Four Principles for Comprehensive Higher Education Reform

This article was previously published as part of The Reconstruction Papers. The entire book is available in print and as a PDF.

Get the complete audio of The Reconstruction Papers now or subscribe to our public podcast feed on Spotify, on Apple, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

The Trump administration will leave behind much institutional wreckage, including in higher education. When Trump and his MAGA movement are eventually suppressed and pushed to the margins, it will be necessary to reform higher education in the United States so that its independence is more resilient in the face of a future (inevitable) authoritarian assault, and so that it does a better job of serving students and the public good.

MAGA attacks on higher education and academic science are part of a broader campaign to dismantle independent institutional authority in pursuit of a postliberal political order.¹ Separate from the damage inflicted by Trump and his allies in state governments, US higher education itself falls short of its promise. But higher ed is not rotten to the core, and there is much to commend it.

Comprehensive reform is necessary. The full scope and details of any comprehensive reform to US higher education are beyond what I can specify here. I outline a set of principles with some specific but not hypertechnical policy recommendations that together amount to an initial agenda. Some reform efforts should be about change and some about preserving what is good and useful about US higher ed. Each of the principles that I outline call upon traditions that are at least partly applicable to higher education in this country.

Students are at the very core of higher education; thus equitable participation is my first principle for comprehensive higher education reform. The second is democratic self-governance, which rests on a long American tradition of academic freedom and autonomy that has rarely been fully realized. The third is global openness and local responsiveness, reflecting both the international nature of higher education and the obligations that it has to the community. The first three principles address democratic ideals. But higher education in the United States is extremely costly, and it is necessary to address political economy in any attempt to think through comprehensive reform. Therefore the fourth and final principle is cost sustainability.

You will notice an overlap in the principles and the policy ideas. This approach reflects the complex reality. Both the brilliance and the bother of US higher education are attributable to its dizzying complexity, and a single reform package will not work for all aspects of higher ed in all parts of the country.

The United States does not have a national system of higher education. It has fifty state systems,² some of which are more systematically governed than others; a large private nonprofit subsector; and a for-profit subsector. Organized civil society, including academic associations and philanthropies, continues to play a major role in shaping US higher ed. States have the primary responsibility for providing and regulating it, but the federal government draws the whole system into semicoherence as the national underwriter of student financial aid and the primary sponsor of academic research, and through the regulatory powers derived from those two functions.

Most students are enrolled³ in “four-year” colleges and universities, but a large minority of enrollees are in “two-year” community colleges. Specialized institutions ranging from stand-alone medical schools to vocational-training providers comprise a modest but meaningful component. When I write about higher education here, I refer broadly to everything that is postsecondary education, but my particular focus is on the traditional providers like four-year colleges and universities. These institutions enroll the most students, they are what most people think of as higher education, and they are the targets of Trump’s ire. The state policy ideas that I discuss are limited to public institutions. Some of the ideas I advance are drawn from a forthcoming book about public universities that I coauthored with Barrett J. Taylor, The Postliberal University: Governance, Leadership, and Partisanship in Higher Education.

A high-level review of US higher ed is needed to establish my ideas. Trump’s assault on these institutions is dangerous but clarifying. I don’t see any good in what his administration is doing there and am not looking for silver linings. But these attacks, which were preceded by and are now concurrent with an organized campaign in the states, do show leverage points and expose vulnerabilities in policy and governance that help explain why and how reform is necessary.

The triumph and tragedy of US higher education

Higher education is a major social and economic sector. Expenditures amount to approximately 2.3 percent of GDP, considerably higher than the 1.4 percent OECD average.⁴ The sector is engaged in all manner of activity, from the mainstays of undergraduate instruction and academic research to vocational training and adult education, technology transfer, regional economic development, asset management, and, among other things, the organization of both professionalized and amateur athletic competitions. And despite substantial state and federal incursions into the operations of colleges and universities, they remain partly self-governing.

