PREAMBLE
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We are a coalition of students, alumni, faculty, and members of the academic community organizing to transform higher education. In a time of deep social division, we are unified by a conviction that universities can be engines of democratic revival and a commitment to fighting for that outcome.
America’s wealthiest colleges and universities operate on an implicit agreement with society: they receive substantial public benefits — tax exemptions, charitable deductions, prestige, and autonomy — in exchange for advancing the public good. Scholars call this relationship the academic social contract.1
In the last century, this contract provided both the material conditions and moral legitimacy for elite universities to amass enormous influence. We focus our attention on elite institutions not because they are superior but because of their power to shape America’s standards of merit, to consecrate value, and to confer legitimacy.2 Their symbolic authority guides how families raise their children, how policymakers design education systems, and what forms of intelligence and ambition are most rewarded.3 Their admissions standards influence public perception of who deserves opportunities and who doesn’t. Their graduates fill the halls of power. The Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Chicago) educate less than 0.5 percent of Americans, but they produce a tenth of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of US Senators, and three quarters of US Supreme Court Justices appointed in the last half century.4
At their best, universities are engines of opportunity committed to educating civic-minded leaders. They cure diseases and expand the bounds of human knowledge. They devote themselves to free inquiry and the protection of unpopular ideas. They teach us to question orthodoxy, pursue truth, and take ownership over our collective future. At their best, they are pillars of democracy. That potential is what inspires us to action: we believe in what universities can be, and we refuse to settle for less.
However, elite universities have too often squandered the powers and privileges lent to them by the academic social contract. The twentieth-century experiment was to shower elite institutions with resources,5 including billions in tax exemptions annually, and trust them to interpret what it meant to serve the public good.6 Answering to boards composed largely of corporate elites, they let their obligations to the public become subsumed by a myopic competition for rankings, wealth, and prestige.7
The evidence is clear. These institutions tend to admit more students from the top one percent of the income distribution than from the bottom 50 percent combined.8 Their endowments are larger than many state budgets,9 yet they invest little in their local communities.10 They neglect their educational missions in favor of improving their rank and reputation.11 Too many students graduate without a sense of civic duty and flock to a narrow band of corporate careers.12 They are governed by boards drawn from the same corporate and financial elite that pads their endowments, industries into which they funnel their graduates.13 These outcomes are not inevitable, they are the result of what our institutions have chosen to prioritize.
The American public has noticed that elite universities are not living up to their potential. Our collective faith has waned. Many Americans do not see themselves reflected, or even considered, by these institutions and the privileged class they produce. Trust in them has fallen to record lows.14 Outside attacks on higher education exploit this antagonism in an effort to undermine academic freedom and institutional independence, two fundamental characteristics of a free society.15
As American democracy backslides from its highest ideals and the emergence of artificial intelligence calls into question the very purpose of education, our most-resourced colleges and universities could be beacons of hope. They could widen opportunity, disperse power, and improve trust in institutions. Right now, they often do the opposite, further entrenching the inequality and resentment on which authoritarianism feeds. Our universities risk becoming casualties of the democratic decay they currently exacerbate.
Elite institutions stand at a crossroads. They can remain citadels of privilege, or they can help kindle a renaissance in higher education and American democracy. We call on universities to renew their social contracts. To merit continued public investment, these institutions must align their wealth, influence, and prestige with the public good.
We call for a refounding of our most-resourced universities in the name of democracy, a new contract between elite higher education and the American people that centers public purpose and reasserts education as a moral, civic, and intellectual endeavor. Where the initial contract failed to adequately define its terms, we aim to state them plainly.
This is a declaration of what elite higher education owes us all, authored by the students who animate these institutions. It is a north star for campus organizing. It is a shared platform that gives the reform-minded majority inside these universities a concrete vision to rally around. It is a living document to be improved over successive generations of student organizers.
This is the Students’ Compact.
EDUCATION
01
Universities must return to their fundamental purpose — educating students for lives of meaning.
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Everyone should have access to an education that stretches their intellect and imagination, frees them from fear and conformity, and helps them discover how to do good in the world. This is higher education’s foundational promise and its first obligation to the public.16 However, it is clear to us that elite universities’ obsessive pursuit of prestige detracts and distracts from this mission.
The postwar academic social contract did not prescribe any one way to educate students for the public good, and rightly so. Campuses should maintain the autonomy to emphasize different academic traditions, practice diverse pedagogies, and educate independently. But rather than leverage this interpretive freedom to create a rich academic experience for every student, universities have locked themselves in a status game that pushes educational quality to the margins.
This shortcoming arises, in part, from the difficulty of measuring how well an institution is educating its students. Educational success — whether a student better understands themselves, the world around them, and how they might meaningfully contribute to it — is difficult to evaluate and is near-impossible to reward in national rankings. As a result, when universities compete for prestige, they do so over imperfect proxies for educational caliber such as selectivity, wealth, alumni earnings, and peer reputation.
Rather than emerging from a coherent theory of education, those metrics were selected because, at the time, the colleges that were considered the “best” did well on them.17 In other words, national rankings crystallized the existing hierarchy instead of creating a dependable rubric for evaluating education. Colleges have almost unanimously bought in. Today, rankings tell us how well a given institution complies with these limited — and limiting — metrics, and remarkably little about the quality of its educational offerings.
The result is that universities optimize for proxies of elite status18 — shallow benchmarks that help colleges attract the applicants, donations, and influence they crave but actively detract from their educational mission.19 They prioritize exclusivity, brand recognition, and graduate salaries. Admissions offices boast about razor-thin acceptance rates.20 Administrators invest in luxury amenities that attract high-income applicants and signal prestige.21 And trustees judge institutional success by endowment growth and elite reputation.22 Under this incentive structure, education for the common good is crushed beneath the primacy of prestige, and “elite” takes on its worst possible meaning.
