The problems cited in the report will be familiar to readers of The Free Press, as they include nontransparent admissions standards, grade inflation, a culture that forces self-censorship, and outrageous tuition pricing. This year, George Washington University—hardly in the top tier of selective schools—started charging a sticker price approaching $100,000 a year for the privilege of studying there.

Those problems have been hanging over academia, and getting worse, for years. But a second strand of issues, though not stressed in the Yale report, concerns the rapid progress of artificial intelligence. To put it bluntly, the AIs know more than many professors, they do not tire of answering questions, they explain things clearly, and they keep unlimited office hours. They are also far cheaper and can organize a class syllabus and grade tests. So what exactly is higher education supposed to be providing us with?

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This should not come as any great surprise. In fact, you should expect many similar shutterings in the coming years.

It’s no secret that higher education is reeling. The litany of challenges is long. Among them: struggles over free speech, antisemitism, and ideological uniformity; President Donald Trump’s many attacks on the sector;, a replicability and peer review crisis in research, and declining public confidence in colleges.

Then there’s also student debt, a declining percentage of high school graduates enrolling in college, low graduation rates, increasing questions around a college education’s return on investment, and a free-for-all in college athletics.

I could go on. But there’s one piece of the puzzle that’s received relatively less attention, however: the fiscal health of many colleges themselves. To put it simply, a tremendous number of colleges and universities are on the fast path to insolvency, which stands to quickly transform not only America’s higher-education landscape but also the many communities built around these institutions.

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In 1950, the average GPA at Harvard College was 2.55, between a B− and a C+. But that norm has given way to one in which top marks are the norm, and any deviation from the top grade needs to be justified by professors pointing to some serious deficiency in students’ work. Today, the average GPA at Harvard is 3.8, between an A and an A−. Even when I was completing my PhD at Harvard about a decade ago, undergrads had the expectation that an A was the natural recompense for competent work. By all accounts, things have grown worse since.

For the past months, a band of courageous faculty members at Harvard have been trying to convince their colleagues to fix the problem. On Tuesday, however, that effort came to a standstill.

Here’s what happened: In February, a faculty subcommittee proposed a package of measures that would standardize grades across courses and limit how many students could obtain A’s. Instructors would be able to give A’s to no more than 20 percent of their students (though A− grades, notably, would still have been unlimited).

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Why? Because, according to the school, I had violated the administration’s values about LGBT inclusion—by reposting Brianna Wu, a trans woman, on X.

Let me explain what happened from the beginning.

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But as The Free Press’s Maya Sulkin reported last month, that pledge appears not to have been upheld. All four finalists under consideration for the Edward Said Professorship in Modern Arab Studies and Literature, a prominent position in the Middle East Studies department, had expressed overt animosity toward Israel.

Now, Columbia’s history department has made its choice. In a March 9 message that has not previously been reported, the selection committee “unanimously and enthusiastically” recommended Harvard professor Rosie Bsheer for the position.

Bsheer has a long history of anti-Israel activism. One year ago, she was removed as a leader of Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies for “insufficiently balanced” programming on Palestine. While she was associate director, the center hosted speakers who “appeared to justify Hamas’s actions” on October 7, 2023, according to Harvard’s antisemitism report. The Trump administration accused the center of fueling “antisemitic harassment” and reflecting “ideological capture.”

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The stern message from the United Auto Workers (UAW) was delivered to leaders of the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC), a union representing about 3,500 student workers, last month. Since then, SWC members have voted overwhelmingly in favor of authorizing a strike, but UAW officials have said that they will not allow it to happen or provide funding for a strike unless the students negotiate further with Columbia, according to internal union communications reviewed by The Free Press. SWC is a local branch of the UAW, which must green-light any strike.

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The union, representing about 3,500 student workers, has asked them to authorize a strike. The results of that vote could be announced as soon as Tuesday. If enough members vote yes, leaders of the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) could launch a walkout anytime.

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How do the students feel about this proposal? You will perhaps not be surprised to hear they are up in arms. While faculty, according to the campus paper, lent cautious support to the initiative, an overwhelming 84.9 percent of my peers “definitely” disagree with limiting A grades to 20 percent, according to a Harvard Undergraduate Association survey.

I’m among the minority who support the proposal. Let me explain why.

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After Columbia lost $400 million in federal funding over antisemitism allegations in 2025, it reached a settlement with the Trump administration. As part of the settlement, Columbia appointed a senior vice provost and a Regional Review Committee to ensure “balanced” curricula for the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies departments. Two of this committee’s members, Timothy Mitchell and Bruno Bosteels, signed an October 2023 letter describing Hamas’s October 7 attack as a response to Israel’s long-standing “crushing and unrelenting state violence.”

Part of Columbia’s announcement is the replacement for the Edward Said Professorship in Modern Arab Studies and Literature, previously held by Rashid Khalidi. Khalidi held the position from 2003 to 2024, and left citing disdain over the university’s shifting priorities. The author and historian described Hamas’s October 7 attacks as “inevitable,” and criticized the university’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance antisemitism definition, which he said “deliberately, mendaciously, and disingenuously conflates Jewishness with Israel,” making it “impossible” to teach without being accused of antisemitism.

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Almost a year later, the Department of Education is still open—and is getting even bigger. The new federal funding package Trump signed into law on Tuesday funds the agency at $79 billion for the current fiscal year, which ends September 30. That is an increase of $217 million from fiscal 2025, $12 billion more than the White House requested in May, and a win for Democrats in Congress who helped negotiate the deal.

