By Tom Robotham
Now that another academic year has come and gone, I find myself reflecting on the future of American higher education. The challenges facing colleges and universities, after all, are formidable, and there’s every indication that they will grow more severe over the next few years.
For starters, the rapid spread of AI is proving to be an irresistible temptation for students who want short cuts to graduation. Why spend hours in the library researching a topic, then hours more trying to develop a thesis when you can just ask a bot to write your paper for you? There have even been reports of some teachers using it to create lesson plans.
The increasing emphasis on asynchronous online courses of short duration (8 weeks or fewer) also troubles me. Underlying the shift is, essentially, an acknowledgement that college is something to race through as quickly as possible, rather than an experience to savor.
Meanwhile, higher education is increasingly under fire from the political right. This is not entirely new. During the McCarthy era, universities were vilified as hotbeds of communism, and even the moderate Eisenhower mocked professors as “eggheads.” That said, today’s assault seems more vicious.
Not that universities themselves are blameless. Increasingly, they’ve fostered an atmosphere of political correctness to the point of intolerance for anyone who dares to challenge the talking points of the “progressive” agenda.
Add to these problems the soaring cost of tuition—which has far outpaced inflation—and you have…well…a mess.
Shedding light on some of this is a report released last month by a committee at Yale, examining the public’s declining trust in higher education.
The decline is dramatic. “Just a decade ago,” the report notes, “57 percent of Americans expressed ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of confidence in higher education. By 2024, that number had dropped to a historic low of 36 percent. While trust improved slightly in 2025, seventy percent of Americans still say that higher education is heading in the wrong direction.”
Not surprisingly, the committee delved deeper into the impact of rising costs as well as controversies surrounding admissions policies.
I was more intrigued, however, by two other areas of focus. One is a rise in self-censorship.
“Yale’s data suggests that self-censorship is a real problem,” the report states. “In a 2025 survey by the university, nearly a third of undergraduate respondents disagreed with the statement that ‘I feel free to express my political beliefs on campus,’ up from 17 percent in 2015. Students who self-identified as conservative reported lower rates of comfort, but discomfort appears to be rising across the spectrum. A recent Buckley Institute survey suggested that more than half of college students nationwide feel ‘intimidated in sharing their opinions, ideas, or beliefs in class.’ Meanwhile, post-doctoral fellows and international students at Yale report that they now hesitate to speak out, even about their own research, for fear of government retaliation.”
My own students have echoed these concerns, and that saddens me. College, after all, is supposed to be about the free exchange of ideas, however unpopular or even idiotic some of those ideas might be. The theory, which I still believe in, is that through open Socratic dialogue—free of rancor—the value of the best ideas will in time become self-evident.
Alas, the chill that leads to self-censorship is felt by faculty as well as students. While I don’t think I’ve succumbed to it, the thought often crosses my mind: If I say such and such, will I be accused by a student of having offended him or her—or of trying to “indoctrinate” the class?
For years, this kind of pressure came mostly from the knee-jerk left. Now, however, I find the pressure from the far right a lot more frightening and extreme. To them, teaching anything other than a Washington-and-the-cherry-tree version of history encourages students to “hate America.”
A MORE FUNDAMENTAL CONCERN addressed in the report is “widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education. Trust is earned,” the report observes, “by doing what you say you’re going to do—and, ideally, doing it well. In recent years, however, universities have been expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable. Rather than build public support, this diffusion of purpose has contributed to distrust. Without a clear mission and purpose, it becomes difficult to judge whether colleges and universities are living up to their fundamental commitments.”
So—what is the purpose of college?
The most common belief is that it will help you get a better-paying job—and there’s evidence to back that up. Study after study has shown that college grads earn—on average—significantly more over a lifetime than people with only a high school diploma.
These statistics, however, are undermined in the public’s view by anecdotal evidence. We’ve all heard stories, after all, of people with graduate degrees working as baristas at Starbucks while some of their high school peers who never went to college are thriving as plumbers and electricians. Early on, after college, I ran into this perception myself. I was making a meager salary as a newspaper reporter, while a kid in my neighborhood who dropped out of high school was making good money operating a backhoe for a construction company. And he was by no means alone. To this day, my closest childhood friend who became a New York City firefighter after high school is far more financially secure than I am, with his generous pension.
A less materialistic view of college is that it affords young people the opportunity to explore all sorts of subjects with the aim of discovering their passions and talents. It certainly did that for me. When I was in high school, I took classes in mechanical drawing and architecture, and I loved them—so much so that I seriously considered pursuing a career as an architect. In the end, though, I wasn’t sure, so I opted for an open-ended liberal arts school. It was the right choice. During my four years there, I dabbled in philosophy, theater, music theory, history and political science. Eventually, I decided to major in English. But equally important to me were my extracurricular activities: writing for the student newspaper, acting, dance and deejaying for the radio station.
It was a wonderful period in my life, and I’m forever grateful that I grew up in an era in which college was affordable. My parents never had much money so I had to take out a student loan. But it was only five grand, and I paid it off in five years. Today, many of my students have to work, even with loans and various financial aid packages, which means they have little time left for reflection and the late-night intellectual conversations that used to be so much a part of the college experience.
Theoretically, higher education benefits society as a whole as well as the individuals who earn degrees. For one thing, well-funded universities are incubators of research in everything from science to sociology.
Moreover, at their best, they move us toward the Jeffersonian ideal of an educated citizenry. The Yale report addresses this by calling for a civic education initiative that would reach every first-year undergrad. The merits of such a program seem self-evident to me, since our democracy cannot thrive unless citizens understand its founding principles and possess a nuanced understanding of our spotted history.
The trouble is, people in power tend to see an educated citizenry as a threat rather than a benefit. As Trump put it at a rally in 2016, “I love the poorly educated.” In that succinct admission, he summed up a streak of anti-intellectualism that runs through our entire history as a nation and is especially pronounced today.
But once again, the culture of academia itself is partly to blame. Over the last 50 years, it has become increasingly insular, and a lot of academic writing is so laden with insider jargon as to be utterly unreadable for a generally educated population. Over the course of my career, I’ve even encountered academics who scoff at the idea of writing for the general public.
In short, universities today face a raft of problems: anti-intellectual barbarians at the gates; smug elitists within; administrations that are more concerned with protecting endowments than with dedicating themselves to the core mission; bloated bureaucracies filled with highly paid vice presidents of nobody-knows-what-they-do, and the cult of technology, which is slowly sapping the very soul from the enterprise.
I hope everyone will read the Yale report. Meanwhile, come fall, I shall rededicate myself to my calling. For in spite of all these problems, the effort is worthwhile as long as I still have hope of lighting up even just one student’s mind.