The expansion and transformation of US higher education was chaotic⁵ and somewhat uncoordinated, with thousands of individual campuses making decisions independently. Colleges and universities have capably demonstrated the capacity to absorb new activities without shedding old ones, constantly adapting⁶ to maintain relevance. Each year, around sixteen million students⁷ are enrolled in some form of higher education. The social origins, educational objectives, and methods of engagement with higher ed are varied. The end product is a sprawling, resource-intensive sector, with only a few direct levers to steer it and, as a result, sometimes unsatisfactory accountability to states and students.

Even so, outcomes for college graduates are consistently good. Despite concerns that the unemployment gap⁸ between high school and college graduates⁹ has shrunk, and a modest rise in the unemployment rate of recent graduates, the typical labor-market benefits of a college education are undeniable. According to a recent Brookings report,¹⁰ the “striking fact is that over the years the median person with a college degree has earned between twice and threefold the typical earnings of a worker with only a high school diploma… Even more, the gap has risen, not fallen, since the year 2000.”

What’s more, the diversity of the higher-ed sector means that different providers offer an array of educational settings and learning experiences to suit students’ circumstances and preferences. Selection makes it very difficult to isolate the effects of education on outcomes, but the accumulated evidence¹¹ suggests a range of benefits, including cognitive and moral development. The social benefits¹² are also substantial and include improved public health, higher levels of civic engagement, and lower rates of committing crimes.

Additionally, higher education is (or was)¹³ a source of considerable soft power. The US had long been the top destination¹⁴ in the world for international students. By attracting top-tier students from around the world, US higher ed has educated around seventy world leaders.

American research universities are among the most productive globally and produce a large share of influential research papers. While other countries are now also scientific powers, without adverse policy the US stands to remain a global leader. The University of California, for example, employs more highly cited researchers than any other scientific organization in the world. Only China produces more research papers than the US by absolute number.¹⁵ In 2022, China-based researchers generated approximately 899,000 science and engineering papers, compared with approximately 457,000 from the US, but when you consider that China’s population is about four times larger, we can get a better sense of the endurance of US research. AUTM, an academic technology transfer association, estimates that academic research contributed around $1 trillion to GDP¹⁶ between 1996 and 2020. Until tech oligarchs abandoned higher education, the partnership¹⁷ among industry, the government, and universities proved to be lucrative.

The story is not all rosy. Social mobility is a consistent political goal for American education,¹⁸ yet the sector generally fails to deliver on this expectation. Higher ed in the US—as it is in many countries—is implicated in the reproduction of social inequality, and expanded access has not reduced inequality.¹⁹ The American tradition of segregation and discrimination is deeply rooted in higher ed. Vast swaths of the sector were formally segregated until 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Today, colleges and universities are what Victor Ray theorizes as racialized organizations²⁰ whose structures, norms, and routine practices enhance the agency of white people while suppressing people of color’s agency. This is why colleges and universities produce large gaps in graduation²¹ rates between White, Black, and Hispanic students, and why degree attainment rates vary widely by race.²² It is also why there are racial disparities in college majors, with White and Asian students overrepresented in the majors²³ associated with the highest average income.

High prices, perceptions of unaffordability, and the buildup of debt burdens are a political drag on the sector. A recent Pew survey found that a majority of Americans think higher education is going in the wrong direction,²⁴ with tuition prices and affordability among their key concerns. Although it’s fair to say that higher-ed institutions have not controlled costs (a topic I will turn to later), limited affordability is in large measure the result of state and federal policy choices. Volatile state funding is a reason for high tuition prices.²⁵

The federal government has chosen to use student loans as the primary vehicle for financial aid. This was built into the 1972 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act,²⁶ and it reflected a tendency among policymakers to focus on the private benefits of education with a corresponding preference for neoliberal market-like policy interventions.²⁷ As a result, some 44 million borrowers are straddled with around $1.7 trillion in student-loan debt,²⁸ and this profound level of indebtedness is a burden to many. The experience of broken promises and betrayal by higher education is why student-debt abolition became a powerful movement on the left and why President Biden advanced a partial debt-cancellation program—rejected by the Supreme Court—even though his administration had no credible plan to prevent a future cycle of debt buildup.

