The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) recently published The Trump Administration’s Higher Education Compact: Eight Proposals for Delivering on Its Vision, which provides a thoughtful, if sometimes toothless, series of suggestions for how to enact the policies adumbrated in the October 2025 Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. Since America’s leading universities swiftly indicated that they would not sign the Compact or voluntarily undertake its catalogue of reforms, AEI sensibly canvassed proposals for how these goals might be achieved through public policy. Different contributors provide recommendations for the Compact’s eight policy priorities: Admissions Equality, The Marketplace of Ideas, Nondiscrimination in Hiring, Institutional Neutrality, Student Learning, Student Equality, Financial Responsibility, and Foreign Entanglements.

The Compact, AEI’s publication, and higher education reformers generally seek to remove American colleges and universities’ commitments to illiberalism, discrimination, and repression, as well as their increasing dedication to refashioning the republic as a whole in their grotesque image. We seek to restore colleges and universities that are dedicated once more to liberty, nondiscrimination, and tolerance, and which aim at the joint pursuit of truth in service of a free republic. Reformers’ intramural arguments generally are about how to achieve these aims.

AEI sought to elicit practicable policy recommendations, rather than shoot-for-the-moon proposals. This is sensible enough, in theory. But a great deal of the recommendations, therefore, are thin. If you drill down, a great deal consist of Congress should—a phrase repeated at least seven times in this series of recommendations. For example:

• Congress should attach a few additional, simple criteria to ensure a commitment to free inquiry.
• Congress should mandate that any institution receiving federal funds annually disclose disaggregated admissions data, including average standardized test scores for accepted and rejected applicants by race.
• Congress should crack down on institutions that are not sufficiently committed to free inquiry.
• Congress should require institutions to give prospective students a binding indication of their net tuition prices before they even apply.
• Congress should simplify and streamline the student aid system.
• Congress should expand on the excellent work already done to hold colleges accountable for poor outcomes in OBBBA by introducing price accountability.
• Congress should require colleges to accept transfer credits from all other institutions recognized by the same accreditor.

All this is well and fine, but Congress is exceedingly unlikely to do what it should. Kyle Beltramini and Steven McGuire, in their chapter on Institutional Neutrality, make clear why little can be expected from Congress should: “Congressional gridlock has frustrated and will likely continue to frustrate attempts to comprehensively address higher education at the national level.” (p. 19) The recommendation trustees should is also less than it seems, since university trustees have been failing en masse to do their duty for generations. The large amount of the AEI’s report that consists of should, alas, should be taken as pious hopes. That much is indeed toothless.

Some authors direct their recommendations to state legislators to enact legislation reforming the state university systems. This indeed is more promising—that, at any rate, is what my own organization has focused on recently. State-level reform, of course, is diffuse, piecemeal, painstakingly slow, and practically confined to about one half of the country. But at least some reform can be achieved—and it is reform that builds toward a strategic goal. Freeing state universities will free a large majority of American college students from illiberal indoctrination. Freeing even half of state universities will also disrupt the career cycle of radical bureaucrats and professors, who depend on securing positions nationwide. AEI’s recommendations to pursue these education reforms via the states are sensible—although they offer no overnight fixes.

AEI’s contributors make some points of particular value. Ian Kingsbury provides a good rule of thumb for what would constitute statistically meaningful evidence of race discrimination in admissions:

any institution at which one racial group is favored or disfavored by more than 0.5 standard deviations (SD) on entrance exams relative to others with comparable nonracial qualifications, or the average accepted scores for one group are lower than the average rejected scores for another.

The proposed threshold—0.5 SD, or roughly 115 SAT points or six MCAT points—captures meaningful bias without punishing natural variation, as it aligns with statistical norms holding that differences below this cutoff are attributable to chance. The second criterion targets inversions like Columbia’s rejected Asians outscoring accepted blacks. (p. 6)

This is an elegant and useful formulation that higher education reformers should promote more broadly. I certainly will.

Jay Greene also makes an important point when he notes that executive action alone likely would be sufficient to reduce the number of foreign students enrolled at American universities:

The Supreme Court has held that the executive branch has ‘broad discretion to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States,’ meaning the Trump administration is likely on firm legal footing when imposing a 15 percent cap on undergraduate enrollment. The administration should extend that cap to total enrollment as well.

The administration does not need to wait for Congress to pass new legislation, nor does it need to rely
on voluntary cooperation with universities, as implied by the compact’s structure. (p. 38)

Greene’s point suggests an important conclusion: higher education reformers who care about practicality should focus on achieving this reform, since it will not require Congressional approval.

AEI’s publication prompts a reconsideration of higher education strategy as a whole. Education reformers generally have adopted several overlapping strategies:

1. Use the Department of Education while you’ve got it, swing for the moon, and see what you can get.
2. Work steadily toward enduring external policy reform, particularly through federal statute.
3. Go to the states and claw back some freedom in the public universities, especially in the red and purple states.
4. Urge internal reforms via the existing university administrations and faculties.
5. Seek to sway public opinion to support higher education reform.

All of these strategies have merits, and they need not be mutually exclusive. AEI’s reforms generally fall into the second and fourth categories, focusing on steady external and internal reform. They are thoughtful, sensible, prudent, and just may not have that much juice to them. Sensibility and prudence only get you so far.

Which brings us back to Use the Education Department while you’ve got it; swing for the moon; and see what you can get. This has presumably been the philosophy underpinning the Trump administration’s actions to date, and it stands in notable contrast to the staid prescriptions of the AEI. Swinging for the moon can also only get you so far. But it has juice, and it’s achieved real results.

Sober steadiness has its place. But we also need the spirit of David Farragut: Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead! This reader hopes that AEI will seek to canvass Farragutian education reform policy prescriptions in its future publications.

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