What Will It Take to Rebuild Trust in Higher Education?

Mushtaq Gunja: Hello and welcome to Dot EDU, the Public Policy podcast from the American Council on Education. I am Mushtaq Gunja, along with my cohost, Sarah Spreitzer and Jon Fansmith. How are you two?

Sarah Spreitzer: Awesome.

Jon Fansmith: I'm surprised Sarah was saying awesome. She can't hear out of one ear.

Mushtaq Gunja: Sarah, what's going on?

Sarah Spreitzer: It's all going great. It's just my continuing head cold of 2026.

Mushtaq Gunja: Are these allergies or is this something else?

Sarah Spreitzer: No, not allergies. Maybe I'm allergic to Congress.

Mushtaq Gunja: Well, and they're out of session all the time.

Sarah Spreitzer: That's true.

Mushtaq Gunja: It'd be good. Jon, I'm sorry that our basketball teams got swept in the second round here.

Sarah Spreitzer: Darn.

Jon Fansmith: Yeah. I mean, after a very dramatic first round series for my squad. Not exactly, would've thought we could have swung one game. Probably worst was the Knicks fans taking over our home arena during the series too.

Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah.

Jon Fansmith: It is what it is.

Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. I don't know that the Thunder fans took over Staples in LA, but they certainly dominated the series, so there was that, but it's good. Second round, Jon?

Jon Fansmith: Yeah, look, I didn't think they get into the first rounds the way last year went, so take small progress where you can.

Mushtaq Gunja: We are talking today about... I think the title of this podcast is, What Will It Take to Rebuild Trust in Higher Education? And a little bit later we're going to have Dr. Julia Adams on the co-chair of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education. Cannot wait to talk to her about a new report that she and her co-authors have put together on this question about trust in higher education. But first, thought we'd do some quick policy updates. Want to talk a little NegReg, want to talk budget and approps and was hoping to talk a little bit about that admissions and consumer transparency supplements. Spreitzer, if you have anything else that you want to add to that rundown, just let me know and we'll-

Sarah Spreitzer: I'll give you a shout-out.

Mushtaq Gunja: Let's start with NegReg. So I think since we last talked, the final rule on professional graduate student loan limits were finalized. We've been talking about this for months. I feel like we've been talking about this every time that we've met. Honestly, we have to talk about it because of the importance of this issue. Just to remind in the one big beautiful bill, Congress established new loan caps that would limit graduate students to borrowing 20,500 per year, I think, or $100,000 in total. Professional students could borrow 50,000 per year, up to $200,000 in total. It was up to the Department of Ed to determine which degree programs fell into each category. In the end, the department opted for that very narrow definition of professional programs limiting access to a select 11 degree programs and they finalized that rule a couple of weeks ago. Theoretically, this rule goes into effect on July 1st. Okay. Now what? What comes next, Jon? Sarah, lawsuits, Action on the Hill, what's next?

Sarah Spreitzer: Well, I worry about our financial aid officers who are going to be packaging aid, but I think there are a lot of people hopeful that maybe something will happen before July 1st, maybe.

Jon Fansmith: There's a lot of things that are happening, but the timing is tough. We're mid-May. July 1st is the implementation date. The department has not been listening, generally, to the public. There were tens of thousands of comments on this proposal from a huge range of groups and individuals all criticizing the department's decision to... And let's be clear, there's a definition in the law. The department said, "We're not going to follow a definition or implement a definition. We're just going to pick these 11 programs and say they're the ones that we think meets the definition." It's not what the law said. They're going to push forward on what they're doing, but I think Sarah's right. The financial administrators, students, institutions are looking at this now, vendors who set up the systems. There's a really compressed timeframe. Now we have a bill, the Professional Student Degree Act, which was introduced by Representative Mike Lawler.

ACA has endorsed it. It's got, I think, 13 or 14 co-sponsors, bipartisan, lots of Republicans both on the committee and off, democrats as well, hopeful soon to have a companion in the Senate. Congress could move to act and do something like pick that bill up. There's a lot of talk about Congressional Review Act resolution or bill moving forward. Wouldn't probably happen because the president would have to sign it but would strike the regulation entirely. And again, this is not something that's a Republican versus Democratic issue. This is really this Department of Ed's really, really loose interpretation of what the law says and their preferred outcome being pushed forward. So we'll see, but time is ticking and the chaos it's going to cause on campuses, the rush to come into compliance. Those are real problems.

Sarah Spreitzer: I was somewhat surprised, Jon, because when the final rule came out, that was an opportunity for the department to respond to these concerns. And there have been a lot of concerns raised by bipartisan members of Congress. And the final rule almost seems like it was the department doubling down on, "Nope, this is what we decided, this is what we're going forward with." And I know Secretary McMahon testified, I believe two weeks ago in the Senate, she's going to be up before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Thursday. And I am sure she is going to get questions again about why the department narrowly defined professional degree as the way it did.