Public misgivings about high tuition prices and debt have been building for years and have become widespread. At the same time, as the political scientists Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins have identified, electoral realignment in which college-educated people increasingly identify as Democrats²⁹ opened a space for Republicans to effectively drag higher education into the culture wars,³⁰ in which university leaders proved to be inept combatants. It is against this background that we take stock of Trump’s assault on higher education.

What we’ve learned from Trump’s attacks

The Trump administration’s war on higher ed was determined, persistent, and broad-based during the first year of his second term. I won’t dwell on this because what’s happening is well known, but I do want to highlight some things that I believe we’ve learned. The assault began with an abrupt pause of all federal grants in January 2025 that was a preview of longer-lasting and profound changes to academic science,³¹ followed by a February “Dear Colleague” letter³² that declared the illegality of a wide set of ordinary campus practices, now often understood in the popular discourse to be underneath the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) umbrella. The administration moved to strip the rights of transgender students in particular³³ and is pursuing a plainly segregationist agenda.³⁴

By year’s end, five elite private universities³⁵ had entered extortion-like “deals” with Trump, demonstrating the administration’s capacity to split the sector with targeted attacks. The administration ousted the president of the University of Virginia by colluding with right-wing board members.³⁶ Even colleges and universities that were not directly targeted by Trump made sweeping changes to campus operations to align with administrative demands, following a process that the higher-education and legal scholar Liliana M. Garces calls repressive legalism.³⁷

The administration’s initial volley peaked in October 2025 when it introduced the so-called Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, a sweeping pact proposing that campuses hand over extensive autonomy to the government in exchange for a vague promise of preferential access to funding. The Compact failed when none of the nine campuses initially invited agreed to sign on, for the first time demonstrating the limits of Trump’s power to remake American higher education, although it would be foolish to believe that the administration has been permanently deterred.³⁸

Right-wing hostility toward higher education predates Trump by far.³⁹ The McCarthy era saw extensive attacks on and censorship of higher education, and Reagan clashed with the University of California when he was governor between 1967 and 1975. Monied right-wing activists like Art Pope have organized to advance major reforms of the sector.⁴⁰

Governor Scott Walker took aim at the University of Wisconsin following the initial Tea Party–fueled wave of reactionary fervor in the early 2010s, and other states including Iowa and North Carolina got in on the action.⁴¹ In the ensuing years, activists like Christopher Rufo launched bad-faith attacks on ideas such as critical race theory and then the entirety of higher education.⁴² Bari Weiss and Matt Yglesias fed a moral panic about the left-wing illiberalism on campus.⁴³ At the start of the Trump administration, Governor Ron DeSantis’s Florida was the archetypal state for targeting higher ed, but in the administration’s first year states including Ohio, Indiana, and especially Texas took aggressive action against higher education⁴⁴ to the extent that censorship of Plato at Texas A&M University is the now farcical reality.

We’ve learned that bad-faith attacks on higher education can be trafficked into the mainstream and rise to full-blown moral panics that occupy high-profile congressional hearings.⁴⁵ We have also learned that college and university executives are ill-prepared to stand up to an authoritarian government and that our governance structures for higher education are too weak and corruptible.

We’ve seen the coercive power of the federal government on full display and have discovered that it cannot be taken lightly when it comes to higher-education policy. And we now know that hyperpartisanship means that some state governments will eagerly extend the work of attacking higher ed when a copartisan president cheers them on.

With these lessons in mind and coupled with my general analysis of US higher education, I now turn to the four principles that I offer as part of a comprehensive plan to reform the sector.

Equitable participation

Higher-education policy communities are accustomed to thinking about student access and success. My first guiding principle for higher-ed reform is equitable participation—integrating both. Reforming higher education through equitable participation involves redesigning systems to welcome students under conditions that minimize preexisting social inequalities.

University College London education professor Tristan McCowan’s three-dimensional framework⁴⁶ for evaluating equity in access is close to my notion of participation, and it is a productive place to start. Working toward equitable access entails an iterative and relative approach to reform that compares policy options against alternatives along the three dimensions of availability, accessibility, and horizontality.

