STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

 

 

 

​April 20, 2026

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The Looming College-Enrollment Death Spiral -- After many decades of democratization, higher education could once again become a luxury good.

 

Editor’s note: As mentioned in a prior Newsletter, schools like Stanford will not be directly affected by these changes. On the other hand, as fewer students and families see benefits in higher education, that change in attitudes may inevitably impact the willingness of governments and even foundations to devote significant resources to support what starts to be considered activities for the elite, and overpriced no matter who pays.

 

Excerpts (link in the original):

 

“The ‘demographic cliff’ is upon us. The number of teenagers graduating from American high schools peaked last year. It will begin declining this spring and keep falling steadily through at least 2041....

 

“Roughly half of students at four-year colleges still attend one within 50 miles of home. The result is a market divided into two: one built on national brands that attract high-performing students from everywhere, and another that serves a local and regional population of place-bound students. Those two markets have hardened in recent years. Applications to the roughly five dozen campuses that accept fewer than 20 percent of applicants have skyrocketed, from nearly 800,000 two decades ago to more than 2.35 million today. This is largely why the admissions process feels so much more competitive to parents who went to college in the ’80s and ’90s....

 

“As they lost more and more local students to national universities, regional colleges found ways to stay afloat. They expanded access for underrepresented groups, added programs and amenities to attract students who might have skipped college otherwise, and partnered with the private sector to reach new markets online and internationally. For a long time, they could count on finding enough teenagers to fill their freshman class.

 

“That era is over. Undergraduate enrollment nationwide has mostly been falling since 2011, even before the demographic cliff. Now, with fewer 18-year-olds in the pipeline, the enrollment machine at local and regional campuses is running out of fuel....

 

“When enrollment falls, campuses shut down. And when campuses disappear, enrollment falls further, because the local students most likely to attend those institutions lose a nearby option. A vicious cycle emerges, and the worry is that the demographic cliff combined with campus closures will drive the number of college-going students only further downward.” ...

 

Full op-ed by ASU Prof. Jeffrey Selingo at The Atlantic.

 

See also “Ohio Cuts 90 Degree Programs as States Target ‘Low Value’ Credentials” at EDU Ledger: “Close to 90 degree programs at Ohio’s public universities are being cut as a result of Senate Bill 1, which requires universities to scrap any undergraduate degree programs with fewer than five graduates per year for three straight years.”

 

Why Everyone Hates the Ivy League -- A new Yale internal report carries a message for the campus: check liberal bias, introduce more merit in admissions and reduce preferences for legacies.

 

Excerpts:

 

“Last spring, Yale University President Maurie McInnis asked a group of faculty to examine why Americans were losing confidence in higher education -- and to propose remedies to restore it.

 

“Their much-anticipated findings, released [last week], call for changes to address everything from perceived political bias among faculty, to opaque admission standards and crushing student debt.

 

“'In its report, the committee calls on Yale to reflect on and take responsibility for our role in the erosion of public trust,' McInnis wrote. 'I accept this judgment fully.' ...

 

“The group noted, for instance, that Yale’s mission statement grew in 2016 to include ‘improving the world today’ and fostering ‘an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.’ 

 

“‘These are all worthy goals,’ the committee wrote, ‘But they are not what makes a university a university.’

 

“Instead, the group recommends Yale adopt a leaner mission statement found in the Faculty Handbook: ‘Yale University’s mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.’ ...

 

“The committee addressed concerns that Yale is perceived as an intellectual echo chamber, a criticism leveled at many universities and academic disciplines. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 36 to one across top schools within Yale, according to one estimate cited in the report.

 

“To combat insularity, the committee recommends that starting this fall, each department should scrutinize the ‘diversity of perspectives’ offered in its curriculum and study the ‘openness of its hiring and admissions practices to dissenting or underrepresented traditions.’” ...

 

Full article at WSJ. Download a pdf copy of the full Yale faculty report here.

 

See also NY Times: “The findings reflect misgivings that Americans have described across years of polling and interviews. But the report, from a 10-professor panel at one of the nation’s most renowned universities, amounts to a damning depiction of academia’s role in cultivating the political and cultural forces that are reshaping higher education’s place in American life.”

 

See also our long-existing webpages:

 

• The Chicago Trifecta regarding (1) freedom of expression, (2) a university’s involvement in political and social matters, and (3) standards for academic appointments. Why reinvent the wheel when these three documents cover all of the key points?

 

• Stanford Concerns with detailed charts and numbers showing the administrative bloat that has developed at Stanford and is largely devoted to non-academic activities.

 

• Back to Basics at Stanford which, like this recent report at Yale, urges that Stanford return to a focus on teaching and research.

 

• How Have Universities Changed from Their Original Purpose? at our Ask AI webpage including, from ChatGPT, "having moved from debate and disputation to avoidance of intellectual risk, from small-scale collegial community to large bureaucratic administration, from moral and intellectual formation to therapeutic and consumer-oriented models, from great texts to ephemeral trends and ideological agendas, and from intellectual humility to institutional self-certainty."

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See also the following quote from “Restoring the Academic Contract” by Stanford alum and U Texas-Austin Provost William Inboden:

 

“Higher education in America sits at a paradox: American universities are simultaneously the crown jewel of the American education system and are also enduring their worst crisis in over a century. The crisis itself has multiple dimensions, including the financial challenges of escalating tuition and student debt burdens, the ideological imbalance among faculty and administrators, the institutional embrace of radical dogmas and speech restrictions, the resurgence of anti-Semitism, the deep ties many universities have forged with foreign nations whose interests are often inimical to the United States, and the new punitive measures that the Trump administration and Congress are wielding.”

