The College Crisis: Heads of Dartmouth & Berkeley Debate the Decline of US Universities

Dartmouth’s president said colleges should bear some responsibility when students leave with heavy debt and weak job prospects. Dartmouth packages aid without loans, a third of students attend free, and lower- or middle-income students may pay about $5,000 a year.

Both leaders conceded that higher education needs internal reform, especially after universities blurred education with politics and advocacy. Dartmouth’s president said universities “lost sight” of their mission, while Berkeley’s chancellor acknowledged the campus had not been sufficiently tolerant of viewpoint diversity.

Dartmouth restored the SAT because its own data suggested standardized testing helped identify talented lower-income applicants. The president argued tests were less influenced by family spending than recommendation letters, summer activities, and other application advantages; other Ivy League schools subsequently followed.

Berkeley is preparing for a future with less federal research money by looking harder at industry partnerships and philanthropy. Its chancellor described research funding as a bundle that may need to shift as federal support declines, rather than assuming Washington will remain the dominant source.

Administrative growth is partly self-inflicted bureaucracy and partly the result of universities being expected to provide far more services than decades ago. Berkeley has a formal “bureaucratic burden” initiative, while both leaders pointed to compliance requirements, advising, and large-scale mental-health services that now require staffing.

The presidents do not expect AI to make elite residential universities obsolete because they see their strongest product as human development rather than knowledge delivery. They emphasized agency, empathy, face-to-face disagreement, resilience, and identity formation—skills they argue develop through sustained residential interaction, not merely access to information.

The discussion placed part of America’s education failure before college: K–12 schools are not meaningfully closing achievement gaps students bring into kindergarten. Dartmouth’s president also cited her prior research finding that some elementary teachers themselves lacked sufficient mathematics competency, weakening what gets transmitted to students.

Large endowments are not simply investment pools; at these universities they directly subsidize both financial aid and research infrastructure that grants do not fully cover. Dartmouth’s president said the institution loses money on each research dollar because buildings, compliance, and supporting systems require additional university funding.