This institutional culture shapes students’ high school and college education just as much — if not more — than curriculum. Young people absorb the values of the institutions we are taught to valorize. When our institutions organize around status, they teach us to do the same. Before we even arrive, colleges teach us to reduce education to status competition: we gamify high school to reach the height of the college hierarchy. When we get in, we’re taught to believe we earned our college acceptance — and every opportunity that might follow — through sheer intellect and hard work. We do what we know best: use our newfound position to keep climbing. A fear of falling paralyzes student culture on elite campuses. We design our education to get into the most rarefied jobs, fellowships and graduate schools. When choosing majors, classes, or extracurricular activities, we often optimize for a polished resume and perfect GPA, instead of letting our intellectual curiosity inform our trajectory.23
While it is our responsibility to opt out, the fact that so many of us buy into this value system is a reflection of the broader educational climate in which we were raised. As students within these institutions, our most transformative educational experiences occur as an act of rebellion against the dominant paradigm. This is not a path to a society filled with critical, empowered, educated people prepared to steward our democracy.
The way forward is clear. We want to be educated in longstanding academic and intellectual traditions. We want our universities to accurately evaluate themselves on their ability to do so instead of relying on external validators to tell them their worth. And we want our schools to stop indoctrinating us into their own status-obsessed value system. Give us the tools to unlearn it instead. If institutional prestige meant providing an education that nourished the mind, galvanized democracy and valorized a moral life, elite institutions would rapidly undergo a paradigmatic shift in their incentive structures.
They should pursue this path in consultation with their students, who have valuable first-hand insights into the most urgent questions and challenges that our generation must confront. We want an education that helps us walk away from the shallow status games that drive us to extrinsic prestige markers at the cost of our own self-worth and satisfaction. We want an education that teaches us to engage opposing perspectives. We want an education that fortifies our commitment to the common good. We want an education that helps us understand our interior lives and our place in the broader world before we are compelled to specialize. We want an education that validates the ideals which underlie the very project of higher education, so that students might protect it for generations to come.
Here is how we can get there:
01We urge our universities to publicly refuse to participate in external ranking systems and encourage peer institutions to do the same. Education loses its promise when it contorts itself to the prestige race. The first step in exiting this prestige race is to exit from formal external ranking systems, especially the US News and World Report.
02Next, we call on our universities to publicly recommit to their educational and research missions with a renewed emphasis on teaching and scholarship. When learning becomes their priority, universities reclaim their power to expect high levels of dedication from students and prepare a generation of future citizens to live in service of each other and the common good.
03Furthermore, universities ought to establish their own standards, in collaboration with the entire academic community, by which to evaluate their own efficacy in teaching and learning. We believe that universities have the expertise and leadership necessary to create and abide by criteria that empower learning for the sake of democracy and self-actualization.
04One of our universities’ most central means of serving the public is in training citizens to sustain and advance our democracy, by educating them in the ways of critical thinking, respect for the views of others, and understanding of their unique abilities to contribute to the public. Universities must commit their classrooms to be training grounds for democratic engagement in a pluralistic society, teaching students to effectively deliberate, challenge their own assumptions, and collaborate with people whose views and backgrounds differ from their own.
05In an age of mass information, universities must also understand their role as more than mere credentialing by providing students a robust education that does not ask them to specialize early. In a rapidly changing world and economy, especially concerning artificial intelligence, universities should draw from long-held educational traditions that teach students to adapt, think creatively, and act ethically. While skills training can certainly be an important component of this education, it should be treated as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
We call for universities to reclaim education as a public good. A university that defines its worth through extrinsic metrics built to satisfy cosmetic markers of prestige betrays the very ideals it was founded to uphold. True prestige can only be measured by the courage to educate freely, generously, and in service of humanity.
02
ACCESS
Our universities should identify and nurture potential in a wide range of forms, for as many people as possible.
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Democracy relies on widespread access to education and a recognition that every citizen should have a voice in decisions concerning our collective future. Higher education is uniquely positioned to deliver on that promise. However, since their founding, elite universities have too often done the opposite: concentrate educational attainment among the wealthy and well-connected.24 Because these institutions receive billions in public funding annually and fill the halls of power with their graduates, the question of whom they admit is a matter of national importance.25
Our oldest elite universities were built in part with wealth and labor drawn from enslavement, and every one of them sits on land taken from indigenous nations.26 From their inception, they were designed to educate the sons of white elites. As people excluded by race, gender, religion and class won their way in, advances were met with new, more covert methods of restriction. One such method persists today — legacy preference. It was adopted in the 1920s, when Harvard, Yale, and Princeton wanted to limit the number of Jewish students that met their admissions standards and won acceptance.27
In the 1950s, an overhaul of elite admissions promised to usher in a new era of merit-based selection and free American society from the “hereditary aristocracy of wealth” once and for all.28 An admissions system that once screened for pedigree began to evaluate talent through standardized testing and widespread recruiting.29 This newfound focus on talent, rather than heritage, initially worked. In the 1960s and 70s, many more women, people of color, and students from public schools entered doors that had been closed to them for generations.30
The positive benefits of this shift started to disappear as the focus on meritocracy transformed the elite class itself. Whereas before, the aristocratic elite was defined by their ability to maintain power and comfort without labor, our new meritocracy meant that elites were defined by their skill and capacity for labor.31 Elite schools were creating superordinate workers that fueled new industries which demanded highly skilled labor and strenuous hours, in turn compensating workers at previously unimaginable levels.32 These workers now had the resources to invest heavily in their children, preparing them to outperform their peers in this highly competitive new world. As a result, our modern “meritocratic” admissions criteria which center testing, strategic extracurriculars, and enrichment programs now serve as the aristocratic inheritance meritocracy sought to eradicate in the first place. The gains of mid-century meritocratic reforms have been undone by an admissions system that favors power over potential.
The numbers bear this out. Research shows that children from families in the top one percent of the United States’ income distribution are 34 percent more likely to be accepted at an Ivy Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Chicago) than an average applicant with identical academic credentials.33 At many selective universities, more students are accepted from the top one percent of the income distribution than the entire bottom 50 percent combined, and students from the top one percent of the income distribution are 77 times more likely to attend the most resourced colleges than students from the bottom 20 percent.34 While first-year enrollment of underrepresented students of color has increased nationally, both the number and the percentage of underrepresented students of color have significantly declined at highly selective institutions and even more sharply at Ivy Plus schools.35 To this day, no reform to college admissions has permanently rectified the tendency to reproduce inherited privilege.
