Culture > Higher Education

The Ivy League’s Self-Inflicted Breakdown

New reports suggest that maybe the patient is starting to recognize that he has a disease.

Jay Rogers | April 29, 2026

Higher education in America has walked off a cliff, dragging public trust, fiscal sanity, and an entire generation’s economic mobility along for the ride.

I saw the warning signs from my own corner of California.  When I arrived in 1990, the state still rewarded work and aspiration.  Three decades later, I watch neighbors in Orange County send their kids to schools that cost a fortune and deliver ideology in place of skills.  The Yale faculty committee’s April 10, 2026 Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education reads like a coroner’s verdict on the Ivy League’s own corpse.  The 58-page document calls out skyrocketing costs, distorted admissions, free-speech theater, grade inflation, and governance that answers to activist faculty rather than students or taxpayers.  The report spares no one, least of all Yale itself.  Yet the deeper scandal is that elite schools spent decades earning public contempt.

I never needed a faculty senate report to confirm what I already knew.  As a father of three boys — one a West Point graduate, two still in college — I watched my oldest miss his high school graduation, senior prom, and final track season because schools shut down while union-protected teachers cashed paychecks from home.  My youngest grew quieter and more withdrawn when youth leagues went dark and neighbors refused to let kids play outside.  That was prime adolescence stolen from young men, who will carry those gaps into adulthood.  The same story played out coast to coast.  The National Assessment of Educational Progress long-term trend data for nine-year-olds showed the largest single-year drops in reading and math in the assessment’s history between 2020 and 2022.  States where teachers’ unions held the strongest grip — California and Illinois chief among them — posted the worst........

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