Higher education is mired in a PR crisis. Since the start of his second term, President Donald Trump has targeted the nation’s most elite institutions, including the Ivy League. The cracks first appeared during campus protests over the war in Gaza, throwing the leadership lapses and internal tensions of colleges and universities into clear view.
Last year, Yale University President Maurie McInnis asked a group of faculty to find out why the university has grown so unpopular in the public eye. Their 20 recommendations match what many critics have echoed for years, suggesting everything from tamping down on grade inflation to addressing opaque admissions standards.
“Our committee’s work brought us face-to-face with some of higher education’s greatest challenges and blind spots,” the report reads.
A recent Gallup poll found public trust in higher education fell to just 36% in 2023 and 2024, a low among a series of controversies facing the institutions. While that number was back up to 42% in 2025, it remains near historical lows. But the pressure extends beyond reputational issues. People today are questioning the value proposition of a four-year degree as AI threatens to automate many white-collar roles across industries spanning law, business, engineering, and computer science.
‘Grade like we mean it’
Among the 20 recommendations, which span everything from protecting free speech, supporting “open minds,” and tamping down on devices in classrooms, the committee called on university faculty to “grade like we mean it.” Grade inflation took to the national spotlight after Trump pushed a crackdown on the practice, tying federal funding to whether universities modify grading practices.
And Yale is guilty of the practice. A 2023 report from Yale economics professor Ray Fair found that Yale dished out A or A- grades to a staggering 79% of students, meaning the median student at Yale receives an A. That’s up by nearly 60 percentage points from 1963, when the school gave out the same grades to just 10% of the student body. Harvard also admitted it was giving out too many A’s last year.
“Decades of inflation and compression have rendered the college grading system almost meaningless as an academic measure,” the report reads.
Grade inflation isn’t just injurious to a university’s reputation. The students receiving those straight A’s could also find themselves losing out in the long run. A recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), “Easy A’s, Less Pay: The Long-Term Effects of Grade Inflation,” found the practice has a direct link to poorer long-term salaries.
“Average grade inflation hurts,” Nolan Pope, one of the study’s researchers and a labor economist at University of Maryland, told Fortune in a recent interview. “They are less likely to learn if it’s very easy to get an A. They spend less time and effort.”
The committee recommended a 3.0 mean grade, or a similar class-wide average, as well as devising a percentile ranking, to mitigate grade inflation on campus.
Reforming undergraduate admissions
The report also found certain undergraduate admissions practices appeared unfair to the public, specifically the preferential treatment of certain applicants, including legacies, varsity athletes, and children of faculty, staff, and donors.
“The current system of preferences for certain groups of applicants,” the report reads, “distorts the admissions process by reducing the number of slots available to high-achieving applicants who do not fit into one of the favored categories.”
A 2025 NBER study found college admissions favor rich kids. Children from families in the top 1%, for example, were nearly 60% more likely to be admitted into an elite university compared with middle-class applicants. That’s because higher-income applicants tend to have access to the resources needed to catch an admission officer’s attention, including SAT tutors that can help boost their score. There’s a near-million-dollar market for that. Some rich families are paying admissions specialists $750,000 to get their kids into the Ivy League.
Undergraduate admissions practices have been upended in recent years. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action unconstitutional, shifting admissions decisions away from considering race. Around the same time, the Biden administration sought to end preferential treatment for the children of alumni and donors.
The committee’s recommendation? Go back to the basics: Give a floor for academic achievement, such as a minimum SAT score, shedding other tangential qualifications.
“It should only use criteria for admission that it is willing to describe publicly and defend openly,” the report reads.