Jon Fansmith: Yeah, there's members on both sides of the aisle in that committee who have signed on to the Lawler bill. A lot of people just don't understand their decision. Now, I think we've been saying for months since the rulemaking commenced, the way the department really put a lot of pressure on negotiators controlled who was at the table, strong armed, especially in this one, to get to consensus, they made it pretty clear that they were going to get the outcome they wanted and weren't really open to modifying their proposals based on what the public wants or what the drafters of the law wanted. And I'll say, Representative Lawler mentioned them a couple times, has a post up on AC's blog today, maybe it came up yesterday for exactly when it went live, talking about this and one of the points he makes is just that, one, Congress... and he's a member of Congress who voted on it, he understands what he intended to do. Congress had an intention, the department isn't following what Congress actually did, which is what a regulatory process is supposed to be.

It's implementing what Congress intended. So obviously, a lot of reasons to be concerned about how they're moving forward on this. Again, big implications for students, especially in those health fields and lots of other areas, social work counseling, therapy that are going to have unmet need as of July 1st if they're starting these programs. So a big chance for disruption, I don't think people even really get the sense of how big the disruption will be in a lot of these program areas. And we won't know really until the fall when we see what enrollment patterns look like.

Mushtaq Gunja: Congress has a tendency to not proactively be able to see the damage that's going to happen until it actually falls in our lap. Am I right about that in this case? I mean, do we think that... I mean, notwithstanding Representative Lawler's bill, I mean, we don't have a companion quite yet. I mean, what should we look out for from a legislative point of view and is there anything that we can do in the meantime?

Jon Fansmith: Yeah, I mean, to be fair to Congress, the reconciliation bill was under enormous pressure by the president to move quickly. And changes were made, vast, complicated changes in a really compressed timeframe. And I think there was. I mean, we were part of the process. We talked with staff. We knew what they were trying to get to and some of the things we disagreed with philosophically or mechanically, but we knew what they were trying to do. And on this level, what they were trying to do was the right thing that say some of these programs, because they lead to licensure requirements, because they have very specific technical aspects, there should be more funding available to acknowledge that these are expensive programs to run. And so they put this test in place to say, "Look, we want to differentiate and you may disagree with where we set the lines, you may disagree with how we differentiate, but we get it. We understand that there's different types of programs with different types of borrowing needs."

It went to the department. The department basically flat out ignored that and took a very... I think it's fair to say, a very politicized view of what this should be and really didn't follow what the law said. So I'll give Congress their due. They did the best they could and they communicated their intent as clear as they could. They can't really address the fact that the department's not listening.

Mushtaq Gunja: Sure.

Jon Fansmith: Well, and the messaging that the secretary is delivering, which he's testifying before Congress, is that ultimately, this is going to keep costs down for students, that they will choose the programs that are lower cost or that schools will be forced to lower their costs because of these new loan limits. And so I think there are members that are responding to the idea that voters do care about college costs and this is the Trump administration's efforts to try to keep it under control, but it's just going to be a train wreck for so many students.

Mushtaq Gunja: Jon, Sarah, you sort of mentioned that it feels like the Trump administration might not be following the law here. Where are we lawsuit wise? I know that when this rule was finalized and announced there was some chatter about lawsuits that were going to be filed. Where are we there?

Jon Fansmith: So I will say, we have heard from two organizations, not higher education organizations actually representing physician's assistants nationally that they intend to file a lawsuit. They announced it almost immediately after the final rule was published, so a week and a half ago. I just have not checked recently to see if that suit's actually been filed. The other group we heard from the National Education Association or National Educators Association, NEA, big union representing teachers across the country, their president came out and said very clearly, "Look, we are strongly concerned. We're expecting to pursue legal remedies." I wouldn't be surprised if they went forward. I also wouldn't be surprised if other groups joined this. For a lot of fields, nursing physicians, assistants, a lot of fields, this will be a really incredibly harmful impact on the pipeline through to those fields. And nursing, for instance, nursing faculty overwhelmingly come through these nursing graduate programs.

If they can't afford to borrow, you're not just wiping out people entering the field now, you're wiping out the ability to prepare people to enter the field for the next generation. So these are big issues. These are really impactful issues. And I think it is rare you get this really, really distinct difference between what the law says to do and what the department's interpretation of the law looks like. And I think for a lot of plaintiffs, and I think for a lot of judges, we're going to see a lot of sympathy to the argument that this was just not done in the appropriate manner by the department.

Mushtaq Gunja: Sure. Well, more to come. We'll certainly circle back as we have been on this topic next time, I'm sure. Sarah, you mentioned a couple of times Secretary McMahon's testimony in front of the Senate. So I think she testified in front of the Senate on April 28th where she faced questions about a whole range of things, but including proposed trio cuts, cuts to OCR among many other things. On TRIO, I was sort of heartened. Many senators asked about the president's budget, which slashes TRIO, including Republican Senators Collins and Rounds and Boozman. McMahon, I think, I don't want to put words in her mouth, but I think the secretary called TRIO a failure. And then on OCR, there were some confusing exchanges where Secretary McMahon didn't quite seem to take responsibility for the fact that there are now way fewer OCR members and most of the branch offices have been closed. And so now there are stalled or dropped investigations. I was confused listening to what was sort of happening. And then on student loans, no real news, I thought. What did you guys take? What were the highlights of that exchange for you?

Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, TRIO was definitely a big topic and I was heartened to hear several Republican senators talk about it, talk about the importance of TRIO to their states, talk about the TRIO graduates that they had on their staff. But the secretary was pretty strident in saying, "Look, we don't believe that TRIO is a success and has it measured up to the metrics. We are going to restructure the program and you can either be a part of that, but we're going to move forward with that." So she was very, very stuck on that point. And I think the OCR, what I heard, which I think was frustrating for the Democrats mostly was that they're hiring people back. So we're seeing this at a lot of the federal agencies that went through the reduction in force or the RIFs last year under DOGE that now these agencies are starting to hire back because they realize that they need people in place.

And so that was the biggest thing that I took from OCR. And there were complaints from several senators that institutions within their state were unable to get answers because there wasn't anybody answering the phone at the regional offices and the response was, "We're hiring up."

Jon Fansmith: Yeah. I mean, I will say the TRIO line I think was both reassuring and especially frustrating because the secretary, as Sarah said, made these assertions about the program doesn't work, it's ineffective. There is copious data out there across the variety of TRIO programs about the work that they do, TRIO graduates graduating at higher rates and with better GPAs than the comparison group of students at their institutions. So it is completely reasonable and we've heard this from the administration law barriers to say, "We disagree with the goals of this program or the funding necessity of it or the propriety of the federal government having a role," Like fine. Having those disagreements is fine. To come in and characterize these cuts as, "This is a program that doesn't work," flying in the face of all the evidence, it's particularly sort of disappointing.

You can argue the mayors, "If you have some reason for gutting the program, speak to it honestly. Don't just make these easily refuted assertions as to the program's value." The OCR piece was bewildering because the department's budget is to cut OCR by $35 million in their budget request. It also was a really bad timing because the day before the hearing, ranking Member Sanders had run the numbers. He'd had his staff run the numbers and released a report about the first year of work under OCR in the Trump administration. And I'm looking at my notes, but the first year OCR resolved 112 cases that were brought before them. On average in the first Trump administration, they would resolve 818 a year. So about 1/7 of the volume of work they did in their first term.

They dismissed over 70% of the 9,000 complaints that were filed, almost all of them on the basis that they lacked merit or didn't have sufficient evidence. Maybe that's true, but when you add to the fact that they gave no resolutions for sexual harassment, sexual violence, racial harassment, or discriminatory discipline, which are generally some of the largest areas that OCR intervenes in and gets resolutions, you start to wonder how valid this idea that this enormous number of complaints were dismissed without cause is. And then you add to it all the things we've talked about, capacity. I don't think anyone reasonably believes, and certainly this administration has asserted that in the area of antisemitism and other areas, discrimination is a serious problem on college campuses and in K-12 districts.

You can't cut your funding to that group. You can't not investigate, reach resolution, even investigate the merits of some of these complaints and argue that you're committed to fighting discrimination in other areas and that you see it as a crisis that needs to be resolved. It's more of the same. And again, testimonies by the secretary before these committees, I think for a long time we've given up as them being sources of real insight and information into the policies and priorities administration, but this one's particularly frustrating in both of those regards. And I don't expect to see anything different on Thursday when she goes before the House.

Mushtaq Gunja: Is the Secretary testifying in front of Senate Approps today? Did I see that that was about to happen or am I wrong about that?

Jon Fansmith: No. Well, I don't think so. She's going before EdD in Workforce on Thursday. I do not believe she's before approps today, but maybe I'm wrong.

Sarah Spreitzer: I mean, approps is in Jon's portfolio, so that's on him.

Mushtaq Gunja: I'm going to guess that you know more than I do about this. Actually, I had just done a search right before we came on to see if there were any fireworks from that, which I sort of assumed there would be, and then I didn't see anything on the Google searches, so I'm probably just wrong. But what should we expect from the testimony in the House? Same sort of line of questions?

Jon Fansmith: So I think the same, but I think the big difference will be in the last week, ranking member Bobby Scott, Alma Adams, who's on the committee, senior member of that committee. Some other folks have raised a number of issues, not just the OCR issues, but whether this committee intends to do things around discrimination more broadly beyond just incidents of antisemitism on college campuses. Our ranking member Scott had talked specifically about antisemitic incidents by college Republicans, a number of widely reported incidents around that issue, other forms of discrimination as well. And so I would not be surprised if the members of that committee went after the secretary on some of this OCR data and especially the idea of paying attention to instance of racial or shared origin issues of discrimination beyond just antisemitism and how this department's approaching that. So maybe a little bit broader scope and I would imagine probably more critical reception even than she got in the Senate side.