The supposed benefits of a system which selects for talent — whether naturally occurring or effortfully cultivated — are taken as universal facts: our meritocratic admission system creates incentives for high schoolers to work hard and gain skills; students who do that well in high school gain relatively more from a highly-resourced college education than their peers; society benefits when those students are then showered with resources because they use their education to better the world.36 These assumptions justify our meritocracy. Yet, scholarship has found remarkably little empirical evidence to support these assumptions. Some evidence even suggests they are counterproductive to the stated goals of meritocracy.37
What we can see clearly, though, is that under the banner of meritocracy, admitted students are taught that they deserve their positions of power and wealth, and that those who are rejected deserve to have fewer opportunities. As a result, we have utterly transformed the way we raise children.38 The ecosystem of college admissions has grown out of control, with serious — and sometimes deadly39 — implications for student mental health, a pay-to-play, multi-billion dollar industry for college admissions preparation,40 and a shameful reality in which entire childhoods have become fodder for common application essays.41
This system is anti-democratic. Elite colleges select disproportionately wealthy students and tell them they won the meritocratic gauntlet fair and square. Those of them interested in questions of justice benefit from answers that feel egalitarian on the surface, but do not threaten the system that gave them their rarefied status.42 They “earned it,” after all. The nation senses their entitlement and performative progressivism; the cleft between educated elites and the rest of the country widens further.
Having a four-year degree is closer than ever to being a caste-like distinction in America: it is one of the most reliable predictors of voting patterns,43 of economic stability, and of health outcomes.44 And a young elite class that touts their social-justice bona fides on campus then flocks into big tech, finance and consulting in a handful of coastal cities epitomizes the collapse of the academic social contract. The result is a more segregated society, a distrusting populace, an unduly politicized higher education sector, and an out-of-touch elite driving our democracy into the ground.
An admissions system that fulfills our universities’ civic obligations would be unrecognizable from its current state. A transformed system would seek to educate a class of students that reflects the diversity of America, which will in turn better prepare the entire class to be productive democratic citizens. In this new system, every student would be educated debt-free, as education would be recognized as a public trust rather than a private asset. We would instill in our young people a new understanding of merit that centers the leadership, vision, humility, and the innovative spirit necessary to carry our democracy forward and shoulder the solemn responsibilities of higher education. Our recommendations follow.
We hope that these changes will spur future creativity for continually perfecting our schools:
01Universities should dramatically expand their enrollment. A university designed to promote democracy would treat openness as the highest mark of prestige, expanding its incoming classes to welcome a greater share of qualified applicants instead of boasting about how many it excludes. Given the size of elite universities’ endowments, many of these universities could double or even triple enrollment.45
02Universities must eliminate arbitrary pathways to admissions including but not limited to legacy preference and preferential admissions for the children of donors, which disproportionately benefit white and wealthy students.
03Given the steep advantages that wealthier students have in the admissions game, universities must create and maintain pathways to admission for students from a diverse range of backgrounds. Dramatically expanding enrollment of community college transfer students and Pell-eligible students, implementing economic affirmative action, and drastically improving outreach to students from underrepresented groups are all legal, precedented steps universities should immediately implement.46 More boldly, admissions offices could place a cap on the percentage of students they admit from expensive independent high schools and restrict the number of athletic recruits they admit each year to less than 20 percent of each class.
04Universities must publish transparent admissions data on race, class, and geographic representation and publish the distribution of non-academic ratings by those factors, so the public can determine to what extent non-academic ratings unfairly skew toward certain groups. That way we can hold universities accountable to the responsibilities that come with public trust. Policymakers and oversight bodies need this data to hold institutions accountable and ensure federal funding is tied to genuine access, not just the performance of it.
05Universities must make higher education debt-free. Exorbitant college costs suppress accessibility and give students and families the impression that colleges are out-of-reach country clubs. We call on private universities with endowments large enough that investment returns cover operating costs to cover the cost of attendance for students from the bottom 80 percent of household income. And if endowments alone cannot foot the bill, we call on universities to boldly create new funding programs, like pay-it-forward initiatives, and to use their lobbying power to reverse the federal-loan driven tuition system.
06Treat inclusion as the ongoing, critical process that it is. Every student, regardless of socio-economic background, immigration status, race, religion, political viewpoint, gender, disability, or identity, should be given the tools to participate fully in the university. All students should see themselves reflected in faculty, staff, curriculum, and physical space. Cultural centers, affinity organizations, disability accommodations, Title IX resources, protections for student workers, and multilingual resources are infrastructure that should be duly invested in.
Transforming university accessibility through admissions, belonging, and affordability reform is one of our universities’ highest mandates for democratic revival. Our universities would be better pillars of democracy if they reflected the full diversity of America: students from different races and income levels; those who are first-generation and those with long academic lineages; students from rural towns, cities, and suburbs alike, bringing pluralistic perspectives shaped by their respective regions, beliefs, and communities. Our universities must understand that just admissions practices are essential for social trust and democratic engagement, especially during our time of extreme inequality and social division.
CAREERS
03
Universities must view the career outcomes of their students as fruits of their values and should take pride in graduating students into jobs that serve the public good.
