STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

August 24, 2026​​

​

U.S. Universities Are Losing Their Global Prominence

 

High costs, political attacks take a toll as fewer students come, top scholars leave

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“The nation was distracted by other things when a quiet warning sounded: Support was diminishing for American academic research that had led to breakthroughs and innovation.

 

“That familiar-sounding worry came not this year, but near the end of World War II, in a pivotal government study by the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development.

 

“The response then: Infusions of government cash that would propel the U.S. higher education system into international preeminence over the subsequent decades.

 

“American colleges and universities rose to the ranks of the best in the world. They attracted top scholars who won a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes. They helped drive the innovation economy. As trade deficits beset other industries, education became the sixth-largest U.S. services export. At their peak enrollment, international students brought in more than $40 billion a year.

 

“Now, as a new academic year begins, American dominance in higher education globally is incontrovertibly in decline, according to data, international rankings, and independent experts....

 

“It takes a while for all of these problems to trickle down, but they are beginning to trickle down,” said Eric Mlyn, a faculty fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University who studies academic freedom.

 

“Top scholars are leaving. Fewer international students are coming. U.S. universities are slipping in international rankings. And American universities have failed to keep pace as other countries pour resources into their higher education systems....

 

[Followed by discussion of these and related issues.]

 

“Chinese universities now hold seven of the top 10 places in the Leiden Rankings from the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, which ranks institutions based on the number of journal articles published by their faculties -- a seemingly arcane but consequential measure of academic productivity in which Harvard has fallen from first in the world to third.... 

 

“Seventy percent of Americans now say higher education in the United States is going in the wrong direction, up from 56 percent in 2020, according to Pew. Adults who went to college are more likely to say this than those who didn’t.

 

“That falloff in confidence began before the current political attacks and stems largely from people’s skepticism about what they’re getting for their money, Pew’s and other surveys show....

  

“U.S. higher education institutions ‘really are deep wells of talent. Their strengths are real,’ [Kumar Garig of Renaissance Philanthropy] said. But ‘we should not sleep on the fact that if we don’t adapt and navigate this moment, we’re going to wake up and all of the premier universities won’t be in the United States, and we’ll wonder how that happened.’”

 

Full article at Hechinger Report and as also published at Washington Monthly. 

 

See also our Stanford Concerns and our Back to Basics at Stanford webpages.

​

Dear Universities: If You Don’t Want to be Neutral, Admit It.

 

Plenty of schools have their own lenses. No need to hide the ball.

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“At many American universities, progressive assumptions seem embedded in the machinery of campus life.... Yet mission statements and promotional materials tend to describe the university’s purpose in nonpartisan terms. When studies show the dearth of right-leaning faculty, administrations typically insist this is just the result of neutral search processes. A gap has opened between the impartial, truth-seeking role universities claim for themselves and the policies they pursue.

 

“A Gallup poll from June showed public confidence in higher education dropping yet again. A viral article in the Atlantic [and excerpted in our Newsletter last week] by a former professor has set off alarms about the depth, and apparent hypocrisy, of progressive commitments at elite colleges. Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s recent call for universities to recommit themselves publicly to ‘rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service’ could be read as an effort to restore public trust by realigning what universities tell the public they stand for and what they do in practice....

 

“There is an ideal of the university, centered on open inquiry, that carries enormous prestige. In this model, truth is pursued impartially through reason and scientific inquiry. All ideas are welcome, but each requires evidence. Campus policies rest on excellence, humility, intellectual pluralism and the free exchange of ideas.

 

“But some universities depart from this ideal, and reasonably so. Religious colleges acknowledge that their search for truth is informed by faith.... At many elite universities today, a similar but unnamed dynamic is at work. Progressive assumptions influence admissions, hiring, curriculum and student life, but administrations are reluctant to admit it. Perhaps they are unwilling to forgo the prestige of open inquiry, and so hesitate to acknowledge the bet they are making against it.

 

“We propose that universities that are committed to progressive policies simply say so. They should tell students, faculty and the public that, like religious colleges, they have opted to teach and pursue knowledge through a particular lens: roughly, the lens of progressive politics.

 

“Such candor would provide answers to uncomfortable questions. Why are conservative thinkers scarce on many faculties and syllabi? Why do admissions and student-life policies seem to reflect particular theories of identity or equity? Why are some speakers shouted down but not others? Instead of insisting that these lopsided outcomes are the result of neutral academic judgment, universities could acknowledge the principles behind them....

 

“U.S. universities urgently need to reconcile themselves with the public they serve. Again, we hope they will do this by taking up the hard work of reforming their practices to better align with the ideal of nonpartisan truth-seeking. Many are doing so, and we applaud them.