Mushtaq Gunja: One last topic before we move over to Dr. Adams, I'd love to get your take on the latest on the admissions and consumer transparency supplement. Just as a reminder that a CTS is that significant new expansion of IPEDS reporting requirements for admissions. So it requires student level disaggregated data rather than cohort summaries and institutions must now collect and report things like individual test scores and disaggregated race data admissions types they wanted back going seven years, which... I don't know. I mean, in the chat it says, "Go hug your financial aid advisors," like absolutely, and also hug everybody in the admissions offices too, because my goodness, the amount is just really significant.

Now, as we talked about a couple of episodes ago, a preliminary injunction paused a reporting requirement for, I think, public institutions in 17 plaintiff states in early April. And then since we last recorded, Judge Saylor in the District Court of Massachusetts issued another preliminary injunction. Jon, Sarah, I'm not sure if you were following, but what did that court find and what did that injunction cover?

Jon Fansmith: So they added a number of new plaintiffs to the suit. Our good friends at AAU joined that. Six state independent college associations, I will get them wrong if I name them all, but Oregon, Massachusetts, Connecticut, North Carolina, California.

Mushtaq Gunja: That's five.

Jon Fansmith: New Jersey, maybe. I don't know. Apologies to whichever... They joined and then a grouping of six individual institutions. Small liberal arts colleges also joined. The judge added them to the suit and granted the same injunctive relief to either those institutions or the members of those associations. We are well past the filing deadlines. The initial filing deadline was March 18th, I believe. There was an extension available under certain conditions until April 8th. So as of now, you have either part of this relatively limited group of institutions, public institutions, 17 states or the private institutions represented within those states are the ones who come forward, or you filed, you've given the departments this data. And I'll also say admissions folks, yes, financial aid officers, some of my favorite people, absolutely. Institutional researchers, the people actually responsible for compiling this data across campuses, trying desperately to get into a format that makes sense so they can meet the really ridiculous demands by the department here and then putting their professional reputations at stake as they try to make the impossible happen.

They deserve a lot of love too. So look, the big question really now is where do we go? The judge has essentially said for those institutions, you don't have to file. In his rulings, and I know you and I both read them Mushtaq, he very clearly seemed to indicate that he's skeptical of the department's process for putting this in place. It seems like he is leaning towards striking it down. The big question there is, does he strike it down on this Administrative Procedures Act basis? The idea, essentially, that the department did it the wrong way and that seems likely. But he also said in his ruling, at least to my read, "Well, the department has the right to demand this kind of data from schools. There's nothing in the law that precludes that. They might not have done this appropriately and made some arbitrary and capricious requirements, but ultimately, they might have the ability to come back and get this data if they did it appropriately. The question will be, does he strike it down broadly? Is everybody exempt or just the schools that are covered as part of the plaintiffs in this?

And then beyond that, if all of the data struck down... They have data from thousands of institutions at this point who weren't covered and who did have to meet the deadlines, what happens to that data? Does it disappear into a void? Is it blocked forever from the department from using? Department already has it. Theoretically, they have a new contractor in place analyzing that data as we speak. So what happens there? Just a lot still to be determined. And obviously for schools that are worried, I think rightfully so, about what the department's intentions are behind this collection, what they would do with the data, still a lot of uncertainty going forward.

Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah, I think there are a lot of different ways the district court can move in this case. I mean, Jon, I think that part of what was happening there was, I think, it's pretty clear in my view that the department definitely... If they have the authority, didn't exercise that authority probably in the cleanest, clearest, and most fair way for institutions. So it's easy for the judge to emphasize that, especially in a preliminary injunction. Thomas in the chat asked when a final ruling will come. I don't know. I mean, Jon, Sarah, do you have any sense of when we might get merits briefings and when we might actually get something that-

Jon Fansmith: I was going to ask Tom, I think they're plaintiffs, right? Are you a plaintiff, Tom?

Sarah Spreitzer: And also since the deadline passed, I just don't know if there's that pressure, right?

Mushtaq Gunja: Well, I mean, there are a lot of institutions that haven't reported that are covered, I think, by one of the two injunctions. So I don't know, Sarah. I mean, this is a complicated one because the judge could rule narrowly and what that might mean is just a pushing out of reporting deadlines, but it could take a little bit longer. And Thomas knows this, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, North Carolina, and Oregon-

Sarah Spreitzer: Not California.

Jon Fansmith: Not California, not New Jersey. Only five. So I screwed up on three levels.

Mushtaq Gunja: But Jon, 80% is pretty good. We'll take it. So I think as I'm hearing both of you, I think that the answer here is hug literally everybody on campus that you, including our graduates. I was just on the law school campus and we're getting ready for commencement and it's an exciting time for all of us. Okay. I'm going to close us out of this part of the policy updates. We'll, of course, update everybody in a couple weeks when we record again about anything new, but we want to bring on Julia Adams, the Margaret H. Marshall Professor of Sociology and co-chair of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education. If you have been following higher education in the news over the last six weeks, you may have seen that Yale released a report on trust in higher education. It's an incredible document. It's a wonderful read. It challenges both Yale and I think all of higher education think hard about why trust in higher education has been flagging over recent years, what we might be able to do about it.