A higher-education system achieves availability when it supplies enough quality places for every student who wants one. Availability is about quantity, meaning that access to higher education is not rationed by scarcity. Accessibility occurs when no students, or groups of students, encounter excessive or disparate challenges to securing student places—including discrimination, financial obstacles, and other barriers to access such as inadequate accommodations for students with disabilities. Colleges and universities can serve students and society well by specializing and differentiating themselves by mission. We’ve already discussed the diversity of education the higher-ed sector delivers, as well as the breadth of mission and activities of these institutions. But when “horizontal” variation is associated with a marked “vertical” resource and status hierarchy, then the equitability of access is compromised by limited horizontality.

Higher education in the United States all but fully satisfies the availability criterion.

The US was the first country in the world to furnish a high participation system,⁴⁷ one that didn’t ration higher education based on supply. In 1965, for the first time, more than half of all students started college within a year of leaving high school.⁴⁸ That statistic has not dropped below 50 percent in any year since 1980. Tuition prices, location, and other factors do pose barriers to access to many students, but the idea that it is hard to get into college in America has been outdated for a half century. In 2025, around 19.4 million students participated in higher education across all levels and sectors, with approximately 16.2 million enrolled as undergraduates.⁴⁹ My analysis of 2024 federal data shows that among 848 public four-year colleges and universities with available enrollment figures, the median acceptance rate was 84 percent and the median yield rate (the share of accepted students who enroll) was 21 percent. In short, these figures illustrate that there is likely excess capacity at public universities and no inventory problem.

Local availability can be an issue. Most students attend a college that is near their home, and some areas are far from high-quality, affordable higher-education providers. States should prioritize increasing availability in education deserts by opening satellite campuses, improving transport, and offering first-rate distance programs.⁵⁰ Federal budget earmarks could be used to support state programs that shrink the distance to a good provider.

Accessibility is a higher priority for reform. I will sidestep the problem of how to select students for elite institutions, a topic that already attracts far too much attention. By my count, there were only fifty-four public colleges and universities that admitted fewer than 50 percent of applications in 2024, including military academies and several universities in California, which has availability bottlenecks around its population centers.

Affordability, a key component of accessibility, is a matter of serious concern. A blanket call for tuition-free college is infeasible because cost sharing will likely be necessary to fund higher ed even in the most progressive reform scenarios. All manner of ideas for loan innovations litter the reform landscape, including proposals to make colleges and universities responsible for defaults or the balances of students who do not graduate. With the possible exception of income-driven repayment programs,⁵¹ few of the loan reforms are very promising in my mind because they adopt a punitive approach and advance the underlying goal of discouraging participation. Instead, we should work to reduce students’ reliance on loans in the first place. The best way to limit borrowing is to dramatically expand the need-based federal Pell Grant, a proposal that is sometimes advanced under the Double Pell slogan.⁵² The maximum Pell Grant should be doubled to around $15,000 per year, and perhaps even quadrupled to around $30,000 to better reflect the total price of attendance at a public four-year institution.⁵³ Income thresholds should be relaxed so that more middle-income students qualify for some Pell aid.

A final point on accessibility: higher education is not accessible if students encounter an adversarial climate and inadequate support. We know that college students of color and queer, disabled, and first-generation students often have chilly and even hostile experiences in college. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) presents real, ongoing barriers to the explicit use of race in selecting students, but the Department of Education’s February 2025 “Dear Colleague” letter that sought to outlaw all diversity and inclusion efforts on campuses does not have the force of law.⁵⁴ Colleges and universities should continue to work on improving the climate and support systems for all students with targeted interventions to support minoritized students. Where these initiatives have been dismantled, they should be rebuilt.

