What is college for and why should the public have confidence that it will fulfill this mission?

In College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Columbia University historian Andrew Delbanco tries to answer the first part of this question, arguing that higher education serves three purposes. The first is economic: providing individuals with marketable skills. The second is civic: cultivating what he calls a “well-functioning bullshit meter” that inoculates people against specious arguments. The third is personal: developing an inner life rich enough that, as former Barnard College president Judith Shapiro puts it, “the inside of your head is an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.”

The public broadly endorses each of these purposes. According to a 2025 poll conducted by New America, the vast majority of Americans said colleges should equip students with the necessary skills to succeed in their chosen fields (96%), develop their critical thinking (93%), prepare them as informed citizens (91%), and expose them to diverse ideas (84%).

Yet recent surveys show that the same public doesn’t think colleges and universities are fulfilling this mission. There are a number of reasons for this loss of trust, but one underexamined factor is a lack of clarity among the public about just what universities are and aren’t accomplishing. Indeed, higher education is now publicly accountable for only the economic component (i.e. will my degree help me find a job in my chosen field?) of its broader mission. 

But while prospective students can compare nearly every school in the country on graduate earnings and debt through the College Scorecard, no comparable resource exists for civic and formative outcomes. The lack of data is surprising because colleges and universities routinely promise to cultivate critical thinking, foster intellectual humility and prepare students to engage across ideological and other differences. But a prospective student currently has no way of assessing whether a school’s graduates leave campus better on any of these crucial formative dimensions than when they arrived.

Transparency about economic outcomes cannot underwrite confidence in the whole enterprise as long as civic and formative promises remain unverifiable. What the Scorecard really proves then is that standardized, mandatory public reporting can render at least part of higher education’s mission legible to the public. But if colleges and universities want confidence to extend beyond their economic mission, they will need to make their civic and formative missions publicly accountable as well. 

Make the Curriculum Verifiable

If colleges and universities are truly serious about civic formation and exposure to diverse perspectives, their curricula should make those commitments clear. Currently, many do not. In one analysis of general education requirements at 120 nationally prominent schools, none required students to take economics and only 15% required them to study U.S. government or American history. But 51% mandated that students complete diversity, equity, and inclusion coursework. This particular curricular balance is difficult to reconcile with the claim that preparing students for citizenship is a central institutional priority.

The same problem appears within courses themselves. While colleges and universities say they teach students to engage critically with competing arguments, course content does not always bear that out. A recent analysis of millions of syllabi from the Open Syllabus Project, for example, found that on contested issues such as criminal justice, the Israel-Palestine conflict and abortion students are often assigned readings that reflect a narrow range of left-wing perspectives and do not engage with scholarly counterarguments. Not every class needs to stage an artificial debate around every question, of course, but institutions claiming to cultivate intellectual breadth should be able to show how and where that breadth is appearing in the curriculum.

The first step toward fixing this is to mandate a broadly defined, civic education course covering American constitutional government, the history of the American political tradition, and basic economic principles. Requirements alone, however, are not enough. Syllabi for courses used to satisfy these requirements should be publicly accessible. Outsiders should be able to determine whether schools that promise civic formation actually require civic learning, whether courses advertised as exposing students to diverse perspectives actually do so, and whether curricular reforms announced by campus leaders or state legislatures actually reach the classroom.

To be clear, these reforms should not be interpreted as a license to micromanage every course or prescribe a single canon for every campus. Instead, these changes should be narrowly focused on making the civic curriculum answerable to the public purposes universities already claim to serve.

Measure What Colleges Claim To Produce

It is worth, however, being very candid about the limits of curricular reform. As American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Samuel Abrams has recently argued, gains in civic knowledge (i.e. the growing percent of Americans who can correctly identify the three branches of government) have not been matched by improvements in civic formation (i.e. the small and declining share of Americans who can productively engage across difference and reason in good faith). Changing general education requirements and publishing course syllabi are the easiest part of reforming higher education. Verifying that a school requires civic coursework tells the public what is taught but nothing about whether students were actually transformed by it.

Colleges and universities must also, therefore, measure and report on the outcomes of their civic and formative efforts. Admittedly, civic and formative outcomes are harder to gauge than graduation rates, eventual earnings, or student debt. But colleges and universities are better equipped than almost any other institution to meet that challenge. After all, they employ faculty who specialize in survey research, measurement, and statistical analysis; administrators experienced in standardized reporting; subject review boards to ensure ethical data collection; and communications teams capable of explaining results to the public.

And, they would not have to start from scratch. Over the past several decades, higher education has developed a substantial assessment infrastructure devoted to tracking formative educational effects. Some tools, such as the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP), track students’ experiences and educational development at scale. Others, including the Wabash National Study, The American Association of Colleges and Universities’ VALUE rubrics, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), measure outcomes such as critical thinking and civic-related gains. More recently, Harvard’s Academic Flourishing Initiative has developed and tested a survey instrument designed to tap dimensions of meaning, character, and intellectual formation among undergraduates.

While these efforts show rigorous measurement of civic and formative outcomes is possible, they have not accumulated into anything like the kind of public accountability system that tracks the economic mission. For instance, NSSE results typically belong to the school that pays for them and are rarely disclosed in standardized form. CIRP functions primarily as an internal research instrument rather than as a public-facing accountability tool. 

The Wabash National Study last completed its longitudinal collection in the early 2010s, and VALUE rubrics are adapted for use and scored by each individual school, making them useful for campus assessments but limiting their value as a common public benchmark. The CLA, for its part, has only been voluntarily adopted among a select group of schools and so yields nothing close to a comprehensive picture of learning across colleges and universities. Despite a considerable effort at measurement, in other words, prospective students still cannot compare their expected civic learning gains or indicators of intellectual formation across campuses.