I mean, most schools obviously are not Yale. We are envious of your resources. They don't have the 400-year history. Most schools aren't accepting only 4% of their applications, but the report was so thoughtful, had so much that all of us could think about that we really wanted to have Professor Adams on the show to talk about it. Thank you, by the way, for all of you submitted questions in advance. Always super helpful. Dr. Adams, welcome to the show.

Julia Adams: Thank you so much and please feel free to call me Julia.

Mushtaq Gunja: Julia, can you tell us what this committee on trust and higher education was, what it was charged with doing and how it came together?

Julia Adams: Absolutely. Well, a lot is right there in the title and it was just a little more than a year ago that President Maurie McInnis at Yale formed the committee and charged it with the impressive problem of analyzing declining trust in higher education with obviously special attention to our home base at Yale. And so I should tell you a little bit about the composition of the committee, I think. So it included 10 tenured faculty, senior faculty, five from the faculty of arts and sciences, five from professional schools and was co-chaired by Professor Beverly Gage in history. And we also had a small and indispensable staff thanks to the president. And the committee really represented a real range of disciplines and also areas of expertise, and of course, interest across the university. And we had a very open mandate. President McInnis encouraged us to quote, unquote, "think big." And we elected to try to do so and to develop a report which was diagnostic on the one hand, but also had practical recommendations for Yale.

And I should add that, of course, because our focus was, in a sense, contributing to getting our own house more in order. But there was always the hope that we could also contribute to larger conversation like today's.

Mushtaq Gunja: So we'll get to what you found and some of those recommendations in just a second, but just from a methodological point of view, how did you go about tackling this problem over the course of the year? Who'd you talk to, what'd you read?

Julia Adams: Yes. Well, it was a lot. So about a year ago, we began, of course, with a range of research. We also began from the very beginning speaking to people and that continued all the way to the end and still continues. We have a website, open link for comments, and then also later, committee email. And we spoke over the last summer to, of course, Yale constituencies, community members, et cetera, more broadly, but also continued to expand to outside experts, to critics and then pivoting in the fall toward a speaker series with invited experts with a range of views who came to campus and... To open sessions so students could attend and others. And I should say that by communities, I really mean a really broad range even locally.

So certainly not including just people who were here physically on campus, but alumni and far more broadly. And let's see, what else? We conversed. We listened, formal listening sessions, of course, but conversation after conversation, I would say everyone on the committee had many, many hundreds together of such conversations and we learned a great deal.

Sarah Spreitzer: Julia, was there anything... I mean, the committee was established in March of 2025 with this idea, "We are losing the trust." You start with that. Was there anything surprising that you heard from those external communities, the external voices that surprised you or the committee about why we're losing this trust or concerns?

Julia Adams: Yeah. Well, I have to say in the first instance, I was personally surprised not just that the decline in trust in higher education is real and it clearly is, but also that it may be different across different groups, but it is across the board. And so that is a warning flag. And then also, of course, it's interestingly inverted. As we note in the report, you often find journalists, et cetera, himming the Ivy League and criticizing less privileged universities. But in terms of trust, that linkage is reversed and people are more likely to trust, for example, community colleges or local regional colleges and less likely, in recent years, to extend such trust to more privileged and quote unquote, "elite institutions." And so that was also a surprise as well.

Mushtaq Gunja: What were your findings and what were the big drivers in terms of the public losing trust in higher education?

Julia Adams: Yes. As you can tell, it's a simple question but a huge topic and I know we'll get into many aspects of it, but over and over with public expressions of concern, there are really several major ones for the public. One is affordability and that won't surprise anyone here. Another has to do with who gets in admissions. And then finally, the complicated cluster of issues surrounding speech and political diversity, if you will, on college and university campuses. There were many other issues, but those were three you could say that relentlessly came up, especially from across the country outside universities and colleges, but inside too. So that's a lot. I'm not sure how you want to dig into that or-

Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah. Well, why don't we dig into admissions? And then maybe we can do affordability and then viewpoint diversity. Yeah. You want to go, Sarah?

Sarah Spreitzer: Yeah, I was going to say, Julia, the admissions section was so interesting. I mean, the whole report, I love that it's written... It's very short and it's very to the point. So it's very plain speaking recommendations. And so-

Julia Adams: I love that you're saying this. We have heard from some people saying, "This is so many pages," so I appreciate that.

Sarah Spreitzer: Oh no, I think it's not very long. So when you were looking at admissions and obviously the Yale admissions process, you talk about the fact that there are concerns about transparency and that there aren't metrics that you're looking at. So can you talk a bit about that? Because I think that that's not just in relation to Yale, but I hear that from a lot of people about the admissions policy and how there's so many things taken into account when you're admitting a college student. Can you talk a bit about your recommendations on that part?