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Every spring, private elite universities announce an incoming class of students touted to be our society’s future leaders. Over the next four years, these institutions will prepare their students to steward democracy and solve humanity’s most pressing challenges. That’s the promise, at least. Four years later, like clockwork, those bright young minds flock to tech, finance and management consulting jobs at a rate of more than 50 percent of work-bound graduates.47 This is a well-documented phenomenon called corporate career funneling.48
The story of how career funneling happens is all too familiar to students. Having just summited the achievement-obsessed culture that elite college admissions promote, students arrive on campus conditioned to chase the next gold star. Leading private sector firms — which rely on the labor of elite university alumni to win client trust and burnish their own prestige — work hand-in-hand with universities to exploit students’ achievement orientation and inexperience with the job market.49 These corporations have spent decades honing their recruitment tactics, with the ultimate goal of making an entry-level job at their company feel like the inevitable next step for an ambitious student.50 Recruitment begins as soon as students arrive on campus, offering summer internship salaries that stun eighteen-year-olds into submission, and enforcing high-pressure deadlines that leverage fears of financial instability to foreclose other options before students have a chance to explore them. Perhaps most egregiously, large firms in consulting, tech and finance enjoy preferential access to students because universities often sell student attention through corporate partnership programs.51
For elite universities, students are the product, and wealthy corporations get first pick of the bright young people that America has invested immense public resources to cultivate. Across 13 of the nation’s most selective private universities, an average of 51 percent of recent graduating classes entering the workforce went into finance, consulting, or technology: 53 percent at Harvard and Princeton, 61 percent at Penn, 63 percent at the University of Chicago.52 At those same schools, roughly 4 percent entered government or public policy and around 4 percent entered nonprofit work. The corporate trio absorbs more than six times as many graduates as government and nonprofits combined, concentrating them in a handful of coastal cities.53
If career funneling were simply the product of a free market rewarding talent, it would happen to high-achieving students across the entire spectrum of higher education. Instead, it occurs largely where corporations have bought privileged access: our country’s wealthiest and most exclusive institutions. At the most-selective flagship public universities, the same three industries take only between a tenth and a fifth of graduates.54
Defenders of the funnel might argue that the primary purpose of higher education is financial gain: a way for individuals to gain high-value skills and secure high-paying jobs, which promotes social mobility and a capable labor force. National rankings reward high graduate salaries, which validates this view, and university boards, largely populated by corporate executives, are happy to go along.55 As graduates’ paychecks grow, so do their universities’ rank and base of future donors. But even by the market’s own logic, the funnel is a bad investment. The same graduates it absorbs are among the likeliest to found firms that innovate.56 When students opt for the safer path, those ventures may never get started.57
This is a flagrant abdication of higher education’s public mission to the whims of the labor market. The public funds universities based on the agreement that the students they graduate will benefit society. Instead, they flow to the industries that too often concentrate wealth, surveil and commodify attention, distort democracy and prize profit over the public interest.58
The cost of this status quo falls on students and the public. Local media, governments, clinics, and public schools compete for graduates against firms with far deeper pockets and unmatched starting salaries. The eight in ten members of Generation Z who want to prioritize helping others and making a difference59 lose out to a preprofessional campus culture that treats education as a stepping stone to a high-salary job — a job that often leads to anxiety, burnout and feelings of meaninglessness.60
We envision universities that free students from this narrow calculus of self-worth, where intellectual exploration and public service are not a detour on the way to Wall Street or Silicon Valley but a destination in and of themselves. Simply asking students to resist the immense pressures placed on them by these powerful institutions won’t work. Universities, instead, should stop selling access to their students, stop treating salary as evidence of their own success, and build the infrastructure that lets graduates choose meaningful work without fear of falling behind.
When we look around at our peers, it is easy to imagine a world where curiosity, service, and a sense of justice drive our career decisions. If universities break the corporate funnel and turn their students loose on the nation’s hardest problems, the nation will be stronger and freer for it. We want that future, we know it’s possible, and we call on our universities to help us get there.
We ask the following:
01Universities must acknowledge and take a stand against the career funnel. Students can’t avoid what they can’t see. Before recruiting begins, students should hear candidly from peers a few years ahead of them that the pressure they might feel doesn’t have to drive their college careers, that public-interest work can support a good life, and that people opt out of the funnel and do not regret it. Naming the funnel is the least expensive intervention available.
02Universities must stop selling student access. They should end corporate partnership programs and any other arrangement where employers pay career centers or academic departments for students’ information, branding, or event space. Instead, they should fund career services from the university operating budget so they are not compelled to court corporations with special interests.
03Universities must publish their data. They should report first-destination outcomes annually, disaggregated by geographic location, industry and employer. They also should disclose their methodology.
04We call on universities to make college debt-free. When steep tuition costs disappear, so do expectations of economic return on investment. This will allow students to choose careers in line with their personal values and ripe for personal fulfillment.
05Universities must end coercive recruiting practices. Students are often courted by firms within their first few weeks on campus and subjected to high-pressure tactics. Universities should ban early recruiting on campus and coercive practices like exploding offers and conditional bonuses that force students into premature commitments. Give students time to learn and explore.
06Universities should pay for public-interest work. Closing the gap between the exorbitant summer stipends that major corporations can offer and everyone else is essential. They have the resources to ensure that every student taking an internship in government, education, public health, journalism, or the nonprofit sector does so with a living wage.
07Universities should build better pipelines to create competitive, cohort-based placement into common-good sectors. Firms with massive recruiting budgets are outcompeting everyone else. The university should work with alternative employers to build attractive pipelines into their jobs.
08Universities must honor service. Media features, commencement recognition, and prize money should be directed toward students and graduates who serve the public.
Our most well-resourced institutions have the people, money, and global leverage to solve some of the most pressing problems of our day. But with their approach toward graduate careers, they have allowed many of these resources to be wasted in the service of profit. Universities must cultivate ambition in their students to contribute to the good labor of the world.
BEYOND UNIVERSITY GATES
04
For institutions that aspire to global leadership, responsibility begins at home.
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Elite universities are engaged in local academic social contracts with their host cities, counties and states. Under these arrangements, universities reside on large swaths of untaxed land and receive significant autonomy from local governance in exchange for benefits such as employment, education, hospitals, research, and community development initiatives.
