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August 10, 2026

The Fifth Estate

What happened to the American university?

What Happened to the American University?

Once the envy of the world, higher education in the United States is now in a state of endless crisis.

Daniel Bessner

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Columbia University, March 2025.(Kena Betancur/Getty)

This article appears in the<br>September 2026 issue.

The American university is in crisis. Neither the public, the students, nor even the faculty believe in a system that was once the envy of the world.

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The lack of faith in universities is striking. According to Gallup, the portion of Americans who were “confident” in American higher education dropped from 57 percent to 42 percent between 2015 and 2025. Moreover, only 35 percent of US adults now say that college is “very important,” down from 70 percent in 2013. A poll by Pew likewise found that “7 in 10 Americans now say U.S. higher education is going in the wrong direction.”

Behind this general loss of confidence lie misgivings about specific issues. Pollsters for Pew have discovered that 79 percent of adults “say colleges are doing a fair or poor job of keeping tuition costs affordable,” while “about half or more give colleges and universities fair or poor ratings on preparing students for well-paying jobs in today’s economy (55%), providing financial help to students who need it (52%), and developing students’ critical-thinking and problem-solving skills (49%).”

Faculty morale is no better: As anyone employed at a US university will readily acknowledge, depression, even nihilism, among professors is real. It’s not for nothing that it is faculty themselves who have published books about higher education with titles like The Great Mistake and Poison Ivy. Both the public and the professors are convinced that something has gone terribly wrong with the American university.

There are various sources of this discontent. First, the labor structure of universities has been transformed from one defined by stable employment to one defined by gig work. A 2023 survey by the American Association of University Professors revealed that almost 70 percent of all US faculty held “contingent”—that is, part-time or adjunct—positions, up from 47 percent in 1987. Then there are the millions of former students who are struggling to pay back the debt they incurred while attending college or graduate school. As of early 2026, the total student-loan debt held by those educated at US universities was $1.833 trillion, with the “average public university student” borrowing $31,960 to get their degree. Finally, universities have become key sites in our never-ending culture war, which has made campuses hostile places for faculty and students, with the general public increasingly viewing them with suspicion. Even on the lists that American university administrators have long sought to dominate, US higher education is in decline. According to the 2025 Leiden Ranking, which rates universities by the number of publications they produced between 2020 and 2023, only one US university—Harvard—ranks in the global top 10. Among the rest, eight are Chinese universities and one is Canadian.

Having long sought to destroy the “radical” and “liberal” university, the right wing now smells blood. In the first year of his second term, President Donald Trump launched an attack on universities. On January 20, 2025—his first day in office—he signed Executive Order 14151, which focused on “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing.” On March 20 of the same year, he signed Executive Order 14242, which instructed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” Beyond these executive orders, the Trump administration also unilaterally eliminated billions of dollars in research grants that the federal government had earmarked for universities; deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to seize and arrest numerous student activists; revoked the visas of more than 8,000 international students, focusing especially on those connected to pro-Palestine protest movements; demanded that Columbia University place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under academic receivership; and, in exchange for federal funding, offered nine universities the opportunity to sign a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that promoted the teaching and research of identifiably “conservative ideas.” The modern American university system, which emerged in the period following...