Julia Adams: Yeah, thank you for that. I think this is a tough area in part because... Or a challenging area because it will differ so much for the breadth of institutions that you examine here. So I'm sure quite a bit of what I say may not be immediately generalizable or relevant, so I want to make sure that I register that. But I think one of our really major foci for reforming undergraduate admissions at Yale is the transparency, the importance of institutional candor, and that we say that we should only use criteria for admission that we're willing to describe publicly and defend openly and that the top priority for admissions decisions should be academic achievement at Yale. And that may sound obvious, but it relates, of course, to the general challenge of diffusion of mission that you see in so many universities worldwide actually, and perhaps we can get to that later.

So it is about recentering the academic mission, reflecting that in admissions decisions and making it as transparent as possible. And that's complicated because there are many categories of admits and the very process of admission in many universities like Yale is opaque. Opaque to students, opaque to families and the committees believe that that is a problem.

Sarah Spreitzer: That's great.

Mushtaq Gunja: And Julia, did I read correctly that you were recommending a minimum threshold for admissions and how might that be relevant to other types of institutions as well?

Julia Adams: Yes. I mean, we suggest that this would be a good thing, but we don't go so far in this section to say that you should do this immediately or of that sort. In part, this is because of the complexity. So you have a current system of applicants that's complicated and we first recommend that Yale reduce preferences for special classes of applicants. That's very important, and that we make public a minimum standard of academic achievement, but we don't say what that minimum standard would be, that it could be a Yale specific exam, or it could be, for example, an SAT floor, but this is something that remains to be or would remain to be worked out. And so I think that would have implications for other institutions, broad numbers of institutions, but it might be that they might adopt different ways into that. There's no one size fits all solution, we thought.

Sarah Spreitzer: I really appreciated that you noted the burden on students who are applying. So they're spending the money, they're spending the time and expanding all this effort to apply to a school that they may not be qualified for, but because the process is so opaque, they may not realize it.

Julia Adams: Yes, absolutely. I think that was something... We all owe that to students and to their families. Yale's already made strides actually in this regard with clarifying, but we could do better and I think no doubt other institutions could do better as well.

Jon Fansmith: Yeah. And it's interesting too because you mentioned affordability, and certainly. We hear a lot about cost and affordability here in DC and the federal government's various efforts to address that. And Yale's in kind of a unique position, has a very high tuition but also high aid model. And I think... It's not a secret, we met earlier to talk about what we'd be talking about today, and Mushtaq and I both sort of expressed surprise at looking at that, what the committee's recommendations were. Can you talk a little bit about what you recommended and also what the thought process was behind that?

Julia Adams: Yes, absolutely. And I would love it if you would also talk about your surprise as well.

Jon Fansmith: Sure.

Julia Adams: That is what you might've expected what the committee would've-

Jon Fansmith: Well, and maybe that's a better place to start too. I think we hear a lot about transparency. What do things cost? Understanding what your costs obligations will be going in. And frankly, one of the biggest, I think frustrations we hear from the public is less what the actual price they wind up paying is and whether that has value and more, "Well, I see a listed tuition price that looks like something impossible for me to afford, but yet I'm being told that's not what I'll pay between aid and institutional discounting and other things." And then, "I don't necessarily know how to look at different institutions with different aid levels," and this kind of uncertainty. And there's been this, I think, effort to say, "Well, maybe we need to get rid of tuition discounting and maybe we need to just have a flat price that people pay and the price is the price," or something like that.

And tell me if I'm mischaracterizing, I read the report as recommending actually leaning in further, providing more aid in the existing model, but also putting a lot of weight behind explaining to students what that might mean for them individually if they are accepted to an institution like Yale.

Julia Adams: Yes, I think that's right. I think that's right and that could extend quite far depending on economic conditions more generally and so on. And it could extend to also making clear what students and their families have to expect over years rather than simply for first year students, for example. So I think that's true. Yeah. So maybe... I was expecting you almost to say that what was surprising that we didn't say that Yale should be free.

Jon Fansmith: Oh, I work with too many college presidents to [inaudible 00:43:29] fully behind the idea of free college tuition.

Julia Adams: We do hear that a lot.

Jon Fansmith: But actually, can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, no, because actually the rationale you included was really thoughtful about why tuition remains an element of the admissions process and paying for Yale.

Julia Adams: Yeah, thank you. Maybe we can also kick that around a little bit because I think there are different reasons. One, it is a... Our feeling is that higher education is valuable actually, first of all, but also that... Imagine it were possible to make it completely free. What that would very likely do is actually put more of a burden on existing relationships to the federal government for support, for example, and very, very generous donors on the other. So it would create enhanced or new dependencies, which we think would actually raise new problems for academic freedom potentially or for higher education in general. So the goal for us was, as we said, not to make Yale free, but to make Yale affordable.

Jon Fansmith: And certainly, I won't put words in your mouth, but given the period of time in which you're developing the report, increasing the dependency on the federal government seemed like a dangerous path to pursue under any circumstances.

