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More than three-quarters (77 percent) of Americans think that college is unaffordable, and 65 percent go further in describing it as “prohibitively expensive.” Only 36 percent of adults think that higher education is “fine how it is,” though 75 percent still believe that college provides a positive return on investment. These numbers speak to the perception of an affordability crisis for a service that most people still think is very much worth pursuing. In this kind of situation, it should be unsurprising that concrete proposals for lowering the prohibitive barriers to accessing a perceived social good should be very popular.
Whatever you find odious about the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” it proposes precisely this: a five-year tuition rate freeze and free tuition for any undergraduate pursuing hard science programs at universities with an endowment of at least $2 million per undergraduate student. These seem like fine ideas (though the latter applies only to a handful of universities), and given the statistics above, they are also most likely very popular ideas. And I find it near impossible to disagree with this statement from the compact: “Universities have a duty to control their costs, including by eliminating unnecessary administrative staff, reducing tuition burdens, engaging in transparent accounting and regular auditing for misuse of funds, and cutting unnecessary costs.”
No university has yet, as of this writing, accepted the compact, and many are making a show of rejecting it. The mainstream press is framing the whole matter as an attempt by the Trump administration to impose “conservative ideas” on universities. The American Council on Education, in a joint statement with other major higher education associations, criticizes the compact as representing “excessive federal overreach and regulation,” an attack on “freedom of expression,” and even a misguided material proposition: “It will not assist in expanding social and economic mobility for all of our students.”
The question that naturally follows from this statement is simple: Then what will? The Trump administration has offered a particular proposal for reining in the costs of college. It is not an irrational proposal; indeed, it seems quite sensible, but perhaps there are better policy alternatives. If universities think that is the case, and if they also don’t want to seem coldly unconcerned with what is for many families and students a pressing economic concern, then it also makes sense to have a concrete counterproposal for lowering the costs of higher education.
Instead, universities have largely touted what they have already done or are continuing to do to ensure affordability. Brown University replied that it “continue[s] to be responsive to concerns about affordability and access,” citing its growing financial aid budget, loan-free financial aid packages for undergraduates and special initiatives for rural students and veterans. Brown’s 2025–26 tuition is $71,700 per year, up from $62,304 in 2021–22.
The University of Southern California replied that it is “diligently working to … control tuition rates.” Its 2025–26 tuition is $73,260, up from $61,503 in 2021–22. Tuition this academic year at the University of Virginia, which “will continue to work to … ensure affordability,” is $16,258 for in-state College of Arts and Sciences enrollees; it was $14,188 in 2021–22.
As the tuition rates rise, the universal response has been: We’re already doing the thing that you want us to do. Of course, these universities could reply that their tuition increases are not even keeping up with inflation, but doing so would only underline the degree to which they see their product as a commodity like any other. It is not, and it is not perceived by the public as such.
For institutions already stereotyped as insulated in their “ivory towers,” these responses to the compact on the question of financial responsibility can only come across to a frustrated public as callously out of touch, and bordering on cynical and gaslighting. While some celebrate the rejection of the compact as “bucking Trump’s authoritarian incursions,” this is a win for the Trump administration, and only further pretext for intervening in a system clearly unable to recognize its own problems.
Of course, there are a whole host of reasons to reject other parts of the compact. As with so much the Trump administration has put out, they’ve worded much of it in such a way as to put universities in a double bind. There is no way, for instance, that any university will or should commit to the following: “Institutions commit to defining and otherwise interpreting ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘woman,’ and ‘man’ according to reproductive function and biological processes.” In addition to being the kind of thing that could not practically be enforced without gross intrusion on the private lives of students, it’s also just out of line with public opinion. Fifty-eight percent of Americans support protections for transgender people in hate crime laws, and in order for them to be protected, they of course need to be recognized as existing in the first place.
But these indefensible bits of the compact are paired with statements like the following, which give pause to even the most Trump-hating of liberals: “Women’s equality requires single-sex spaces, such as bathrooms and locker rooms, and fair competition, such as in sports.” Here only 31 percent of Americans support allowing “transgender people to use bathrooms that match their gender identity” and only 19 percent support “allowing transgender athletes to play on sports teams that match their gender identity.” On this and many other issues addressed in the compact, the Trump team has carefully crafted a document that makes universities look out of touch with popular opinion if they accept it or if they reject it.
To my mind, the solution here is simply to state very clearly which parts of the compact a university supports and which it doesn’t. Perhaps a university wishes to take a position out of line with public opinion, which is fickle and often moves quite quickly on hot-button cultural issues. That’s fine, but if it does, it should have enough confidence in its decision to defend it plainly. Instead of issuing vague and moralistic press releases, universities should do what they claim to teach their students, which is to critically analyze the faults of the Trump compact, to affirm clearly what is correct in it and to suggest alternatives in cases where the solution to a real problem is lacking.
The best response to the compact so far came from the University of Pennsylvania, which took the time to break down its areas of alignment and areas of concern. Effective this academic year, Penn expanded its financial aid awards, excluding the value of the primary family home from asset calculations and raising “the income threshold for families eligible to receive full tuition scholarships from $140,000 to $200,000 with typical assets.” Still, Penn’s tuition jumped from $53,166 in 2020–21 to $63,204 in 2025–26, and its average aid package still leaves students on the hook for about $22,000 per year of the total cost of attendance. Many universities have made very recent steps toward making college more affordable. They must describe what actual changes they have made and specify further ones to bring down the costs of college.
If anything, universities should go further in attempting to outdo the compact by pushing for free college for all and putting the onus of addressing the affordability crisis back on the Trump administration by insisting on the need for student debt cancellation. We can admit that past policies have made a social good prohibitively expensive, that such policies have saddled many people with life-altering debt, and that universities and government both must work together to solve the higher education crisis.
Universities cannot afford to further lose the public with only hand-wavey gestures on this issue, essentially ceding it to the right. The Trump compact lays down a gauntlet. Not recognizing it as such is a grave political mistake. Universities have the resources, both materially and intellectually, to rebut the compact with a clear plan of their own, but not if they reject the idea that there is a problem here to begin with.