What’s missing is a centralized, public reporting system built on open science principles. Colleges and universities should preregister what they will measure, which students they will include, how the data will be analyzed, and what results they will publish. Doing so would make it far harder to redefine success after the fact or selectively report only flattering findings. Schools should, of course, be free to add mission-specific measures to their data collection efforts, but a small set of common questions should be mandated so that institutional strengths and weaknesses become visible and, more importantly, so that schools can begin to learn from one another.

There is no reason this has to be a government undertaking. In fact, a federal mandate may do more harm than good by inviting politically driven standards and by raising the stakes in ways that intensify the temptation that comes with the imposition of any measurement scheme to focus on what is tested rather than on what ultimately matters.

Higher education’s economic mission is surrounded by an accountability infrastructure because public legitimacy came to require it. Its civic and formative missions have remained largely exempt from comparable scrutiny because they are inherently harder to measure.

The most credible approach, therefore, would be led by a consortium of colleges and universities themselves or an independent nonprofit clearinghouse modeled on how institutions currently pool data through bodies like NSSE. This approach, of course, would not be easy to implement. It would require coordination across disparate institutions, agreement on shared standards, and a willingness to accept a form of public scrutiny that many campuses have long sought to avoid. 

But the alternative is continued drift in a system that does little to improve public confidence. Imperfect measurement is better than no accountability at all, and the time for deferring reforms has passed.

Public reporting would also reshape how excellence in higher education is evaluated. Conventional judgments of “quality” are heavily influenced by what is easiest to measure (e.g. selectivity, graduation rates, earnings, debt, etc.). As Brendan Case and Tyler VanderWeele have recently pointed out in an article in The Harvard Crimson, standard rankings largely omit the broader outcomes colleges and universities promise to deliver. Schools that excel at civic learning or intellectual formation currently have no way to make that excellence legible to prospective students, policymakers, or to the public more broadly. 

Standardized public reporting would change that. Without comparable data on these dimensions, however, the prestige system will continue to reward the outcomes it can measure and ignore the ones it cannot.

What Trustworthiness Requires

There is a difference between earning public trust and establishing institutional trustworthiness. Trust is an attitude that is shaped by what institutions do but also by polarization, media environment, and forces well beyond any single institution's control. Trustworthiness is more directly within institutions' reach: It belongs to those that verifiably do what they claim they will do. The reforms proposed here cannot guarantee that Americans will trust higher education, but they can help ensure that colleges and universities deserve that trust.

This distinction matters because distrust of higher education is often dismissed within the academy as a problem caused by conservatives. This deflects from the more fundamental question facing higher education, which is why anyone, regardless of their ideology, should trust an institution that rarely provides outsiders with enough evidence to judge whether it is fulfilling its own promises. When curricular commitments are difficult to verify, syllabi are inaccessible, and civic learning is not systematically measured, skepticism is predictable and hard to dismiss.

These reforms are not about winning back the support of conservatives. They are about giving institutional legitimacy a defensible foundation for people from across the political spectrum. Regardless of whether they move survey numbers, institutions that claim to form citizens and prepare students for democratic life owe the public evidence that proves those claims.

Nor do these reforms impose a single telos on higher education. Civic formation can coexist with other educational purposes rather than displacing them. What’s more, they do not invite federal coercion. In fact, the most credible answer to looming external interference is internal action that makes such coercion less necessary.

Until recently, higher education received the kind of trust almost no other institution had, namely, trust based on deference to prestige and, at least on its civic and formative claims, largely insulated from public verification.

Higher education’s economic mission is surrounded by an accountability infrastructure because public legitimacy came to require it. Its civic and formative missions have remained largely exempt from comparable scrutiny because they are inherently harder to measure, because the federal government has not compelled colleges to report on them the way it has compelled reporting on economic outcomes, and because the public has long simply taken universities at their word. If trust, let alone trustworthiness, is to be restored, that exemption is no longer sustainable.

We May Not Like What We See

What will be revealed when formative measurement does break into public view may not please supporters of higher education. For example, in their book Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa used data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment to show that a large share of more than 2,300 undergraduates across two dozen schools showed little improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or written communication during their first two years of college. 

But while the book provoked substantial debate within higher education, it failed to produce a durable apparatus for assessing formative or civic outcomes. Indeed, 15 years later, the CLA remains voluntary and there is no centralized public database, website, or dashboard that publishes scores across colleges and universities.

Work emerging from Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program also shows what more serious measurement has the potential to reveal. In early analyses of “student formation” measures, Ivy League scores on meaning, character, intellectual formation, and the capacity to work across differences were not especially impressive despite the schools’ dominance on more conventional measures of academic quality.

These are the kind of findings that have the potential to build the foundation for institutional trustworthiness. They subject colleges and universities to a serious, repeated, public test against the ideals they claim to serve, and they illuminate patterns that a focus on economics alone can obscure. But reporting one-off survey results is not the same as building a consistent accountability system. Higher education now has the tools to make evidence of this kind routine and comparable. Colleges and universities should take the initiative for this work themselves rather than leaving outsiders to assemble it piecemeal.

Until recently, higher education received the kind of trust almost no other institution had, namely, trust based on deference to prestige and, at least on its civic and formative claims, largely insulated from public verification. The 2026 Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education report, more than any other development in recent years, signals that this era of deference is over. The only question now is whether universities will build the infrastructure that trustworthiness requires or have others impose it on them.