The benefits that universities receive cannot be overstated. As of 2017, at the 52 institutions with endowments larger than a billion dollars, the average annual per-student tax break was $26,000.61 At many elite universities, the annual tax break amounts to over $100 million: $158 million at Harvard,62 $182 million at Columbia,63 $102 million at Yale,64 $145 million at NYU,65 and at least $139 million at Stanford,66 according to estimates from various sources. Local governments use property taxes to fund fire departments, public schools, sanitation, and more, so every dollar that universities are exempt from paying is one that local residents go without.67
Too often, universities fall short of their end of the arrangement. They exercise immense power over local issues such as land, policing, and housing — sometimes akin to that of a city government and often without democratic accountability. For example, more than a third of private four year colleges run private police departments,68 whose officers can stop, search, arrest and carry firearms, with jurisdictions that extend well beyond the campus itself.69 Yet, private police forces lack democratic accountability mechanisms, subjecting local communities to the authority of an armed force they can’t hold accountable.70
Elite universities also impact their surrounding housing markets, often gentrifying their local communities and pricing out local residents.71 In 1959, universities gained federal approval and funding to rapidly expand, under the guise of urban renewal, through the section 112 credits program. The ensuing wave of development forced local residents, often people of color, out of their homes.72 To this day, universities continue to gentrify their surrounding communities. Local residents must shoulder increased tax burdens to compensate for the universities’ tax breaks.73 Landlords in university towns often prefer student tenants who can pay higher prices, straining the housing market and further ostracizing local residents.74
Some universities have tried to remedy fraught town-gown dynamics through “payment in lieu of taxes” (PILOT) programs. The payments are voluntary, meaning universities decide whether they are going to donate and how much. PILOT programs often fall short, where they exist at all. Boston requests private colleges to pay 25 percent of what they would owe in property taxes, half of which can be covered by so-called community benefits the colleges themselves define.75 Still, Harvard has paid less than Boston’s requested share for more than a decade.76 While these programs are a step in the right direction, they fail to adequately make up for lost tax revenue, and rollout has been uneven; neither Columbia nor NYU has a PILOT agreement, despite being two of New York City’s largest landowners.77
We urge universities to recognize that a thriving local community is integral to their mission. Our universities must utilize their resources and power to build symbiotic relations between universities and their surrounding communities. This will take time, care, and sustained commitment.
Below is a non-exhaustive list of steps universities can take to begin this crucial process.
01They must pay their fair share. Universities should sign agreements with their host cities committing to at least 50 percent of the property taxes they would owe for public services. It is a shame that many universities sit on multi-billion dollar endowments while local public schools suffer and public resources remain grossly underfunded. Universities should view a thriving local community as equally integral to their success as expanding research infrastructure or drawing world-class faculty.
02Residents should have a vote. Universities should codify meaningful representation for local residents on university governing boards. At minimum, one in seven trustees should be a local resident, chosen by election or by city council, and they should not be an employee of the university.
03Universities should admit local students and graduate local leaders. A university that is truly rooted in its community would commit to admitting students from surrounding public high schools, and giving them a clear pipeline to work in their local communities when they graduate.
04Campuses should be open and accessible to local residents. We urge universities to open up their campus spaces and resources to local community members, as those resources are paid for, in part, by tax breaks afforded by the local community. University libraries, gyms, shuttles and other transportation technologies, green spaces, and meeting rooms should be accessible to local residents. And local residents should have access to university course offerings every year.
05Universities should protect the local housing market. An earlier recommendation calls on universities to expand enrollment. They should, and do so by building more housing in consultation with the local community to ensure that any housing that they remove from the market is replaced with permanently affordable units.
06Campus police should be under public control. Police departments should no longer have jurisdictions beyond campus grounds, unless granted by local city councils on four-year renewal basis. They should publish comprehensive data on arrests, searches, stops, uses of force by demographic data, and be as transparent to public scrutiny as municipal police. Police officers are public servants, not private guards. As such they should answer to the public, not unelected and unaccountable private governing boards. Universities should also support legislation that ensures private police are subject to the same public records requirements as public police.
We believe that universities can play a vital role in uplifting their communities. To do so, they must hold themselves accountable to the terms of the local academic social contract. For institutions that aspire to global leadership, responsibility begins at home.
GOVERNANCE
05
In their own self-governance, universities should practice the same democratic values they extol in the classroom.
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Higher education prepares citizens to think critically and contribute to society. It encourages debate and supports and protects free inquiry, even when it is unpopular. The leaders of these institutions claim that these goals are best achieved through a self-governed university, arguments raised often as the federal government interferes with even routine university operations. We share this belief in democratic self-governance. But when we look at our universities, we see corporate capture, not autonomous self-governance.
At the highest level, our universities are not governed by the people who make these institutions function on a day-to-day basis. The faculty, staff, students, and community members who feel the greatest impacts of operational decisions have limited formal say in how their universities are run. Instead, they are controlled by an undemocratic Board of Trustees, largely self-selected and primarily composed of wealthy corporate leaders.78 At Yale, eight of 14 current board members hail from the corporate sector.79 At Stanford, all but three of 34 board members have corporate backgrounds.80
The over-representation of corporate leaders on boards has grown in recent years.81 At elite universities, private equity and hedge fund managers have especially surged into board membership. They are three times more likely than other Forbes 400 billionaires to serve on elite boards (making up 17 percent of trustees at the top 30 universities), and they are far more likely to serve at elite private universities than other institutions, even highly ranked public ones.82
Research suggests that corporate leaders, particularly hedge fund and private equity managers, understand board membership as an avenue for their own self-enrichment.83 Board membership at elite universities provides proximity to potential investors and recruitable alumni, large endowments they can lure into management at their own firms, and the social cachet within elite circles that stems from prestigious philanthropy.84
As the share of corporate leaders on elite boards swelled, the universities themselves began to behave like investment firms. They moved the endowment heavily into alternative assets such as private equity, hedge funds, and venture capital — the exact industries which are increasingly over-represented in the boardroom. This strategy came with a big governance cost. Alternative investments are strictly confidential, meaning faculty, staff, students, and the public cannot see where their money goes.85 In the context of campus protests that call for ethical investments and divestment from harmful industries like fossil fuels or weapons manufacturing, universities shirk accountability with asset confidentiality arguments. Simultaneously, they consolidate control over the institution into the hands of a select few administrators and board members privy to these investment details.