 

“But for those who prefer to hunker down and defend their status quo, we propose this: If some universities want to be ideological, let them. They just need to admit it.”

 

Full op-ed by Brown U Prof. John Tomasi and Harvard Prof. Tyler VanderWeele at Washington Post.

 

‘Graduate Tax’ Hangs Over Generation of Workers in England

 

Excerpts:

 

“When it comes to student debt, Americans think they have it bad. By some metrics, things are pretty bad too in England, where higher education used to be considered a good deal.

 

“Graduates in England have among the highest levels of student debt in the developed world, with an average balance of more than $70,000 by the time they start repaying, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development....

 

“While lower-earning graduates don’t have to make any repayments, those who land jobs with salaries above a threshold, which starts at about $34,000, have to pay back 9% of everything they earn above that level -- an arrangement critics have dubbed the ‘graduate tax.’

 

“Although Britain’s capped tuition fees of roughly $13,000 a year sound modest to Americans, added living costs and compounding interest push total balances far higher.

 

“Six years after graduating from a four-year program with a chemistry degree, Alexander Chamberlain-Clay, a 28-year-old software engineer, owes about $110,000. That is up from an original balance of $74,000. His required monthly payment doesn’t cover the $500 added in monthly interest, causing his balance to balloon over time.”...

 

Full article at WSJ.

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

Pentagon Probes 30 U.S. Academic Institutions for Potential Ties to Adversaries

​

Full article at Defense Scoop. Note that Stanford is not on this list of 30 schools but apparently is subject to a separate inquiry, "Stanford Could Face DOJ Scrutiny Over Foreign Donations" at Stanford Daily and "U.S. Justice Department Official Flags Stanford University for Scrutiny Over Foreign Donations" at Straits Times.

 

America’s Colleges Are Hurtling Toward an Enrollment Cliff 

​

Full article at WSJ including graphs showing acceptance rates from 2006 to the present at the Ivies, other private universities including Stanford, public universities and others and showing increased competition among selective schools compared to dropoffs for all others: “In some parts of the country -- especially the Midwest and the Northeast -- the declines [in enrollments] have already begun.”

 

But see also “College Applications Are Up, Despite Questions About Higher Education” at Washington Post: “Some of the greatest interest comes from applicants from low-income households and those who would be the first in their families to go to college, representing an 8 percent and 6 percent increase in applications, respectively. Applications from both groups have steadily climbed over the past decade, according to Common App.”

And from our Newsletter last week, per the Chronicle of Higher Education Annual Almanac 2026-2027: "This was the first year that comprehensive enrollment data was able to give a sense of the impact of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Most institution types saw an increase in underrepresented minorities.... Nationwide, 

underrepresented minority enrollment increased 11 percent from the fall of 2022 to the fall of 2024. But nearly 70 percent of the most selective colleges -- those that admitted fewer than 15 percent of applicants -- saw the number of underrepresented minority students decline.”

​

British Kids Are Skipping Top Colleges for White-Collar Apprenticeships

​

Full article at WSJ: “College grads on both sides of the Atlantic are facing a challenging start to their careers, with job candidates finding themselves competing with AI for entry-level positions. For a large cohort of British high-school graduates, college no longer feels like a good deal. Now, a growing number of white-collar apprenticeship programs are offering high-school leavers another route into industries such as consulting, finance and law -- fields typically reserved for college graduates.”

 

5 Ways AI Is Cutting Into Students’ Ability to Learn

​

Full article at The 74: “A College Board survey last fall found that the share of high schoolers using [AI] for schoolwork had climbed to 84%, with about half using it to brainstorm, revise essays or research topics. A follow-up issued in December found that high-achieving students -- and those who are perhaps experiencing ‘senioritis’ -- are the most expansive users of AI.”

 

College Students Can’t Do Middle-School Math After Test-Blind Admissions -- UC Berkeley Professor

 

Full article at College Fix. See also “My Students Can’t Read” at Chronicle of Higher Education.

 

Dissident Dialogues -- Panel Discussion of Kathleen Stock, Steven Pinker, Greg Lukianoff and John McWhorter (video, 1 hour).

​

Full video at YouTube. Although this video is from two years ago, we recommend it as an important discussion of what continue to be current issues and is well worth watching.

 

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.

 

Solar Car Project Races Across America

 

Aging Brains Welcome Reinforcements from Outside Immune Cells

 

Could Bemotrizinol Change Sunscreen in the U.S.?

 

Shrinking the Fed’s Balance Sheet Is Easier Said Than Done

​

**********​​​​