“Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin, a Harvard alumnus, has given more than $500 million to his alma mater over four decades. Now he is pledging $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University.
It is the largest individual gift in the history of American higher education and includes $2 billion for a new Miami campus that CMU says will invert the traditional higher education model, organizing learning around societal challenges rather than majors.
That's exactly what higher education needs: investment in new, competitive experiments.
Higher education is failing students, and the American people are fed up. Seven in 10 Americans, including majorities from both parties, say higher ed is headed in the wrong direction, according to a recent Pew Research poll. Yet in 2025 donors gave nearly $80 billion to colleges and universities. Harvard raised $1.3 billion.
No matter how much money donors throw at the problem, classroom instruction at elite institutions keeps getting worse. In a 2024 survey at Harvard, 45% of students said they were reluctant to share views on controversial topics in class.
Sixty percent of grades at Harvard College were A's in the 2024-25 academic year, up from 24% in 2005-06. That doesn't sound like an environment of rigorous debate and scholarship.
Under pressure from powerful critics, elite universities have begun to make changes such as adopting statements of institutional neutrality, capping grade inflation, promising to protect open inquiry and establishing civics centers. These changes are cosmetic.
Undergraduate education comprises three elements: students, teachers and classes. If admissions policies, faculty and curriculum don't improve, administrators haven't changed anything. They've maintained the status quo while trying to deceive the public and get critics off their backs.
For all the Trump administration's efforts to use federal funding as leverage, elite universities are too wealthy to feel significant pressure from withheld government subsidies. Harvard last reported its endowment at $59.9 billion. In fiscal 2025 the return on the endowment was 11.9%, and the university paid almost no taxes. Administrations at these schools whine about funding cuts because they feel entitled to taxpayer money, but they aren't hurting.
For the same reason, private donors can't make much of a difference at these schools. Donations to Ivy League schools get you invitations to cocktail parties and, for the big shots, your name on a building where activist professors who hate you teach classes in which you are the villain.
Philanthropists can still make a difference in higher education. They can do so by investing in alternative institutions and new competitors, as Mr. Griffin has at CMU and I have at the University of Austin. If 20% of the $80 billion donated to higher ed went to experimental and disruptive ventures, that would be about $16 billion a year -- enough to begin transforming the landscape.
Bolstered by these donations, new universities would flourish and compete with the Ivy League for the best faculty and the brightest students. Their graduates would compete for the best jobs. Competition would force existing universities to adapt faster and more comprehensively than any direct donation or withheld government funding could.
We've seen this work before. Johns Hopkins opened in 1876 and, funded by a $3.5 million bequest, was America's first research university. By 1889 it had produced more Ph.D.s than Harvard and Yale combined did during the same period.
Harvard's president at the time, Charles Eliot, later admitted that his university's graduate school "did not thrive, until the example of Johns Hopkins forced our Faculty" to invest in it. The University of Chicago and Stanford also began as upstarts funded by private fortunes. Today they are among the world's best universities.
Donating to alternative institutions benefits everyone who cares about higher education. That includes people like me -- who believe elite universities are culturally malignant rackets that should be put out of business -- and alumni of these universities who love them, believe they are great and want them to be greater. If they are in fact great, a little healthy competition will make them even better.
Whether the goal is to make the best better or to beat them, philanthropists who want to improve higher education should follow Mr Griffin's lead. Welcome disruption. Fund competitors and new institutions.
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Mr. Yass is cofounder of Susquehanna International Group.” [1]
1. Pouring Money Into the Ivy League Won't Solve Its Problems. Yass, Jeff. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 09 Oct 2026: A15.
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