US higher education does not fare well on the horizontality criteria. The sector is steeply stratified. Expenditures per student vary widely, and so does the share of total expenses that are covered by student fees. In research from the 2010s, a colleague and I found that super-elite private universities spent nearly 5.5 times more on education per student than the national median.⁵⁵ Tuition covered 66 percent of educational (excluding administrative and research) expenses nationwide; students at the richest universities were responsible for less than 30 percent of educational expenditures. Postgraduation salary likely has more to do with a student’s major than campus selectivity⁵⁶ but the places at elite colleges and universities are positional goods that provide entry to influential jobs⁵⁷ and top graduate schools.⁵⁸

Addressing the social consequences of the steep verticality in US higher education is a tough nut to crack. It is tempting to focus on the pinnacle of the hierarchy: private Ivy-Plus-type universities and elite liberal-arts colleges. A standard liberal response is to improve the distribution of students to campuses by developing programs and information systems that ensure that highly accomplished low-income and otherwise marginalized students are considered for selection to these places. More radical ideas have included endowment taxes to confiscate the wealth that is hoarded by elite institutions and redistribute it to lower-status campuses. I’ve become wary of both approaches. Yes, these institutions should work to admit more low-income students and students of color. But well-resourced and highly selective campuses simply educate too few admitted students to make much of a difference to social equity. Endowment taxes⁵⁹ create too much coercive power for the state, as demonstrated by the Trump administration’s use of them.⁶⁰

Efforts to improve horizontality are best taken up by the states to ease inequality among public colleges and universities. This will be imperfect work because the accumulated financial and social resources at leading campuses are difficult, and often undesirable, to dislodge, but concrete improvement measures are available. An Illinois proposal to develop an adequacy funding model⁶¹ offers a glimpse at the sorts of policies that could ensure that all campuses are sufficiently resourced and a good deal for students. The model guarantees steady funding increases for higher education each year and allocates state funds to institutions based on an algorithm that considers enrollment, program costs, and student needs. By distributing resources in ways that reflect such needs, the model is explicitly race and class conscious. A drawback to these plans, which are inspired by K-12 funding models, is that they may overlook the benefits to the state that come from activities beyond classroom education and therefore underfund comprehensive universities that have multipronged missions. Research is an obvious example. In fact, adequacy funding is stalled in Illinois because of opposition by the University of Illinois,⁶² which would lose state funding under current proposals. I return to this tricky question in the cost-sustainability section below.

Democratic self-governance

The United States has a grand tradition of lecturing other countries about good governance and democratic values. This extends to higher education, where US-based consultants (including me on occasion) have offered advice on how these countries should govern their universities. American scholars have argued that academic freedom is a necessary ingredient for universities to attain “world class”⁶³ status. It’s time to get our own house in order.

The extent to which higher education in the US has operated independently is the result of political and legal contestation and labor organization. In 1815, the New Hampshire legislature moved to forcibly amend Dartmouth’s charter and put the college under its thumb. The Dartmouth board sued, and the case was decided by the Supreme Court in 1819. Although Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward protects private contracts and charters from the state, it is commonly cited as foundational in instantiating the idea of autonomy among colleges and universities.

Facing coercive pressure, academics formed the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which since the 1920s has pressed for shared governance that gives faculty control over the curriculum and research as well as democratic input into leadership and administrative decisions. The 1966 AAUP Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities describes institutional governance as a “joint effort” among the faculty, administration, and a governing board.⁶⁴ In this vision, the state’s role is limited to financial support, board selection, and indirect oversight.

The reality, however, has never truly lived up to the ideal. Just after World War I, Thorstein Veblen wrote The Higher Learning in America, which documents how the interests of powerful businesses drove the agenda on campuses. Joseph McCarthy’s post–World War II Red Scare campaign was perhaps the most spectacular violation of academic freedom in the 20th century. Dominique J. Baker observes that the current moment both echoes the McCarthy period and extends beyond it.⁶⁵

For a decade, right-wing activists and either gullible or bad-faith centrist observers have trafficked in the idea that a leftist monoculture on campus is a profound threat to open inquiry and academic freedom. David French made this argument in The New York Times⁶⁶ on January 25, 2026. But the profound threat comes not from undergraduates who choose their words carefully because they are concerned about hurting each other’s feelings; it comes from authoritarian political forces.