Julia Adams: Yes, yes. I mean, this relates to the whole question that may come up later about looking within in a period of external turbulence. Obviously, one looks within for good reasons, one should look within periodically and especially in complex institutions like Yale that are becoming even more complex institutionally, for example, with Yale's [inaudible 00:45:32] medical school alone, et cetera, you need periodically to reevaluate how things are working, but it's also true that it can help you respond and adapt more effectively to external turbulence. And if you can do that, then you also are able to better work with other institutions as well collaboratively. At least there would be less emergency pressure, more time to collaborate. At least that's the hope.

Jon Fansmith: No, and I certainly agree with that. And the one other thing before I... I know my colleagues want to jump in, we have a lot of things we want to talk about with you. One of the other recommendations around affordability was particular to the graduate programs and emphasizing certain programs with a very clear note about some of these fields are preparing people to enter professions that are not highly compensated, where the idea of reducing the risk of pursuing a degree in that area, especially at the graduate level, it just... From the first half of our conversation, we're talking about the loan limits, what that's going to mean for these different... Nursing was one of the programs at Yale that you recommended additional financial aid support for. And tell me a little bit about that process because I think that really actually the timing as to what's happening in the policy space is almost too perfect.

Julia Adams: Yes. Well, I'm amazed at the timing and I just want to say, that was very important to us and we were delighted that that was one of the things that the president highlighted in her acceptance of the report, including for those essential programs whose pipelines are now under challenge, including nursing, as you all were saying.

Mushtaq Gunja: On affordability and cost, because it ranks so highly in the list of issues that are affecting public trust, I wouldn't mind spending just one more second here and maybe kick a question to all three of you, Jon, Sarah, Julia, I mean, there are a set of institutions that are high tuition, high aid. I mean, Yale is at the far end of having high tuition and a lot of aid, but there are other institutions too that have very high sticker prices, but most students aren't paying that sticker price. They have aid either in the form of institutional aid or in terms of loans. And then of course, there are a whole set of institutions that are much lower cost... A much lower sticker prices at least.

There's a range, it's a very complicated ecosystem, obviously. One of the things that jumped out to me though was that notwithstanding the fact that I think if your family makes less than $200,000, you're going to be able to go to Yale for free, there's still pretty significant dissatisfaction with the cost and the financial aid system, which does, I guess, maybe bring us back to transparency or something else. I'm curious, what... And maybe to Sarah and Jon first and then to Julia, I mean, what struck you in this report as being applicable to other types of institutions from the cost and affordability point of view?

Julia Adams: I can just say one very quick thing and then pass it back to you all, which is... This relates to Sarah's question about surprises. Surprise at the percentages of people that believe that these high sticker prices are all there are for a huge range of institutions, even those that have a lot of support. So that information is just not getting out there.

Mushtaq Gunja: Well, there's no question about it. I mean, every single story, I feel like I see... Right around now, when we're talking about college admissions is BU sticker price is $96,000," and then conflating that with every single family everywhere is going to pay $96,000 to go to college. And I mean, obviously that's not going to work for the vast majority of families and so college isn't worth it. And I mean, yes.

Sarah Spreitzer: Well... and I think, Mushtaq, to your point about what can other institutions take from this report, I think the report does a really good job of identifying major issues impacting all of higher ed. Even if you're an open access model, I think a student down the street may still think that that institution is going to be too hard to navigate or too expensive to afford. And I really applaud Yale for doing this kind of self-reflection. And I think every institution, given the diversity of the types of institutions that we have, could gain a lot by reading this and thinking about some of the same questions that are being asked. And the other thing I would add that I think that every institution could take from this report is how interconnected these things are. So your admissions policy plus the affordability plus your campus-free speech policies, plus your undergraduate education, all of that is really interrelated.

And I think that's something that we don't often think of in the world of higher ed. We think high sticker price, we think admissions, we think elite institutions, we think of transfer of credit, but we don't put those all together. And so I think it would be really helpful for institutions to just look at some of the major themes in the report.

Julia Adams: Thank you.

Jon Fansmith: And I notice that's being reflected in the comments too, a lot of people saying it to that effect. I mean, the one point I'll just make on the last point on affordability, it is really fascinating. A school like Yale that has such a generous aid program, I think if you were to ask people, "What would I pay to go to Yale?" And you've talked about the transparency, but this is such a general assumption among the public. A Yale alum, our current vice president talked about in his book, the fact that Notre Dame sent him a letter saying, "You should apply here as an undergrad." And he said, "Well, there's no way I could afford Notre Dame," even though he clearly would have been a recipient of a very generous financial aid. And he talked about later, "I learned this but I didn't know it, and choosing to go to Ohio State, that that was even available to me."

And I think we have built this model, this is my opinion, people, whatever, I've said it before, we've built this really crazy model where we have a pricing system that is meant to be as progressive as possible, yet it reads to the public as the most expensive, regressive model you could possibly have. There's no bigger disconnect than what we do in pricing versus how it's perceived.

Julia Adams: Yeah, that dovetails with our findings.

Sarah Spreitzer: Well, and barriers, right? Really, whether it's admissions or the cost or transferring of credits, I think the public really focuses on the barriers to higher education. When you talk to an institutional person, it's all about expanding the reach of higher education. So it seems, in some ways, we're across purposes with the public when it comes to that messaging.

