One of Donald Trump’s favourite disruption tricks is to take one true thing and embed it in a welter of lies. Does the global trading system need an overhaul? Yes. Is ruining the US economy and tanking markets the way to do it? No. Should Europeans pay more for their own defence? Yes. Is trashing Nato making Europe safer? No. Is American higher education in need of reform? Yes. Is holding the country’s top colleges hostage the way to fix it? No.
So, what is? Trump’s war on the Ivy League is both punitive and premeditated. Republicans have complained about “greedy colleges” since at least the 1980s. Late last year, the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute laid out a plan for how to stamp out university elites who “kowtowed to pro-genocidal campus quad glampers”. Attacks on university funding and attempts to deport campus protesters are part of that goal.
That said, reasonable people — particularly those who went to elite schools or worked at them (I’ve done both) — can and should ask why the academy has come in for such treatment and what can be done to address the flaws in America’s higher education system. There are many, but I’ll point here to three: administrative bloat, cost inflation and toxic credentialism. Fix these problems and colleges will not only stop being such an easy target for conservative ire, they will also work better.
For years now, colleges and universities in the US, both public and private, have been spending more on bureaucracy and less on actual teaching. Since the 1970s, the ratio of faculty to administrators has flipped, in large part because they have become not just places of education but lifestyle centres. College campuses now offer mental health services, intramural sports, entertainment, luxury dorms and gourmet food. Until recently, DEI initiatives proliferated (the latter are now under legal threat following the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action in 2023).
You need more people to run all these things. And while college administrators used to be promoted from inside the academy itself, they are now largely drawn from business schools and professional management programmes. These people are often disconnected from the core mission of teaching and yet their ubiquity and high salaries (often into six-figures) force schools to push up the cost of tuition.
Between 1979 and 2021, the price of a four-year degree tripled, even after accounting for normal inflation. That translates into more teaching being done by lower-paid adjuncts rather than full-time faculty.
If I were running a large university, public or private, I’d start by looking for economies of scale and tech-based job displacement in these sorts of administrative functions, just as efficient companies do. I’d also think carefully about the net effect of bureaucratic bloat on institutional effectiveness if it’s pushing up fees. As a 2024 piece in the Bowdoin Review put it, “that new ‘accessibility co-ordinator’ might just be making your university less accessible to the average tuition paying student.”
In effect, the expense of America’s higher education system is now out of control. Nobody but the rich can afford a debt-free college education any more. But the solution is not to pull federal funding and throw the ball to the states, as the Trump administration is doing. Not least because that would disproportionately hurt the majority of students who attend public schools and less elite institutions, which tend to have much smaller endowments and depend more on state funding. The latter has been falling in recent years thanks to the tax revolt led by Republican fiscal conservative Grover Norquist and the Koch Brothers.
Rather, we should look to bend the cost curve not only by focusing less on fancy extras and the staff to administer them, but by retooling secondary education to include two years of college (the so called “6 in 4” year model which is something that is becoming normal in many states and has backing from many educators and business leaders). For two-thirds of today’s jobs, that level of education would be enough. Meanwhile, it would halve the cost of a traditional state college degree.
For those who want a full four-year experience, you could imagine universities being a conduit for paid work experiences that fully connect what students are learning with jobs in a way that supports development of real world skills for students and creates a pool of less expensive labour for companies — something that has turned schools like Northeastern in Boston into a global franchise, with campuses in many countries. We might even make a year of mandatory public service part of the college experience, which would go some way towards bridging the political divide in the US.
This gets us to the issue of toxic credentialism. Universities used to be a place where people from different class backgrounds and family histories came to level the playing field. But higher education has become a place where differences — political and economic — are then magnified. Half of America’s government and business leaders come from a handful of the elite institutions now under attack by the Trump administration. And the percentage of college graduates coming from the lowest 25 per cent of the income distribution is the same as in the 1970s.
Therein lies the opportunity. For America to grow, higher education must evolve.