A Yale report blamed universities for declining public trust. Princeton professors are divided.

Grade inflation, the suppression of free speech, and an unclear admissions process: Yale University has recently released a report that publicly addressed what a faculty committee found to be shortcomings at Yale and across higher education — issues on which Princeton professors remain divided.

The report, written by an ad-hoc committee of 10 professors at Yale, charged the Ivy League university with being at least partially responsible for declining public trust, and listed 20 recommendations for the school ranging from changing their mission statement to increasing transparency around their admissions processes. On Thursday, Yale narrowed its mission statement in line with the report’s recommendation.

The Yale report was published on April 10 after a year-long investigation conducted by the committee into “the problem of trust declining in higher education institutions.” The report was commissioned by Yale President Maurie McInnis in April 2025, less than a year after her appointment as university president. Regarding the finding that Yale should take responsibility for the role it has played in deteriorating public trust, McInnis wrote in a statement, “I accept this judgment fully.”

Dean of the College Michael Gordin and multiple Princeton professors sat for interviews with The Daily Princetonian to discuss the Yale report and what, if anything, it could mean for Princeton. 

The report

At its core, the Yale report centers around the question of declining public trust. Princeton politics professor Jan-Werner Müller defines trust as an act that requires competence, the ability to carry out the task, and goodwill, meaning positive intent. Transparency, Müller believes, removes the need for trust. 

“When you read some of the conclusions in the Yale report about the need for more transparency, which I’m not against, it misses the point,” Müller told the ‘Prince.’ “If you have full knowledge of what’s going on, you don’t need trust.” 

A Gallup poll cited by the report found that trust in higher education has dropped drastically in the past decade, though most other American institutions mentioned in the poll also saw some level of decreased public confidence.

In an interview with the ‘Prince,’ Gordin expressed skepticism that universities were largely responsible for reduced trust in higher education.

“Given that there’s this large-scale decline of trust, it seems like something broader might be going on that cannot entirely be laid at the feet of the institutions,” Gordin said. 

He expressed his belief that the report makes unsubstantiated assumptions, including that implementing their recommendations could reverse the problem of declining public trust in higher education institutions, and that these institutions are responsible for the problem in the first place.

“Even if it were the case that the things they identified are the reasons why trust went down in higher education, it’s not obvious that undoing them would restore the trust,” Gordin said. 

Other Princeton faculty members further questioned the assumption that universities are responsible. 

“The major drivers that they identify — admissions, financial aid — are more or less constants,” politics professor Charles Beitz GS ’78 said. “They’ve been around for a long time, but the problem [the Yale report] is addressing is a change.”

The report did not mention federal attacks on higher education. University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 has been outspoken on this issue, having written an op-ed and participated in a New York Times podcast on academic freedom. 

Faculty from Princeton and Yale interviewed by the ‘Prince’ disagreed on the extent to which the report should have addressed the external factors, such as political influence, that impact sentiments towards higher education institutions. 

“It’s also important to remember that distrust doesn’t arise in thin air or out of nothing. Parts, not all, but parts of the American Right have run campaigns against universities for many, many decades,” Müller said. “It is a mistake to simply assume that public opinion is a given.”

“They simply decided to not address the fact that we’re faced with the most serious attack on universities in the history of this country, as if that was simply not happening,” he added. “In and of itself, it can be read as evidence that intimidation is working, that they were so afraid to even bring this up.” 

Over the past year and a half, various higher education institutions including Princeton have lost millions in federal research funding amid criticism by the federal government for diversity, equity, and inclusion policies along with insufficient efforts to address antisemitism on campus.

Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale who was on the committee that composed the report, felt that addressing the current political environment was not within the report’s scope.

“Certainly everyone’s aware of the news cycle, the changing relationship with the federal government, but it really wasn’t the focus of what we were doing as a committee,” Gage told the ‘Prince.’

Some Princeton professors agreed that the report might not have been the place to include findings of how other groups might be impacting public views. 

“If I were a member of that Yale committee, what I would think is that there’s nothing that Yale can do to make that go away,” Beitz said. 

The recommendations in the report, ranging from grade inflation reduction measures to clarity around admissions processes and financial aid, were met by varying degrees of acceptance and skepticism. 

“The vast majority of the recommendations resonated with me, and I thought they would make Princeton a better place, so I think that we should seriously consider each of the recommendations in the report,” economics and public affairs professor Owen Zidar told the ‘Prince.’