Eve Darian-Smith persuasively argues⁶⁷ that the war on academic freedom is part of a global antidemocratic movement that suppresses disciplinary and evidence-based knowledge to make space for the rise of authoritarian and quasi-fascist rule. Academics, in turn, have a responsibility to pursue truth through evidence-based knowledge creation and dissemination as a check on power. Such a view on the importance of academic freedom within a democratic society is consistent with the idea that it is a stipulation of academic work and a professional obligation rather than an individual right akin to freedom of speech.

Institutional autonomy is a necessary criterion for securing academic freedom as a condition of labor and professional obligation. Scholars who study higher-education governance have long established a distinction between “procedural” and “substantive” autonomy. The idea is that states could constrain procedural autonomy⁶⁸ by deciding who runs colleges and universities and how they spend their money through regulation and by appointing boards, without encroaching on substantive autonomy, defined as control of the curriculum, the research agenda, and student and faculty selection.

Through the power of the purse, control of boards, and statutory authority, many states have the capacity to legally control nearly all aspects of public higher ed. In these cases, substantive autonomy is simply normative and means almost nothing when elected partisans decide to reject the norm and impose their will. We’ve seen the consequences of this to devastating effect in states like Texas and Florida.

Comprehensive reform that establishes substantive autonomy through procedural autonomy is necessary to prevent the authoritarian attacks the sector is currently enduring.

Two interlocking proposals can help accomplish the needed reforms.

First, state constitutions should be amended to ensure institutional autonomy. Michigan’s constitution, which enshrines procedural autonomy⁶⁹ by forbidding direct state involvement in university operations but requires that the state provide adequate funding, can serve as a model. Constitutional autonomy is no panacea, because governing boards can still act corruptly. Yet it does provide real protection from direct state interference. For example, constitutional autonomy could make intrusive legislation like Indiana’s law mandating some academic-program closures difficult if not impossible to implement.⁷⁰

Board reform is also necessary to protect autonomy and academic freedom. Currently, public colleges and universities are governed, depending on the state, by campus, system, and/or statewide boards. Most board members are selected through political processes, usually by gubernatorial appointment and sometimes by election. The idea behind political selection, reasonably, is to provide responsiveness and accountability to the public, but it’s not working.

Recent events demonstrate that boards are too easily weaponized for partisan ends, as in the case of New College in Florida,⁷¹ where Governor DeSantis replaced the board as part of a hostile takeover that converted the public liberal-arts college into a right-wing academy.

For colleges and universities to be democratically self-governed, they must be governed by their core constituents and those charged with fulfilling their missions. My proposed solution is to expand boards with new voting members that consist of student, faculty, staff, and perhaps alumni representatives. Each of these groups could use their various established associations or unions to elect members, who collectively should account for a bare majority of votes over the politically selected members. States can make these changes to their board structures either through statute or, preferably, by constitutional amendment.

Private boards are also clearly corruptible. Billionaires Bill Ackman and Marc Rowan⁷² reportedly applied intense pressure on the University of Pennsylvania’s administration and board to force them into a deal with Trump. Most private institutions have perpetuating boards, meaning that existing boards establish the bylaws and select new members. These boards will have to take it upon themselves to guard against the corrupting influence of activist billionaires and partisan pressure. Maybe some student activism could help them feel the spirit of reform?

Globally open, locally responsive

The University of Bologna was founded in 1088 by foreign students⁷³ who hired scholars to lecture them. For centuries, higher education has been an international enterprise rooted in place. The academic environment is enormously enriched—intellectually and, to be blunt, fiscally—through international engagement. The empirical evidence is clear that foreign-born academics have made, and continue to make, extraordinary contributions⁷⁴ to academic science. The popular discourse often pits international students against their domestic counterparts with the implication that foreigners crowd out locals, but this idea is not supported by the evidence. In fact, international enrollments create more overall access for local students whom internationals subsidize by paying higher fees.⁷⁵

At the same time, colleges and universities are anchored to their communities and must be responsive to community needs.⁷⁶ When people feel like colleges and universities are indifferent to their surroundings, resentment can breed. Not to mention the fact that higher education cannot provide equitable participation when it is not attentive to the people and communities around it.

