action.

In that this Yale report was titularly about trust, I was disappointed by the absence of any definitions or direct discussion of morality and institutional integrity, the defense of which is a “distinctive competence” that allows organizations to resist “character defining comments” that affect its ability to control its future organizational character. This defense is an active organizational process; institutional history tells the story of where it stands at any present moment.¹ 

The choices of many universities have resulted in a corrosive neglect and diminution of the educational core, and—although absent from the Yale document but so influential on university choice making that it must at least be mentioned here—a deeply competitive and conflicted research enterprise that, in some fields, Merton would not recognize.²

In closing, I’m concerned by the Yale Report on Trust that institutions of higher education (the sector, not Yale alone) do not recognize how much courage, vision, and organizational skill and tenacity it will take to make meaningful change. It cannot be viewed as a matter of programs and initiatives. The problems are structural, integrative, and high level, but they are ultimately the product of choices made by people. Begin, then, by asking, of every level of governance and management—trustees, faculty, administration: are the people in place the people with the skills and temperament to lead through this precarious time to higher ground? Answers, and change, begin there.

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1From Selznick, Philip. Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation. University of California Press, 1957, a slim and partial distillation of leadership findings from his seminal (and massive) work, TVA and the Grass Roots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (1949, also UC Press).

²On Merton’s view of ethics in research, see Merton, Robert K. 1973. The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations. University of Chicago Press.

Up next:

the promised post(s) on tenure delayed to make room for this post on the Yale Report on Trust