It’s unclear how much the endowment strategy has paid off financially. Over a recent 10 year span, endowment growth among the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, and Chicago has trailed the S&P 500.86 What the university loses in democratic governance, it doesn’t necessarily gain in financial resources.
Nor has the growth of elite endowments been accompanied by a greater expansion of the university’s mission. Immense endowments should shield universities from the year-to-year financial pressures caused by market fluctuations or policy changes. Instead, endowment growth is prioritized above the core mission of the university. University boards swollen with financiers become hyperfocused on protecting growth at all costs. In years where the endowment performs well, university leaders prioritize its growth over additional spending; conversely, when the endowment underperforms or the short-term future is uncertain, university leaders resist spending more than its growth that year.87
In sum, university leadership measures success by accruing capital it then resists to deploy in service of its higher mission. The class sizes of elite universities have remained relatively stagnant, even as the institution’s capacity to support additional students has increased.88 When elite universities face budgetary shortfalls, endowments are prioritized over the preservation of educational or civic programs that comprise the core of the university’s mission. Academic departments viewed as unprofitable are slashed, while student services that promote academic development, civic participation, and public service disappear.89,90
When the university itself is under attack, leaders too often choose to protect the endowment at the expense of academic freedom, civic participation, and student expression: cutting costs by striking deals or complying with federal demands rather than pursuing expensive legal battles that could protect the institution and entire sector’s autonomy.91,92,93 And when leaders weigh the interests of board members and major donors above those of students, faculty, staff, and community members, university operations appear less like self-governance and more like elite capture.94,95,96 The solution is not to change the mindset of trustees but to change the trustees themselves.
We envision a university governed by the students, faculty, staff and local community members most directly impacted by its institutional decisions. Our universities must accept their role as stewards of democracy and training grounds for civic leaders, rather than proffering these liberal values as a hollow gesture to an outdated academic social contract. This means governing themselves by the same democratic principles they wish to instill in their students.
We ask the following:
01Universities must democratize the board of trustees. They should codify majority representation for students, staff, faculty, and local residents on university governing boards. These representatives should have guaranteed voting rights on the board, and they should be selected democratically by their respective constituencies for fixed terms. Those who live, work, and study at the university should govern it.
02Universities must protect dissent. Universities must acknowledge student, faculty, and staff dissent as an essential component of institutional governance, the formation of an engaged citizenry, and the history of their university. Broad restrictions on student speech, demonstration, association, and assembly must be lifted, and any restrictions must be narrowly tailored to limit only direct disruption of university operations or activity that endangers human life.
03Universities must increase transparency in their internal governance by publicizing meeting dates, locations, and agendas well in advance. Meetings should be open to the public, excepting specific extenuating situations such as the disclosure of confidential, legally protected information, and should always include public comment opportunities. Thorough meeting notes, including the voting record of each board member on each issue, should be published online.
04Universities should open the books. The community should be able to ascertain where the endowment is invested so the university community can grapple with the ethical implications of those investments.
05Furthermore, stakeholders must be allowed to set the agenda. Universities should create a clear path by which stakeholders may add agenda items to governing board meetings, whether through petitions, referendums, or other channels. These pathways will ensure that universities remain responsive to the broadly held concerns of stakeholders.
06Allow recalls. For any trustee that the university constituency elects, a petition with 15 percent of the constituency signed should trigger a recall vote.
We believe in a university that is governed by its members, a truly autonomous university that models, stewards, and reproduces the democracy on which it relies. It is this university that can regain the trust of the public, find support in turbulent times, and instill democratic ideals in its students.
NOTES
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Preamble
1Ralph R. Banks et al., “Private Universities in the Public Interest,” Stanford Center for Racial Justice, November 1, 2024.
2There is no one widely-accepted definition of elite institutions. We use a broad definition: institutions with the largest endowment per student — roughly those with more than $300,000 per student — or more than $5 billion in total endowment, and acceptance rates below 20 percent. These institutions, on top of being highly rejective, tend to be private. Some of the most influential among them have endowments over one million dollars per student and single-digit acceptance rates.
3Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap (Penguin Randomhouse, 2020).
4Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges in the United States,” Opportunity Insights, August 2025.
5Banks et al., “Private Universities in the Public Interest.”
6Eaton, Bankers in the Ivory Tower.
7Sondra N. Barringer, Barrett J. Taylor, and Sheila Slaughter, “Trustees in Turbulent Times: External Affiliations and Stratification among U.S. Research Universities, 1975–2015,” Journal of Higher Education 90, no. 6 (2019): 884–914, https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2019.1574695.
8Raj Chetty et al., “Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility,” Opportunity Insights, July 2017.
9“Fast Facts: Endowments,” National Center for Education Statistics.
10Mariah Stewart, “Private Universities Bring New Growth, but Gentrification Can Sideline Existing Residents,” Insight into Academia, August 7, 2019.
11Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder, “Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds,” American Journal of Sociology 113, no. 1 (July 2007): 1–40, https://doi.org/10.1086/517897.
12Amy Binder and Ryan Cieslikowski, “Educating Citizen Leaders: How Elite Universities Can Reduce Career Funneling and Build a Better Workforce for Democracy,” Johns Hopkins University Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute.
13Charlie Eaton, Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
14Jesse Arm, “National Higher Education Poll: Americans Distrust Universities—But Back Bold Reforms,” Manhattan Institute, July 13, 2025.
15“The Unmaking of the American University,” New Yorker, March 16, 2026, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/16/the-unmaking-of-the-american-university.
01 Education
16President’s Commission on Higher Education, Higher Education for American Democracy: A Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education, vol. 1, (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1947), https://higheredhistory.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Higher-Education-for-American-Democracy-A-Report-of-The-Presidents-Commission-on-Higher-Education.pdf.
17Nicholas Thompson, “The Best, the Top, the Most,” New York Times, August 3, 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/education/the-best-the-top-the-most.html.
18Steven Mintz, “What’s Really Wrong with the College Rankings,” Inside Higher Ed, November 28, 2022, https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/higher-ed-gamma/2022/11/28/whats-really-wrong-college-rankings.