We need not see a tension between being globally open and being locally responsive, and indeed higher education should be both. Until Trump’s first term, US higher education was quite open to the world. Federal immigration policy placed few restrictions on recruiting and enrolling international students, and colleges and universities enjoyed an exception to the H-1B (skilled) visa cap, allowing them to hire faculty and staff from around the world with surmountable administrative burdens.

The Trump administration and its congressional allies have created enormous friction for international engagement by discouraging international partnerships,⁷⁷ especially with China, by imposing onerous fees on skilled visa applications,⁷⁸ and most outrageously by harassing and attempting to deport international students for their protected speech.⁷⁹ In a post-MAGA world, federal policy should course-correct by restoring and extending the policy environment for global engagement. In addition to returning to a before-times immigration stance, Congress should create a pathway to residency and citizenship for students who complete degrees and substantial training programs in the country and should fund exchange and partner initiatives through both the State Department and the research-funding agencies.

Colleges and universities must engage with the world, but they must also be good local citizens by thinking about how their campuses affect local communities. Whenever possible, the institutions should source goods and services from local businesses and give attention to preparing, enrolling, and supporting local students, with a special focus on engaging with marginalized communities. Programs like the University of Michigan’s Go Blue Guarantee support equitable access by providing price clarity for low-income students from the state, and the City University of New York’s (CUNY) ASAP program provides extremely valuable wrap-around services to underserved students.

Cost sustainability

There is no doubt about it—higher education is an expensive enterprise. Real costs of the current model of higher education cause students to face exorbitant tuition prices and subsidies that cover less than half of their total expenses. They often need to borrow to finance their education. Conservatives blame the easy availability of student aid, and especially loans, for the high tuition prices and heavy debt burdens. Even though the so-called Bennett Hypothesis,⁸⁰ named after Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education William J. Bennett, enjoys only limited empirical support, right-wing zeal for curbing the availability of loan aid is evident in the new limits on borrowing put in place by Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”⁸¹

On the left, austerity⁸² is described as the primary culprit for out-of-control student debt. Public funding per student varies quite a bit by state and may not be down by much depending on the state and end points one chooses, but the clear fact is that state funds account for a smaller share of total educational expenses over time.⁸³

When state funding is cut, public campuses increase tuition; this causal relationship has been established.⁸⁴ But state funding goes up and down with the business cycle⁸⁵ and volatility may be the biggest culprit at play. When states cut funding, campuses raise tuition to help cover the difference, yet when states reinvest, tuition does not often go down (the partial exception being recent years, when tuition has generally failed to keep up with inflation).

Higher education is famously cited as an example of the cost disease⁸⁶—a labor-intensive service that cannot easily find economies of scale or increase productivity using technology. The revenue theory of cost is an even more satisfying explanation for why costs seem to constantly increase in higher ed. Also known as Bowen’s rule,⁸⁷ this theory posits that since higher education’s mission is expansive, its capacity to spend on mission-supporting activities is limited only by available revenue. This expansionary tendency is exacerbated by competition via differentiation and (vertical) status seeking that creates a revenue-chasing treadmill. Doing more (mostly good) things is the basis of competition in higher education. Consider the example of research. In a recent webinar that I hosted,⁸⁸ Rutgers University’s Chief Financial Officer, J. Michael Gower, explained that even with high indirect rates from the federal government, the university’s research operations are not self-sustaining, meaning more revenue from other sources—i.e., state funding and tuition—is constantly needed to keep the research engine at the cutting edge.

Revenue-theory-of-cost-style competition, volatility in public funding, and loosely regulated tuition markets are a recipe for cost escalation. And since student demand for traditional higher-education providers is both strong and acyclical,⁸⁹ alternative providers can only disrupt this dynamic on the margins.