“I know that many of my colleagues and I would disagree with both the specific, large-scale recommendations, and with whether those recommendations are tailorable to institutions that are not Yale,” Gordin said.

Transparency around admissions and financial aid

Yale and Princeton both use a “holistic approach to admissions,” in which admission officers use personal and contextual information to help assess applicants, according to their websites. The report found Yale’s approach to often be “subjective and hard to explain.” The report recommended the school publicly articulate their priorities when weighing one candidate against another.

Zidar expressed that admissions is perceived as a “mysterious process.”

“My sense is there are a lot of advantages of different layers, and some of them might be in the institution’s interest, but we could do a lot more to make it a bit more transparent, and I think that would help restore trust,” he told the ‘Prince.’

“I am not surprised that students don’t understand the criteria for admissions, but what’s important is that we, every year, have a class of great students at this university, and the admissions office is doing their job,” Gordin, who oversees undergraduate admission and financial aid within his role as Dean of the College, said. 

The Yale report recommends decreasing the influence that athletic, legacy, and donor and University-affiliated family status have on a student’s likelihood of acceptance. At Princeton, recruited athletes are identified as potential admits by coaches of individual sports, and legacy status is considered as a “plus factor amongst similarly qualified applicants.” A 2024 press release by Princeton clarified that “all but about 30 a year” of alumni children would have been accepted without consideration of legacy status. 

“I think it would be bad policy for an institution to play a varsity sport and then run admissions in such a way that we always lose the games we play,” Beitz said. “There are prestigious institutions in the United States that simply don’t do legacy admissions, and they don't seem to suffer for it.”

Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Karen Richardson ’93 previously estimated that around half of rejected applicants would be qualified to attend Princeton.

This means, however, that the other half of applicants are not considered to be prepared for Princeton.

“That’s 18,000 people who ought not to have to waste their time and anxiety on applying to a place where they have no chance of getting in,” Beitz said. “We know that test scores are pretty crude measures of people’s academic aptitude, we know that high school grades and rank in class are also pretty crude, so I think the question about the Yale recommendation is whether there’s a good way to operationalize [baseline admissions standards].”

Zidar expressed support for raising the minimum standards for applicants in the athletics, legacy status, and donor and University-affiliated family categories. He also raised the concern that applicants may be confused by the difference between the sticker price and cost of attendance factoring in financial aid.

“The FAFSA forms and all this stuff, people just find it very confusing, and if you just say, ‘Look, if you make less than X you’re gonna have a full ride,’ that can be very clear,” Zidar said. “We’ve done some of these things, and Princeton’s been a leader in terms of pushing accessibility towards a broader set of people, but generally that's something where more clarity could be helpful.”

The report found that there was indeed a gap between the public’s perception of the cost of attending top institutions and the average cost including financial aid. According to Müller, this can lead some to question whether the system is “rigged.”

“No disrespect to our communications department here, but I think in general, it’s not a crazy thing to say that universities have not done a good job in addressing the wider public,” Müller said. “Now, granted, it’s not easy, because there are a lot of people out there who are not exactly neutral observers, but who have a clear anti-university agenda, who are in the business of radically simplifying things.”

Gordin argued that the University’s tuition and financial aid system is not confusing.

“I don’t feel that our pricing is unclear and our financial aid program is clearly more generous than basically any other institution in the country that I know of, and certainly more than our Ivy plus peers,” Gordin said. 

Shared governance 

The report discusses the growth of non-academic administrative functions as an area of opacity, and recommends that the school establish formal methods of collaboration between the faculty and their board of trustees. 

“Over the last couple of decades, in many institutions, faculty has lost influence, [and] administrators have gained influence,” Müller said. “It’s of course double-edged, because, to be very fair, many faculty are also fairly content, in general, with not having to be more involved in governance, because they want to do their research, they want to be left alone.”

Some faculty are growing frustrated by what they perceive as a growing bureaucracy at Princeton.

“The red tape and bureaucratic growth [have] really gotten out of control broadly across higher ed but including at Princeton; it just takes a lot longer to get things done,” Zidar said. 

Princeton faculty disagreed on potential solutions to what some see as a problem of diluted influence.

“I think faculty don’t have a very strong voice in decisions that are actually made at the higher level of the school, so one concrete thing I’d love to see is some faculty representation on the Board [of Trustees],” Zidar said. “As all these big strategic funding cuts and decisions are being made, I think having some views of people who are actually in the classroom, doing teaching, research is really essential.”