 

Harvard Asks Donors to Endow $10 Million Professorships for Viewpoint Diversity Initiative

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Harvard is quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to establish new endowed professorships in a sweeping bid to reshape its faculty under the banner of ‘viewpoint diversity,’ according to two people familiar with the initiative....

 

“The initiative builds on plans that have been taking shape for more than a year. Last April, [Harvard President Alan M. Garber] committed to ‘accelerating’ efforts to establish a campus-wide viewpoint diversity initiative. That summer, the Wall Street Journal reported that Harvard was sketching plans for a conservative-leaning center modeled on Stanford University’s Hoover Institution....

 

“But the approach now emerging marks a clear departure from that idea. Rather than creating a separate hub, Harvard is pursuing a more integrated strategy -- placing new faculty directly within existing departments....

 

“[In a Harvard Crimson survey last year], a majority of respondents said they did not want Harvard to make a ‘concerted effort’ to hire more conservative faculty. By contrast, just 23 percent wanted it to be a focus of the University.

 

“Even so, some prominent voices have pushed for change. Government professor and prominent conservative Harvey C. Mansfield penned an op-ed in The Crimson last spring calling on the University to increase the presence of right-leaning scholars.

 

“Harvard’s internal task forces on antisemitism and Islamophobia also recommended last year that the University establish a central hub for ‘pluralism’ on campus. But Harvard has yet to publicly outline formal plans for such a program.”

 

Full article at Harvard Crimson. 

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See also paragraph 1.d. at our Back to Basics at Stanford webpage: “In any recruitments and decisions to make offers, schools, departments and other academic units shall assure that the pools of candidates reflect viewpoint diversity. This does not mean partisan diversity but rather a diversity of thinking with respect to the substantive areas of the relevant academic unit. Among other things, academic units that consider societal issues shall make special efforts to recruit and retain faculty who may have different viewpoints than the majority of the faculty and have the academic skills to present their alternative viewpoints.”

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We Say We Believe in Free Inquiry, But Our Classrooms Tell a Different Story

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

. . . .

“Conservatives and progressives alike invoke free inquiry when it serves them. Accreditation bodies expect it. Mission statements everywhere pledge allegiance to it. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in its 2017 Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, explicitly called for higher education to move beyond content delivery and toward helping students develop the skills and modes of thinking that civic life in a democracy demands.

 

“A statewide faculty survey I conducted involving 198 undergraduate instructors across disciplines revealed a striking and largely underacknowledged finding: Faculty overwhelmingly believe in dialogic, student-centered pedagogy -- but far fewer actually implement it.

 

“Eighty-four percent of faculty in my study believed in incorporating experiential learning. Sixty-nine percent identified Socratic dialogue as an effective method for fostering meaningful student learning. Eighty-five percent endorsed collaborative, student-centered approaches. These are not the mindsets of a faculty resistant to free inquiry. On the contrary, faculty embrace the Socratic ethos of education—the idea that academic content should be a mode of thinking, that students should take intellectual risks, that real-world application matters.

 

“Yet when the same faculty described their actual classroom practices, significant gaps emerged.... In short: faculty preach free inquiry but in their classrooms, on average, practice something considerably more constrained....

 

“The result is a pedagogical inheritance passed, largely unexamined, from one generation of faculty to the next. And when that inheritance leans sophistic -- toward lecture, toward passive receptivity, toward questions with single correct answers -- it quietly undermines the very spirit of free inquiry that the same faculty would eloquently defend if asked....

 

“We will not defend free inquiry successfully by defending it in press releases and policy statements alone. We defend it -- and advance it -- by doing the patient, reflective, institutionally supported work of practicing the principles we claim to teach.” ...

 

Full op-ed by former College of Southern Nevada Prof. Mella McCormick at Inside Higher Ed.

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

North Carolina Is a Model for Higher-Education Reform

Full article at James Martin Center: “North Carolina leads the country in campus free-speech protections, with 15 public universities earning a ‘green light’ from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.”

 

We Need to Teach Public Speaking

Full op-ed at Minding the Campus: “Ultimately, students need constructive criticism and consistent practice in front of an audience to cross the threshold from ‘forever doomed’ to confident presenter, much like combining a personal trainer’s coaching with consistent gym time. With more widespread oral communication training, colleges and universities will better prepare students for their careers and give them the keys to leadership success.”

 

Gallup: Gen Z Growing More Negative Toward AI

Full article at Higher Ed Dive: “Gen Z is becoming more skeptical about whether AI will aid their learning. Fewer than half of overall respondents, 46%, agreed that AI tools can help them learn faster, down from 53% who said the same last year.”

 

About the Layoffs in Silicon Valley and Nationwide

Full article at WSJ: “Snap is laying off 16% of its staff. Block lopped off 40% of its workforce. Oracle, meanwhile, is shedding thousands of employees, after Amazon cut about 30,000 in a matter of months....The willingness to make the big cuts reflects a fundamental shift in how U.S. companies view their professional talent. Instead of competing for knowledge workers with big pay raises and other perks, as many did for much of the past decade, corporate leaders have come to see large teams as impeding progress, not helping it.”

 

See also Section 3 of our long-existing Back to Basics at Stanford webpage “Stanford’s Administrative Bureaucracy Must Be Reduced Significantly and Immediately in Both Size and Costs” and our long-existing Stanford Concerns webpage with detailed charts and numbers showing the administrative bloat that has developed at Stanford and is largely devoted to non-academic activities.

  

Why We Care -- Samples of Current Teaching, Research and Other Activities at Stanford

 

Click on each article for direct access; selections are from Stanford Report and other Stanford websites.

 

Stanford Fuels Solutions for a Power-Hungry World

 

Microchip Implant Helps Blind Patients Read Again

 

Stanford Medicine Opens Novel Proton Therapy Center

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