Julia Adams: Yeah.

Mushtaq Gunja: Things that you highlighted in the reports as one of the factors and the newspaper reports really picked up on our questions about viewpoint diversity and campus political climate. Can you talk a little bit about what you found in regard to those two topics?

Julia Adams: Yes, absolutely. And I know our time is not lengthy, so I won't go on too long, but this is an important part of our self-focus also on viewpoint diversity as applicable to faculty as well as students, et cetera. And this is an area in which you could say people care about, which people care passionately and both at the university and from the public. This was also an area where we actually explicitly recommended for our own campus, a degree of first self-scrutiny, which will begin in the coming academic year, but also experimentation because the committee itself, of course, does not know what will work best in terms of continuing to enable more honest, broader, and brave conversations on campus to continue and strengthen our tradition of discussion and serious debate. And so we name a range of possibilities basically, which also, of course, looks at the appendix of the report for what is happening at other institutions and what are recommended by university observers and critics. And so we were very open here, but also saying, "Let's get started. Let's get started now and see what works."

Mushtaq Gunja: I really appreciated that. I also appreciated the reference, I think you said some version of research, learning, teaching is not helped by being in an echo chamber. And it's really important for us to be able to get the diversity of viewpoints [inaudible 00:55:16] to be able to... And I like the idea of just, "Let's try some stuff in the classroom, in hiring. Let's see what happens." And you won't have a silver bullet, but... Or at least we don't know what it might be, but let's try some stuff.

Julia Adams: Right. No, it's exciting that other institutions are grappling with this now and I think we have a lot of experiments that are enrolling and some seem to be going better than others around the United States, but let's look at that and let's share information.

Mushtaq Gunja: On that viewpoint diversity, what's been the reaction of the faculty to those sets of findings and to that recommendation? I can imagine a range of responses. How's the faculty responded?

Julia Adams: Yeah, I think there will be varied responses and I think those will become more marked or clear this coming academic year during the self-studies basically. But so far, what I've heard is quite open and it has given rise to debate on campus already. Of course, we are also right up against graduation at this point. You can see the tent right out my office window. So that's why I think probably beginning in the fall, we'll know more about the answer to that question.

Mushtaq Gunja: I know that time is a little bit short and there are, I think, 20 recommendations and we got to three of the topics.

Julia Adams: Oh my goodness.

Mushtaq Gunja: Julia, are there topics that folks have not really asked you about that you want to highlight in the report that you think are sort of important... That are maybe a little hidden that haven't gotten as much play?

Julia Adams: Oh, thank you Mushtaq. Well, I think what I'd like to say... Just a couple things. First of all, the committee was so delighted that President McInnis directly attended so warmly to our mission statement recommendation. So that's just been magnificent, recentering on the academic mission. And that relates to the cluster of recommendations around the classroom and switching the default, for example, in the classroom away from devices to device free zones when pedagogically appropriate, and of course, with adequate student support, but change the default, recenter on human interaction in the classroom, in labs, but also on campus. And so we have a whole cluster of recommendations around that and I hope people will take a peek at those.

Mushtaq Gunja: Be nice to be in a screen-free classroom.

Julia Adams: It would be very good for me.

Mushtaq Gunja: I know that there are reasons, I mean, students like taking notes, they're working with interactive and often digital textbooks now, and so they're highlighting and I know all of those things and I also wouldn't mind if we could go to a... I actually always tell my students the first class, "First class, use your laptop. Second class, don't use your laptop and then see what happens and which one you like better," and 60, 70% still are using their laptops.

Julia Adams: Well, that's very... See, you already have the experimental mentality, which is great. I would add to that then we know that the classroom is not all there is to it with respect to devices and social media and the challenges of social media and student culture is also in the report as well. And that's a space in which the president has already asked that following up on the report that a cross-university student committee be formed to address these issues because the students can best analyze actually how to engage with student culture and social media. The impact is very large. That's a very portable recommendation.

Mushtaq Gunja: Well, Dr. Adams, we are... Professor Julia, we are so-

Jon Fansmith: Covered all your bases there.

Mushtaq Gunja: Yeah, that's good. We're so pleased that you were able to join. I really do hope that everybody takes a look at this report. It's long, but it's a fast read. I mean, it's 35 pages. Maybe you don't have to read every single part of the bibliography, which I think is 20 pages.

Sarah Spreitzer: I had to read a bill the other day that was like 70 pages, that's why I thought it was so short reading this report.

Julia Adams: Wonderful.

Mushtaq Gunja: Much better read. Please do. Please, everybody, take a look. And we'd love to keep engaging with these topics over the course of the year because look, we've got a trust problem that we all need to tackle and we're all going to tackle it in slightly different ways. We all are tackling different parts of the problem, but I'm really pleased that Yale did the self-study and that we were able to have you on to talk about it. So thank you so much.

Julia Adams: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Mushtaq Gunja: And thank you everybody. We'll see you back in a couple of weeks with more news from the federal government. Thank you all.​​​​​