19Evan Mandery, Poison Ivy: How Elite Colleges Divide Us (New Press, 2022).
20Michael T. Nietzel, “Acceptance Rates by the Ivies, Other Elite Colleges Stay at Historic Lows,” Forbes, April 1, 2023, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2023/04/01/acceptance-rates-by-the-ivies-other-elite-colleges-stay-at-historic-lows/.
21Brian Jacob, Brian McCall, and Kevin Stange, “College as Country Club: Do Colleges Cater to Students’ Preferences for Consumption?,” Journal of Labor Economics 36, no. 2 (2018): 309–48, https://doi.org/10.1086/694654.
22Eaton, Bankers in the Ivory Tower.
23Lucas T. Gazianis, “The Market for Gems: How Harvard Courses Got So Easy,” Harvard Crimson, March 27, 2024, https://www.thecrimson.com/column/lucas-t-gazianis/article/2024/3/27/gazianis-harvard-course-gems/.
02 Access
24Mandery, Poison Ivy.
25Banks et al., “Private Universities in the Public Interest.”
26Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (Bloomsbury Press, 2013).
27Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
28James Bryant Conant, “Education for a Classless Society: The Jeffersonian Tradition,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1940, https://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/95sep/ets/edcla.html.
29Karabel, The Chosen.
30Geoffrey Kabaservice, “The Birth of a New Institution,” Yale Alumni Magazine, December 1999, https://archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/99_12/admissions.html.
31Markovits, Meritocracy Trap.
32Ibid.
33Chetty, Deming, and Friedman, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders?”
34Chetty et al., “Mobility Report Cards.”
35James Murphy, “A First Look at College Enrollment Outcomes After the End of Affirmative Action,” Class Action, February 3, 2026, https://www.joinclassaction.us/post/a-first-look-at-college-enrollment-outcomes-after-the-end-of-affirmative-action.
36Zachary Bleemer and Jesse Rothstein, “The Meritocratic Consensus and Stratification in Higher Education,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 35650, August 2026, https://www.nber.org/papers/w35650.
37Bleemer and Rothstein, “Meritocratic Consensus.”
38Mandery, Poison Ivy.
39Scott White, “College Admission’s Part in the Decline of Mental Health in Teens,” Forbes, 2023.
40William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (Free Press, 2014).
41Sophie Callcott, “Holistic Admissions Harm Students’ Mental Health,” Stanford Daily, April 21, 2022, https://stanforddaily.com/2022/04/21/from-the-community-holistic-admissions-harm-students-mental-health/.
42David Brooks, “How the Ivy League Broke America,” The Atlantic, November 14, 2024.
43Pew Research Center, “Voting Patterns in the 2024 Election,” June 26, 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patterns-in-the-2024-election/.
44Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Life Expectancy in Adulthood Is Falling for Those without a BA Degree, but as Educational Gaps Have Widened, Racial Gaps Have Narrowed,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 11 (2021): e2024777118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2024777118.
45Richard Weissbourd et al., “Innovation and Justice: Reinventing Selective Colleges,” Making Caring Common, Harvard Graduate School of Education, April 2021, https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/innovation-and-justice.
46Banks et al., “Private Universities in the Public Interest.”
03 Careers
47Evan Mandery, “How America’s Elite Colleges Breed High-Status Careers—and Misery,” Mother Jones, September 24, 2025, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/elite-ivy-league-colleges-endowment-inequality-career-funnel-finance-management-consulting-tech-recruiting.
48Amy J. Binder, Daniel B. Davis, and Nick Bloom, “Career Funneling: How Elite Students Learn to Define and Desire ‘Prestigious’ Jobs,” Sociology of Education 89, no. 1 (2016): 20–39, https://doi.org/10.1177/0038040715610883.
49Binder, Davis, and Bloom, “Career Funneling.”
50Lauren A. Rivera, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016),
51Daniel Davis and Amy Binder, “Selling Students: The Rise of Corporate Partnership Programs in University Career Centers,” in The University under Pressure, ed. Elizabeth Popp Berman and Catherine Paradeise, Research in the Sociology of Organizations 46 (Emerald Group Publishing, 2016), 395–422, https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X20160000046013.
52Links to this data will be available on the website version of this document at joinclassaction.us
53Danny Dougherty et al., “Where Graduates Move After College,” Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/graphics/where-graduates-move-after-college/.
54Links to this data will be available on the website version of this document at joinclassaction.us
55Charlie Eaton and Albina Gibadullina, “Elite Embeddedness: The Rise of Financiers on University Boards as Parallel Social Organizations,” Socio-Economic Review 23, no. 3 (2025): 1057–89, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwaf001.
56Guo, N. and Leung, C.K.Y. (2021), Do elite colleges matter? The impact on entrepreneurship decisions and career dynamics. Quantitative Economics, 12: 1347-1397. https://doi.org/10.3982/QE1587
57Hacamo, Isaac and Kleiner, Kristoph, Forced Entrepreneurs (April 29, 2021). Journal of Finance, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2801637 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2801637
58Mandery, “How America’s Elite Colleges Breed High-Status Careers—and Misery.”
59Walton Family Foundation and Gallup, “Gen Z Wants to Do Good: How Helping Others Supports Meaning and Wellbeing,” Voices of Gen Z Study, June 24, 2026, https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/reports/gallup-gen-z-wants-to-do-good
60Mustafa Yavaş, “White-Collar Opt-Out: How ‘Good Jobs’ Fail Elite Workers,” American Sociological Review 89, no. 4 (2024): 761–88, https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224241263497.
04 Beyond University Gates
61“Why Should Elite Universities Get More Taxpayer Support than Regional Public Colleges?” Washington Post, February 23, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/02/23/why-should-elite-universities-get-more-taxpayer-support-than-regional-public-colleges/.
62“Harvard’s $465 Million in Tax Benefits Draws New Scrutiny,” Bloomberg, July 25, 2024, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2024-harvard-property-tax/.
