It also unfortunately exemplifies the self-centeredness that has earned elite colleges public disdain. The Yale report pinpoints three factors for declining trust in higher education: (1) soaring costs; (2) opaque admissions processes; and (3) “free speech, political bias, and self-censorship.” It also claims an outsized role for itself and other elite schools in driving public perceptions of higher education. “No sector of higher education faces greater public skepticism than the Ivy League,” the authors write.

While it’s noble of Yale to shoulder so much of the blame (or credit) for Americans’ views of higher education, this perspective is fantastically, myopically, solipsistically narrow. Sure, Yale reported its largest-ever applicant pool this year—50,015 hopefuls—but consider that nearly 3 million students will enroll as first-time college students this fall. For the overwhelming majority of students and their families, schools like Yale simply aren’t relevant.

Yale may have rejected 95 percent of applicants this year, but more than 99 percent of high school seniors rejected the idea of applying to Yale in the first place. Nevertheless, the Yale report interprets the problem of distrust in higher education through the narrow prism of itself and its equally cosseted peers. The result is a grave misdiagnosis of what’s gone wrong with the public’s perceptions of higher education.

For instance, Yale’s principal defense to the issue of cost is to argue that an Ivy League degree is, in fact, affordable. Despite the eyeball-popping sticker price for one year’s attendance ($94,425), “approximately one in five undergraduate students attends Yale on a full ride, paying nothing for four years of education, including tuition, room and board, travel, books, and personal expenses,” the report protests. That’s great for the vanishingly few students admitted—and meaningless for everyone else.

The perceived price of an Ivy League degree is not what’s driving students’ distrust. Rather, it’s the actual cost of buying a degree, typically from a local college or university, the value of which is increasingly uncertain. More than 40 percent of recent college graduates are “underemployed,” according to the New York Federal Reserve, casting doubt on whether a college diploma is worth the sacrifice and the debt to acquire it.

At the University of Missouri-Columbia (my undergraduate alma mater), the average net price for a full-time incoming student in 2023-24 was $22,169, according to the federal government’s College Navigator. The median debt for graduates is $20,500. That’s not bad, comparatively.

A new NerdWallet study projects that the average student heading off to college this fall will borrow $43,000 to earn a bachelor’s degree. (By comparison, Yale says, 90 percent of their students graduate debt-free.) Yale’s recommendation for tackling costs is to make its tuition free for higher-income student. But that doesn’t help the kid aspiring to Mizzou—nor does it help Mizzou. As much as Yale would like to “lead by example,” few schools can afford its generosity, enabled by its $44 billion endowment, the second-largest in the country.

In contrast to Yale, most institutions are staring down budget cuts and financial pressures, thanks to demographic shifts and the Trump administration’s funding cuts. The University of Missouri, for instance, slashed $40 million from its 2026 budget, and the rating agency Moody’s slapped a “negative” rating on the outlook for higher education this year. Granted, college affordability is a much bigger problem than Yale alone or even the elite schools together can solve.

These schools can, however, do more to fix their own reputations and their broader role in society. Sadly, the Yale report falls short on this front too. The problem confronting elite education is not so much public distrust as public resentment.

Many Americans rightly see elite universities—and their graduates—as co-conspirators in a scheme to hoard the nation’s wealth and power for themselves. Kids in the top 1 percent are twice as likely to attend an “Ivy Plus” college compared to middle-class kids with the same test scores, according to Harvard University’s Opportunity Insights. These elite graduates then go on to run the world.

At Harvard, for instance, more than half the class of 2025 entered careers in tech, finance, or management consulting. The over