Escalating costs have contributed to the creation of the greatest higher-education sector heretofore the world has ever seen, but also one implicated with American inequality. Controlling costs to protect students and taxpayers from unsustainable escalations while making sufficient resources available to support high-quality education and research is a difficult path to find. The US will want to be very careful to avoid a UK-like situation where tuition had been capped for years and public funds stagnated, driving big swaths of the higher-education sector to the brink of insolvency.⁹⁰

To address this, let’s start with the adequacy-funding idea that I introduced in the equitable-participation section. States could tie adequate and annually increasing funding levels to expectations of tuition restraint. Institutions that increase tuition above some defined threshold—say, a half-percentage point above inflation—would face a reduction in state appropriations that is greater than the net gain in tuition income. Likewise, if states failed to maintain adequate funding levels, campus tuition-setting authority would be unrestrained and institutions could communicate clearly to the public that the state was not living up to its end of the bargain.

K-12 schools are funded in large part by property-tax income that is not enormously sensitive to the business cycle. Higher-education funding comes through the state appropriations system, where revenue is derived from more volatile income and sales-tax streams. States, which are generally required to maintain balanced budgets and will face short-term deficits during recessions, should think about how to interrupt the price ratchet that comes during retrenchment periods. To smooth funding, states should establish multibillion-dollar trust funds that pay out to public college and university campuses during downturns in the business cycle.⁹¹ Release of the funds should come with tuition-restraint expectations so that any tuition hike should not exceed state cuts from the previous non-recessionary year net of trust-fund disbursements.

Finally, academic research generates public goods, but research competition is also a cost driver. Universities with research missions tend to spend from their general funds (derived mostly from tuition and state appropriations) to support research. The potential loss of funding used to support research is why some universities lobby hard against proposals like the Illinois equity-funding model. Competitive pressures prompt universities to spend more on research. The federal government and states could provide direct research funding.⁹² Accepting those direct funds would come with conditions. For one, institutions would have to limit or eliminate existing general-fund research spending. Additional accountability measures could include requirements to redirect replaced research funds to instruction or student supports, requirements to maintain or expand enrollment of lower-income students, and/or requirements to limit tuition-price increases in recognition of additional direct funding for research.

Thinking ahead

Higher education has become a charged partisan issue. Trump’s battle against academic independence, buttressed by antidemocratic policy in several red states, has exposed the sector’s limited ability to resist authoritarian overtures. As Trump’s outrageous agenda threatens the quality, material security, and integrity of US higher ed, major reform is needed both to recover from the damage caused by antidemocratic attacks and to remedy the underlying challenges facing the sector.

Other higher-education experts may wish to revise, expand, or edit my principles or add different policy ideas. That’s inevitable and generally productive. You will notice, for example, that I have not addressed how to think about generative AI. Nor did I directly address the political economy of the academic profession. Both topics are important. What I propose here can be a starting point, not a definitive plan. Building out a reform agenda for higher education requires thinking about a wide range of topics that intersect with other policy domains.

I urge my colleagues to consider a positive affirming agenda for higher education. Think about what is lost when the democratic purposes of education are attacked. Think about how to protect higher education for what it contributes and not just how to make it more efficient or responsive to your preferences. There is little room now for the hostility toward the sector that has long been displayed by some policy analysts on the center left, often coming from a righteous sense of advocacy on behalf of students but nevertheless with thinly veiled antipathy toward academics. Given the current state of higher education, and considering the realistic constrictions of a complex sector, what fundamental guideposts should we stake to reform higher education so that it does not succumb to antidemocratic rot? That is the question at hand.

The decentralized, institutionally diverse, and multipurpose characteristics of the sector make it resistant to centralized reform. Congress has been unable to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, which was intended to be revisited every five years, since before Barack Obama was first inaugurated. Reform necessitates semi-coordinated federal and state policy as well as institutional action. This cannot be managed neatly. To deal with the complexity, I propose a set of four principles to guide a reform agenda—equitable participation, democratic self-governance, global openness and local responsiveness, and cost sustainability—introducing policy ideas alongside each principle. Some of my ideas are more ambitious than others, and all of them would require political commitment to implement. Now is the time to build that commitment.