Cornell University on Tuesday became the latest elite school to propose a course-correction as it navigates one of the toughest periods in the history of American higher education.
In a more-than-200-page report commissioned by Cornell's provost, a special faculty committee outlined what it called an unprecedented crisis facing universities, thanks to disrupted federal funding, an erosion in public trust and rapid AI-led technological change. The committee's recommendations included diversifying funding sources, embracing a range of ideologies and developing a new tuition model.
"Higher education finds itself at a crossroads that calls for more than just surviving a crisis," the committee wrote. "It calls for making difficult choices."
Cornell's report follows similar reflections from Yale University and Vanderbilt University, which criticized institutional missteps and blind spots. Cornell offered a gentler approach and a more capacious central recommendation: To find their footing in the age of artificial intelligence, universities must graduate students with a broader, more human-centered judgment.
"Judgement is the skill that learning produces," the committee wrote, "and it is the university's most important contribution to a modern democracy."
The report described a risk-averse student body anxious about the cost of college and finding a good job. Employers, the committee wrote, hold a "jarring" skepticism about the current generation's ability to handle workplace demands, solve problems without clear answers, and recover from setbacks.
In many instances, the committee recommended a return to the basics. That includes more project-based learning and teaching time management strategies such as "navigating competing priorities, assessing workload, anticipating expectations, and adapting to personal and academic circumstances."
Cornell students who pay full-cost spend nearly $400,000 for an undergraduate degree. The committee found expense along with opaque pricing to be a source of public distrust. But it advised against shortening the time to a degree to three years or leaning in to online education, and instead suggested establishing a task force to develop a new tuition model.
For the university's own finances, the report urged school leaders to push for robust federal and state funding, following the Trump administration's attacks on research dollars. Regarding research, the committee recommended examining "publish-or-perish incentives that emphasize quantity over quality."
The report sees AI as a serious threat, and leans into the notion of fostering human-centered judgment.
"Universities really need to develop a vision of what we do, what we teach, how we teach it, what research we do, how we do it," Kavita Bala, Cornell's provost, said in an interview. "AI could be incredibly positively transformative and deeply harmful both at the same time."
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