Yale Spent a Year Figuring Out Why Everyone Hates Yale
American confidence in higher education has collapsed. A decade ago, 57 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in colleges and universities. By 2024, that number had fallen to 36 percent. Seventy percent of Americans now say higher education is heading in the wrong direction.
Yale University (my beloved alma mater) has decided to, at long last, take this crisis seriously.
In April 2025, Yale president Maurie McInnis asked a committee of ten faculty members to spend a year figuring out why trust had collapsed and what could be done about it.
The Yale committee recently released its findings. It’s nearly 60 pages long; I read it so you don’t have to.
For the first time, insiders at one of America’s most powerful universities are saying the quiet part out loud. The most unsettling part, though, isn’t what Yale and the rest of higher ed got wrong. It’s what it finally admits has been true all along.
If even Yale’s own faculty are now admitting the system has gone haywire, then something deeper is going on. I’ll explain what it is.