63“‘The Untouchables’: How Columbia and N.Y.U. Benefit From Huge Tax Breaks,” New York Times, September 26, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/26/nyregion/columbia-university-property-tax-nyc.html.
64Davarian L. Baldwin, “Higher Education Has a Tax Problem and It’s Hurting Local Communities,” Time, April 7, 2021, https://time.com/5952901/universities-tax-exemption/.
65Eric Santomauro-Stenzel, “Columbia & NYU Tax Break Targeted to Repair Disparities between Private Universities and CUNY,” Indypendent, December 19, 2024, https://indypendent.org/2024/12/columbia-nyu-tax-break-targeted-to-repair-disparities-between-private-universities-and-cuny/.
66Kathleen Pender, “Some of the Bay Area’s Biggest Property Owners Don’t Pay Property Tax. Here’s Why,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 3, 2019, https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Some-of-the-Bay-Area-s-biggest-property-owners-14277604.php.
67Daphne A. Kenyon and Adam H. Langley, Payments in Lieu of Taxes: Balancing Municipal and Nonprofit Interests (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2010), 18, https://www.lincolninst.edu/sites/default/files/PILOTs%2520PFR%2520final.pdf.
68Elizabeth J. Davis, “Campus Law Enforcement Agencies Serving 4-Year Institutions, 2021–2022 – Statistical Tables,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, NCJ 309076, November 2024, https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/cleas4i2122st.pdf.
69Cameron Okeke and Lauren Abrahams, “Four Ways Private University Police Forces Jeopardize Public Safety,” Urban Wire (blog), Urban Institute, April 12, 2018, https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/four-ways-private-university-police-forces-jeopardize-public-safety.
70Davis, “Campus Law Enforcement Agencies.”
71Grace Carroll, “Priced Out,” Stanford Daily, February 29, 2020, https://stanforddaily.com/2020/02/29/priced-out/.
72Olivia Sawyer, “How Urban Renewal Harmed Black Communities—and Helped Colleges,” New America, May 12, 2025, https://www.newamerica.org/insights/how-urban-renewal-harmed-black-communities-and-helped-colleges/.
73Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021).
74City of Boston, Student Housing Trends: 2023 (Boston: City of Boston, 2024), 1, https://boston.gov/sites/default/files/file/2024/06/Boston%20Student%20Housing%20Report_Final.pdf.
75Simon J. Levien and Austin W. Li, “For Eighth Year in a Row, Harvard Fails to Meet Boston PILOT Program Request,” Harvard Crimson, February 18, 2020, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/2/18/harvard-pilot-program/.
76Angelina J. Parker and Emily T. Schwartz, “Amid Uncertainties for Boston PILOT, Harvard Fails to Fulfill Payment for 13th Year,” Harvard Crimson, April 29, 2025, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/29/harvard-pilot-13/.
77“How Columbia and N.Y.U. Benefit From Huge Tax Breaks,” New York Times.
05 Governance
78Barringer, Taylor, and Slaughter, “Trustees in Turbulent Times.”
79“Current Trustees,” Yale University, accessed October 9, 2026, https://www.yale.edu/yale-board-trustees/current-trustees.
80“Board Members,” Stanford University Board of Trustees, accessed October 9, 2026, https://boardoftrustees.stanford.edu/board-members.
81Barringer, Taylor, and Slaughter, “Trustees in Turbulent Times.”
82Charlie Eaton and Albina Gibadullina, “The Social Circuitry of High Finance: Universities and Intimate Ties among Economic Elites,” Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.11.2020, Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley, September 2020, https://cshe.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/publications/rops.cshe.11.2020.eatongibadullina.socialcircuitry.9.23.2020_0.pdf.
83Eaton and Gibadullina, “Elite Embeddedness.”
84Eaton, Bankers in the Ivory Tower, 60–65.
85“The Power of College Endowments,” Make Me Smart, episode 1155, Marketplace, May 7, 2024, https://www.marketplace.org/episode/2024/05/07/the-power-of-college-endowments.
86Gary Smith, “The Multibillion-Dollar Mistake Elite Universities Keep Making,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 30, 2026, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-multi-billion-dollar-mistake-elite-universities-keep-making.
87Hayley Cuccinello, “Federal Funding Cuts Are Raising Questions about University Endowments. Here’s What Some Are Worth and How They Work,” CNBC, April 1, 2025, https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/01/how-university-endowments-work.html.
88Eaton, Bankers in the Ivory Tower.
89Abigail S. Gerstein and Amann S. Mahajan, “Harvard College Lays Off Writing Center Director, Consolidates Center,” Harvard Crimson, July 28, 2026, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/7/28/college-writing-center-closure/.
90“‘A Step Backwards’: Students and Faculty on the Arts & Humanities Restructuring,” Chicago Maroon, https://chicagomaroon.com/50123/grey-city/a-step-backwards-students-and-faculty-on-the-arts-humanities-restructuring/.
91Jameel Jaffer et al., “What the Columbia Settlement Really Means,” Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, August 4, 2025, https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/what-the-columbia-settlement-really-means.
92William C. Mao, Veronica H. Paulus, and Elise A. Spenner, “Harvard Grad Schools Rebrand Diversity Offices as University Wipes DEI Messaging,” Harvard Crimson, July 13, 2025, https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/7/13/grad-school-dei-removals/.
93David Pozen, Ryan Doerfler, and Samuel Bagenstos, “Why Universities Must Start Litigating—and How,” Nation, April 7, 2025, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/universities-protests-trump-speech/.
94“Billionaire Donor Assails Brown’s ‘Unconscionable’ Deal with Protesters,” New York Times, May 3, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20251105045005/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/03/business/sterlicht-brown-university-donor.html.
95“For Columbia and a Powerful Donor, Months of Talks and Millions at Risk,” New York Times, May 10, 2024, https://web.archive.org/web/20251104030710/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/10/us/columbia-university-donor-angelica-berrie.html.
96“Harvard Could Face Inquiry into Enron Links,” Guardian, February 4, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/feb/04/internationaleducationnews.highereducation.
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