Yale recently released a report asking how universities can “regain trust.” The report offers a familiar list of vague recommendations—“re-center the classroom” (whatever that means), “deliver value,” “focus on the mission”—but avoids the one issue that most directly affects public confidence in higher education: cost.

There is an abundance of low-hanging fruit to meaningfully cut university costs: multi-million dollar administrative salaries, along with bloated staff—one university has eight vice-chancellors—and faculty who do little actual teaching. But the report Maurie McInnis commissioned appears to reflect the priorities of a leftist faculty. The committee was drawn, for instance, from fields such as gender studies and climate change, and Yale faculty donations go almost exclusively to Democrats.

The president of Wesleyan University, where I studied, also wrote a New York Times essay about the Yale report. Interestingly, he noted that community colleges and state universities don’t have the same trust problem. But he also avoided saying why: they cost less. Community colleges have much lower tuition costs, which immediately affects the pocketbooks of students and families. That builds trust and respect. They offer an excellent education at a fraction of the cost, leaving students with little to no debt. (Read “The Community College Reinvents Itself—Again“).

It is not surprising that Wesleyan’s president avoids the cost issue. He is among the highest-paid university presidents in New England, making close to $3 million in total compensation at a relatively small university with a small endowment that relies on tuition income and donations. His chief investment officer makes almost $1.5 million a year, and the list of overpaid administrators goes on.

In every practical sense, higher education has become an insiders’ millionaire club. Students are footing the bill for the administration’s lifestyle, yet when pressed on this, university leaders retreat to claims of “equity.” One university president I spoke with recently pointed to Yale’s pricing model as justification for high tuition, arguing that Yale is effectively free for everyone outside the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans. That’s not exactly right, however.

About 1,000 students out of approximately 6,700 undergraduates qualify for what Yale calls “zero parent share” awards. About half qualify for need-based aid, but that includes loans and expected parent contributions. And tuition is just one cost: housing, meal plans, health insurance, books, and fees add up quickly.

This model does not make college more affordable. Rather, it props up a complex pricing structure that, in economic terms, resembles price discrimination: some families pay more, so others pay less, maximizing total revenue. A single, lower, transparent price would benefit everyone, but that would require institutions to restructure their costs, and they are not prepared to make that sacrifice.

It is also telling to hear a president refer casually to the wealthiest 10 percent as if high tuition is inconsequential for those families. That group includes households earning roughly $200,000 annually, which, after taxes, falls closer to $140,000, with much of their wealth tied up in home equity. (Kamala Harris once advised parents to take out home equity loans to put their children through college). Yet they are expected to absorb costs exceeding $400,000 over four years at Yale? Universities are, in effect, engineering a massive transfer of private household wealth to sustain their operating model.

Where that money goes is another problem. At some institutions, it services institutional debt (read, “UChicago’s Self-Made Crisis“); at others, it funds administrative expansion and external commitments. At Yale, for instance, university funds support significant payments to the City of New Haven alongside rising internal expenditures.

But the pricing problem is inseparable from the governance problem.

After all, universities charge what they do because those setting the prices are insulated from the consequences, and academic leadership benefits too greatly from the current system to seriously reform it. Like government, universities have cultivated an entrenched insider culture—call it an academic deep state—naturally motivated to protect the status quo. If Yale truly wants to regain public trust, the answer likely begins with new leadership.

The odds of institutional improvement are poor, of course, as entrenched academic interests will marshal the resources at their disposal to block reform and protect the status quo. But if universities are serious about regaining the trust of students, parents, and taxpayers, university leadership will have to include outsiders willing to challenge the current model of administrative expansion and unchecked spending.

As I have said before, nearly everything a university does can be done in half the time, for half the cost. That argument will never receive a fair trial, however, so long as universities remain governed by an entrenched insider culture more inclined toward preservation than reform. Meaningful change may therefore require pressure from outside the system—from taxpayers, students, families, employers, and state governments increasingly unwilling to subsidize rising costs without clearer returns.

Many university leaders think they can wait out the current political cycle and that the “good times” of federal largess will return. Perhaps they will. Maybe they won’t. For now, however, the political and fiscal environment appears to be shifting toward greater scrutiny of higher education spending and greater pressure on states and universities to justify rising costs. That may force a fundamental rethinking of how universities are operated and how their costs must realign with changes in grant funding, student revenue, impaired federal loan underwriting, limits on endowment growth, and variable rates of return on university assets.

Until then, universities are unlikely to regain the trust of a public increasingly skeptical of both their costs and their leadership.