STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

September 28, 2026

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Higher Education Has to Do a Better Job of Controlling Costs

 

Excerpts:

. . . .

“For too long, colleges and universities have responded to growing public skepticism by defending the value of higher education. We produce reports, commentaries and a lot of billboards explaining why college still matters; we remind families that graduates earn more than nongraduates over their lifetimes and celebrate the role universities play in preparing the workforce.

 

“Every one of those arguments is true. They simply miss the point....

 

“Every unnecessary dollar a university spends is a dollar that a family must earn, save or borrow. Those choices carry a human cost. They mean more debt, more financial pressure and greater sacrifice for the families who place their trust in us. Universities should spend tuition dollars with the same discipline families use when deciding whether they can afford college in the first place....

 

“Americans shouldn’t have to trust higher education because university presidents tell them to. They should trust us because our actions leave them no other conclusion.”

 

Full op-ed by U Arizona President Suresh Garimella at Hechinger Report.

 

In 200-Page Report, Cornell Confronts the Crisis in American Higher Education

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Cornell University [last week] became the latest elite school to propose a course-correction as it navigates one of the toughest periods in the history of American higher education.

 

“In a more-than-200-page report commissioned by Cornell’s provost, a special faculty committee outlined what it called an unprecedented crisis facing universities, thanks to disrupted federal funding, an erosion in public trust and rapid AI-led technological change. The committee’s recommendations included diversifying funding sources, embracing a range of ideologies and developing a new tuition model. 

 

“‘Higher education finds itself at a crossroads that calls for more than just surviving a crisis,’ the committee wrote. ‘It calls for making difficult choices.’...

 

“In many instances, the committee recommended a return to the basics. That includes more project-based learning and teaching time management strategies such as ‘navigating competing priorities, assessing workload, anticipating expectations, and adapting to personal and academic circumstances.’” ...

 

Full article at WSJ, and a PDF copy of the full report can be downloaded here.

 

Editor’s note: For the past four years, our weekly Newsletters and related website have been highlighting the fact that Stanford has the highest administrative cost per student of any college or university in the country -- $52,099 per student in 2024, and that’s just for the central administration, business and finance, legal and fundraising and NOT the academic and research support units, student counseling, buildings and grounds, housing, food services and similar services which result in additional administrative costs per student. Our charts and other data also demonstrate Stanford's unfavorable ratio of faculty-to-students and low participation of alumni as donors, especially as compared to schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Put another way, and according to Stanford Facts 2026, Stanford has 1,781 faculty Academic Council members (page 35) compared to 17,768 staff (page 12). 

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We and others have also continually noted that it is Stanford's oversized-bureaucracy that is responsible for Stanford's Kafkaesque party planning rules, its mind-numbing policies and procedures for the annual Draw for undergraduate student housing and its now rescinded list of words and phrases that were not to be used (black box, brown bag, whitespace, he, she, chief, freshman, immigrant, victim, etc.) among many other embarrassing actions and decisions in recent years, copies of which remain posted at our Stanford Concerns webpage.

 

And just last week, there was disclosure that a unit with the somewhat grandiose name “Residential & Dining Enterprises” used AI to change the race, sex and body features of the Stanford students appearing in one or more of their ads. And by the way, since when have the dorms become an enterprise, why does anyone need to advertise the food services in the dorms, and note that the senior management of this single unit includes a senior associate vice provost for R&DE and special advisor to the provost, three assistant vice provosts, a chief human resources officer, a chief financial officer, a chief communications and marketing officer, a senior director for conferences and a chief information officer. 

 

Which leads to the questions: How many other units at Stanford have their own vice provosts, CFOs, heads of HR, PR teams, etc.? How many lower and mid-level staff members are required to support each of these individual senior administrators? How many thousands/hundreds of thousands of staff hours have been wasted on projects that end up causing problems for Stanford? And what is the cost of all of this -- not just financial, but the ongoing and negative impact on the campus climate and the bad PR that keeps coming from these misguided actions?