“Congress will not abolish the Department of Education,” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, a retired preschool teacher who is the second-highest-ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said last week after the Senate passed a spending package that included the agency’s funding. The House approved the measure by a vote of 217–214 on Tuesday after a brief round of negotiations with Republican holdouts.

Trump signed 225 executive orders in 2025 and another 10 so far this year, compared with 220 during his entire first term. Getting rid of the Department of Education “would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” the president wrote in the order last March.

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The AMC 12, formally known as the American Mathematics Competition, had faced issues in the past with stolen exams. Last year, though, was different. It was not a question of a few leaked copies of tests passed from hand to hand a day before the competition. On Chinese sites like RedNote and WeChat, as well as Discord and even Reddit in the United States, copies of the yet-to-be-administered exams were openly for sale.

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The same tired arguments about the racism of meritocracy are still unconvincing and are still unsupported by data or evidence, yet tenaciously hang on like land acknowledgments, “hands up, don’t shoot” chants, and the idea that socialism will actually work this time.

No matter what happens to the New York City school system, which had 906,248 students during the 2024–25 school year and is the largest in the United States, Mamdani’s first month as mayor will be forever marred by the deaths of 16 people who “passed away outside during this brutal stretch of cold,” as he put it on Monday. The new mayor reversed a policy by predecessor Eric Adams that would have allowed the police to get the homeless inside. Mamdani’s brand of progressivism essentially handcuffed the police in order to “protect” the homeless from the very people who might have saved their lives.

About 18,000 elementary school students in the city are enrolled in G&T, with about 2,500 admitted for kindergarten each fall.

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But what does Qatar get in return for all that money?

Some extraordinary clues surfaced in a court order unsealed last month by the federal judge overseeing an antisemitism lawsuit against Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Yael Canaan, who studied architecture at the prestigious Pittsburgh university, alleges that she faced discrimination and harassment because she is Jewish and of Israeli descent. CMU has received $1 billion from Qatar and operates a campus near its capital, Doha. Canaan is represented by The Lawfare Project, a nonprofit that provides legal support for Jews who have experienced antisemitism.

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The monitor, Bart M. Schwartz, a veteran compliance consultant and the co-founder of Guidepost Solutions, was tasked with overseeing Columbia’s adherence to th…

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But last spring, longtime Cornell professor Eric Cheyfitz invoked a very different interpretation of this principle to justify kicking an Israeli Jew out of his “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance” seminar.

During the third meeting of the class, computer science PhD student Oren Renard raised his hand for the first time. It would also turn out to be the last.

When he was called on by Cheyfitz, Renard spoke briefly about the Gaza war. The student said that when Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals” two days after the October 7, 2023, attacks, he was talking about Hamas. Cheyfitz had claimed that Gallant was talking about all Gazans.

The next week, the professor asked Renard to talk to him after class. Renard was suspicious. He secretly pressed the record button on his cell phone. It was a fateful, freighted decision. Had he not done so, there would be no record of what happened next.

Cheyfitz told Renard that he was “necessarily suspicious, unfairly no doubt, of your presence in this course,” according to the recording. The professor added that Renard’s “conduct in the course has been fine so far, so I’m not complaining about you.”

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I am a senior at Brown University. Saturday night was a nightmare.

The day began normally. As I usually do on Saturdays, I slept in, then headed to our campus Chabad for lunch around 12:30 p.m. As always, the room was packed with about 30 people, and filled with love, warmth, and food. Our final exam period had just begun, and we commiserated about our studies and chatted about our plans for winter break.

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We’re proud to publish an exclusive, adapted excerpt from the book, answering an urgent question: Why, after generations of progress, are today’s children less intellectually capable than their parents? —The Editors

This might be one of the hardest truths today’s parents have to face:

Our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.

The daughter who once loved school, but now dreads it. The son who used to devour books, but now scrolls until midnight. Fading memory, slipping focus. Something is wrong, and many of us have felt it.

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On Monday morning, the House committee, led by Republican Tim Walberg of Michigan, requested from each school district “an anonymized chart of all complaints” of antisemitic incidents, and any documents, communications, or contracts related to antisemitism, Judaism, or Israel.

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Solve (10 − 2)(4 − 6x) = 0

California officials expect math students in public school to know the first answer by the end of second grade—and the second answer by the end of eighth grade. But when some incoming college students were asked these questions, about 20 percent could not correctly count the number of coins, and over 80 percent were unable to solve the equation.

A report released last week by the University of California San Diego, which has about 45,000 students and is one of America’s highest-ranked public universities, said that the number of entering first-year students whose math skills fall below middle-school level “increased nearly thirtyfold” from 2020 to 2025—to roughly one out of every eight new students.

The deterioration of basic academic preparation has left incoming students “increasingly unprepared for the quantitative and analytical rigor expected at UC San Diego.”

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This radical move, which gives new meaning to the word “independent,” has been made possible because of a $100 million gift from Jeff Yass—the largest donation since the university was founded.

Yass, the founder of the Philadelphia-based trading firm Susquehanna International Group, is not an alum of the school. Indeed, we have no graduates at all as yet. So why did he give this donation? He explains below. —Bari Weiss

I am giving $100 million to the University of Austin because the feedback mechanisms of higher education are broken.

Almost every system that works, works because of feedback. Evolution works because helpful mutations survive while harmful ones die off. Democracy works because voters support effective leaders and remove ineffective ones. Markets work because prices tell producers when to ramp up or scale back. Science works because the data from an experiment tells the scientist how likely their hypothesis is to be false.

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