Beitz served as an academic dean at Bowdoin College for eight years, and said that he met regularly with trustees and senior officers in this role. He stated that he does not believe that adding faculty members to the Board would change the decisions made. 

“Trustees typically don’t operate at the level of detail of deciding how much we should increase the library budget, or how much we should increase the football budget, or how much we should invest in sociology,” he said. “They hire administrations to make recommendations.”

Free speech

The Yale report discussed a belief among conservatives that top universities “tend to exclude conservative intellectual traditions.”

Institutional research data shows that self-identified conservative undergraduates on Princeton’s campus report lower levels of comfort expressing their beliefs on campus than their more liberal peers. 

“There’s a differentiation between how conservative students feel about speaking their mind in class versus how they feel speaking their mind among their peers; they’re much more comfortable speaking in class,” Gordin said. “To the extent that there is self-censorship, I’m not sure that is a thing the administrators can or should address.”

“I have not seen evidence that persuades me that students are not getting the full spectrum of intellectual views in class,” Gordin continued. 

The Yale report brings up statistics of voter registration among professors. A 2020 survey found that the ratio of registered Democratic faculty to registered Republican faculty at Princeton was 40:1. 

Müller rejected the implication that a faculty of mostly registered Democrats significantly impacts teaching.

“The assumption that people teach their own beliefs, from my experience, it’s just not right,” he said. “How can it be so surprising that members of a university say ‘I have a problem with a party that is against the institution that I’m a member of, that I believe in.’”

“In so many departments, that’s completely irrelevant. It’s not like, ‘Oh, the physics department is really in trouble because there are only five Republicans in there,’” he continued. 

Grade inflation

In 2004, the University implemented a nonbinding cap on A-range grades in courses at 35 percent. Since this policy was rescinded in 2014, individual departments have been left to define their own standards.

Over the past several decades, grades at Princeton have been steadily rising, with two-thirds of undergraduate grades in the A-range during the 2024–25 academic year. While peer institutions are actively discussing grade deflation measures, Gordin made it clear that the University was not considering such changes. 

“There’s no grade deflation panel that has been impaneled in secret. We’re not having those discussions,” he said. 

“[If] the curriculum is just as rigorous, why should the grade matter? It kind of concedes the whole case, because it assumes that the rigor is a property of the content that floats free from the act of evaluation,” Yale law professor Sarath Sanga, who was on the faculty committee that produced the Yale report, said in an interview with the ‘Prince.’ 

“[Rigor is] established through the practice of distinguishing a correct derivation or mastery over a subject from mere adequacy,” Sanga added.

The Yale report recommended that the school implement a universal mean grade point average standard of 3.0, or another college-wide standard. 

“There are things that are negative about grade inflation, or grade compression … everybody has the same grades; employers don't love that, it’s very hard to award prizes, it’s very hard to award honors,” Gordin said. “Those things are true, but it’s not clear what a solution would be and whether the cost of a solution is worth it.” 

Many questioned the relationship between grade inflation and public trust in higher education institutions, as expressed in the Yale report.

“I honestly don’t know whether grade inflation influences public trust,” Beitz said. “Independently of the public trust issue, I think grade inflation at Princeton is really quite a serious problem … there’s a practical question of whether anything can be done about it.”

A 2014 faculty committee report that helped end Princeton’s 2004 “grade deflation” policy found that the A-range caps caused students to believe they were “competing for a limited resource of A grades,” with little effect on inconsistent standards between departments.

“I personally have not seen a lot of evidence that [grade compression] is really the thing that people are super concerned about,” Müller said. “I wouldn’t at all be against a wider discussion about this … I think it is healthier to have grades mean something.”

The Yale report at Princeton

Though members on the faculty committee who wrote the report focused their research on Yale specifically, some topics addressed, they say, may apply to other schools. 

“Our hope was that, while it was specific to Yale, there are lots of other institutions that might be interested in and grappling with some of the same issues that we were taking on. I think that other Ivy League and selective private universities probably have the most in common with some of the specifics of the report,” Gage said. 

“I think this is a really healthy exercise for any institution to undertake,” she added.

The Princeton administration has not yet announced plans to conduct a similar investigation.

“There are a lot of differences between the Princeton context and the Yale context, and between the Yale context and the rest of higher education that are important to keep in mind,” Gordin said. 

Devon Rudolph is the head Podcast editor and a senior News writer. She is from Fairfax, Va. She can be reached at devonr[at]dailyprincetonian.com.

Chris Braun contributed reporting.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.