 

Coincidentally, we also have long posted at our website a concept similar to what is contained in this report from Cornell -- that is, the need to get Back to Basics at Stanford including Section 3, “Stanford’s Administrative Bureaucracy Must Be Reduced Significantly and Immediately in Both Size and Costs.”

 

Downsizing and simplifying any entity is difficult and disruptive, and especially at a university where so many competing constituencies all demand to be heard. But it looks like Stanford’s trustees, senior administration and faculty leaders need to finally address these longstanding problems, as is happening elsewhere, and in significant and measurable ways.

 

Obituary -- May Merit at Cornell Rest in Peace (1868 to 2026)

 

Editor's note: The following parody was published a week before the release of the Cornell study discussed above and thus is not necessarily a comment, one way or the other, on the substance of that study.

 

Excerpts (some paragraphs combined):

 

“We are gathered here today to mourn the passing of Merit, late of Cornell University.

 

“Merit had a good run. For generations, Merit could be found wandering East Hill, occasionally trudging uphill through sleet at 8:00 a.m., carrying an engineering problem set it had not finished and wondering why it hadn’t just gone to Penn.

 

“Merit believed in an antiquated set of ideas: that excellence mattered; that effort should be rewarded; that professors knew more about their subjects than their students; that grades should reflect the quality of one’s work; and that admission to a great university should have something to do with being exceptionally good at something....

 

“Merit suffered another stroke. And through it all, Cornell has remained spectacularly good at studying Cornell.

 

“There are committees. Task forces. Working groups. Surveys. Climate assessments. Reports about reports. Committees charged with reviewing recommendations made by previous committees. Somewhere in Day Hall, there may currently be a working group studying whether the working groups adequately represent the lived experiences of members of other working groups. Merit requested a seat at the table. Its application was referred to committee....

 

“And so today we say goodbye.

 

“Let us remember Merit as it once was: demanding, imperfect, occasionally unfair, but stubbornly attached to the proposition that excellence exists and universities ought to recognize it. Merit believed some arguments are better than others. Some papers deserve higher grades than others. Some discoveries are more important than others. Some applicants are better prepared than others. 

 

“And, most scandalously, that identifying those differences is not a defect of education. It is one of its purposes....

 

“Rest in peace, Merit. You were demanding. You made people uncomfortable. You occasionally told very accomplished young people that they weren’t quite good enough yet. And that, perhaps, was your greatest sin.

 

“But somewhere tonight, in a library on East Hill, there is still a Cornell student studying long after everyone else has gone home. Not because a rubric celebrates their lived experience. Not because a committee told them they belong. And not because anyone promised them an A. They are doing it because they want to be excellent.

 

“Merit, it turns out, may not be entirely dead. Just don’t tell the administration.”

 

Full obituary by Cornell Alumni for Free Speech at Substack. 

 

From a Davidson Alum -- The Erosion of Free Speech and Critical Thinking in Higher Education 

Excerpts:

 

“My 40-year career has been focused on joyously and avidly preparing, interviewing, counseling, and placing college grads from across the U.S. into their best possible first jobs. Seeing a grad land a role that will challenge and inspire them is my passion. Things went great for the first 25 years of my career -- I went around the U.S. finding fabulous kids who hungered for the best opportunity to launch their career and follow their passion. 

 

“Starting around 2015, however, I first noticed a shift in capability and engagement in a growing percentage of the seniors with whom I interacted. By 2020, job retention among those hired in ensuing years was dramatically declining....

 

“I decided to do a great deal of research to determine the range of free speech at one specific college, Davidson College, but then compare it to all the colleges and universities across the U.S. I think telling a story in numbers is the easiest way to do that.

 

[Followed by specific data along with a discussion of various topics including this excerpt from a syllabus for a calculus class at Davidson:]

 

‘I am committed to creating and sustaining an inclusive and equitable learning environment for all students. I recognize racism, sexism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, and cisgenderism as systems of oppression that affect our whole society and communities like our classrooms. I acknowledge my own power and privilege as a white person, an aspect of my identity that has made success in mathematics easier for me than Black, Indigenous, and POC (BIPOC) individuals, who have been historically excluded from mathematics by racist policies and people. I commit to the ongoing and iterative work of developing personal and institutional practices of anti-oppression, including in what and how I teach.’

 

[And this excerpt from a syllabus for Spanish 101 at Davidson:]

 

‘As students in my class, I expect you to uphold the following:

 

1. Recognize and critically reflect on the benefits and costs of your privileges, in particular, your complicity in upholding systems of oppression;

    

2. Challenge yourself to be honest and open and take risks to hold you and your classmates accountable in addressing racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia head on.’ ...

 

“[On top of all of this,] there are at least 1,300 anonymous bias reporting systems across the U.S., provided by a company called Maxient (which Davidson uses). Maxient states that it is a tracking system for bias-related conduct and reports receiving over 7,000 reports daily from its client schools.” ... 

 

[Followed by a discussion of the cost of tuition, grade inflation, increasing levels of unemployment of college graduates and related issues.]

 

Full text by Connie Buehler, chair of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA) and also a board member of Davidsonians for Freedom of Thought and Discourse.

 

Editor’s note: As is the case with Davidson, Stanford has long been using the Maxient system and which, in turn, raises numerous issues still to be addressed. See, for example, “Stanford’s Computerized Case Management System for Student Behavior” at our Stanford Concerns webpage including a discussion of how reports are regularly collected, even anonymously, and then automatically cross-referenced with other students and events; how computerized email and other messages are regularly sent to students, including we believe in the case that led up to Stanford student Katie Meyer’s suicide; the lack of disclosure to students and others about how this automated system operates; the lack of disclosure to students of their rights under federal (FERPA) and state laws; and other ongoing concerns.

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

Stanford Is Tied for #5 in U.S. News' 2027 National Rankings

 

Full list at U.S. News: #1 MIT; #2 Princeton; #3 Harvard; #4 Yale; #5 Caltech and Stanford; #7 Penn; #8 Duke; #9 Chicago, Johns Hopkins and Northwestern; #12 Columbia and Dartmouth; #14 Carnegie Mellon and Cornell; #16 Brown, Rice, Vanderbilt and WashU; and #20 UC Berkeley, UCLA and Notre Dame.

 

College Is Coming Apart

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Full op-ed by WashU Prof. Ian Bogost at The Atlantic: “College in America makes two promises. On the one hand, college is a credentialing service: It awards a degree that affirms knowledge and sends a graduate into a career. On the other hand, college is a coming-of-age service. It forms identity through social exploration and intellectual development. It is the American ideal for how a young person figures out who they are. Partying, drinking, Greek life, sports, and other forms of college life always risked undermining the educational project -- and vice versa. But the two categories coexisted well enough. Now two things that got packaged together as ‘college’ have begun to unbundle and disperse.”

 

The Tech Elite Is Funding an Alternative to College

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Full article at WSJ: “‘The idea is to create an AI-native education offering so that these students can be ready for jobs at the top leading tech companies, or to start their own tech company,’ says [Gagan Biyani, co-founder of the ed-tech platform Udemy]. ‘In the modern world, knowing how to build and ship things is even more important than it’s ever been.’”

 

AI is Hurting Students’ Ability to Think -- It’s the Illusion of Learning

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Full op-ed at Washington Post: “As more college students get help from rapidly improving large language models, faculty members worry they are missing out on the struggles required for real learning.”

 

When College Sports Stop Being College Sports

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Full op-ed at James Martin Center: “UNC’s increasingly professional athletic model shows how NIL and revenue sharing are reshaping college athletics.” See also “Colleges Pay Athletes, Now Teach Them How to Manage the Money” at Inside Higher Ed.

  

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.

 

The Human Brain Is Now Believed to Be Two Separate Organs

 

Researchers Create Advanced Model for Studying Brain Development and Disorders

 

Stanford Experts Weigh the Risks of AI, the Rules and the Race Ahead

 

Archive of Female WWII Photographer Agnes Pickering Comes to Hoover

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