Why Flagships Are Winning

Federal attacks on elite private universities, and a few public ones, might lead one to believe that our entire system of higher education is buckling under pressure. But just below the media and political fray, flagship research institutions are forging ahead with great determination.

Flagships and their leading public peers educate millions of students and conduct about half the nation’s university-based research. In a populist age, they remain exceedingly popular. Opinion polls may suggest a generalized ambivalence about college education, but application and enrollment figures tell a different story: If there is a crisis of confidence in our universities, it is not scaring students and parents away from flagships. The people want what they offer because they offer all things to all people: sports, jobs, medical care, scientific inventions, cultural amenities — and not least, world-class education at mass scale.

Flagships are accountable to their states and protected by them, but they also march to their own drums. Big, broad, and anarchically self-organizing, they are not easily controlled by any government. They focus instead on competing with rivals, not just on football Saturdays but in every other thing they do. We all benefit because of it.

While flagships, like all institutions, face novel threats, they are well positioned to survive the present and thrive in the future. The pressure they feel is hardly new. They have been living in an age of disruption for nearly two decades.

It is easy to forget, but not so long ago, the big threat to flagships was disinvestment. Waggish presidents had long lamented the shift from “state-funded” to “state-assisted” to “state-located” public universities. Then the Great Recession of 2007-09 drove state budgets off a cliff. Students, it was feared, would be saddled with runaway tuition and unpayable debts. Yet universities, not states, were fingered as the culprits, ostensibly because of administrative bloat and fiscal indiscipline.

The entire sector soon fell into crisis, “academically adrift.” Futurists came forward with books proposing radical reforms: unbundling degrees into market-ready credentials, reorganizing academic departments to solve wicked problems, revolutionizing and democratizing college through technology, or redesigning the public research university tout court. And who could forget the MOOCs — massive open online courses — that would obviate human contact, on the cheap.

Online education, like AI today, was a chance to turn the world upside down. To gleeful prophets of “disruptive innovation,” for-profit online upstarts could make dinosaurs out of brick-and-mortar campuses. Even Harvard and MIT got religion in launching “edX” — a play that suddenly made online chic — even if elite institutions had no intention of throwing their doors open. Those in the middle, the big, dumb state schools, could not help but slump into mediocrity.

Of course, that did not happen. edX and the for-profit upstarts flamed out. The pandemic soured everyone on online cure-alls. And the elite privates, once thought to be legally, financially, and reputationally impregnable, were shockingly revealed to be our most vulnerable institutions. As the Ivies cowered before trumped-up inquisitions into antisemitism in 2024 and undisguised extortion in 2025, which players were left on the field? The big, dumb state schools.

The Great Recession steeled flagships for what they now face under a cruel new regime. The shock of that earlier disruption jolted public research universities out of complacent old habits and emboldened them to chart their own paths. Courting students and donors, poaching faculty and administrators, chasing more grant dollars, stealing best practices from rivals, and expanding collaborations with industry, they learned to manage their own priorities, strategies, and resources more autonomously than ever before.

Their prickly independence brought frequent conflict with governors and trustee boards. Some moved too fast for trustees’ comfort. Others moved too slow. But flagships in the 2010s obeyed a higher market logic by making peer institutions their pace-setters. Public universities retooled their internal operations to meet the moment, often by taking a page from the privates. Sophisticated enrollment management targeted prospective students, particularly high-paying out-of-state and international ones, with precise recruitment strategies. Aggressive branding and marketing reinforced the sales pitch.

They also imposed market discipline on the academic core. Responsibility-center-management (RCM) budget schemes routed tuition dollars to wherever the students were flocking — STEM fields, mainly — while deans found creative ways to save humanities and the arts.

On the research side, industry-wide benchmarking in the form of research-excellence analytics caught on as a way for ambitious institutions to discover and invest in their own competitive advantages. Cluster hiring identified scientific and scholarly subfields that could become world-class by adding more faculty to move “from good to great” in strategic areas.

Across every enterprise function, campuswide strategic plans harvested bright ideas from every corner of the university. Stakeholders jockeyed for position in these catalogs of top-level action items to keep harried senior leaders focused on key priorities. Institutions embraced quantitative metrics — retention and graduation rates, campus diversity indicators, and more — to measure progress against competitors and inform strategies to catch up with them.

Critics, particularly within higher education, decried these and other corporate-management techniques as an offense to timeless intellectual and public values. Ironically, it was market instincts that kept flagships on course. During a decade heady on radical reform proposals, flagships ignored the noise around them and doubled down on improving what distinguished them from their rivals.

Today, flagships stand battered and bruised but fundamentally sound. Apples-to-apples comparisons are difficult across two very different sectors. But contrast the 38 public with the 31 private members of the Association of American Universities (AAU), our leading consortium of major research institutions. This reveals the extraordinary combination of access and excellence that defines our best public research universities, flagships, land-grants, and otherwise. Publics admit half of their applicants; privates, only one-twelfth. Publics cost nearly $10,000 less than privates a year to attend. This is not because states, which chip in only one-sixth of publics’ funding, cover all that gap.

It is because publics economize. Per student, they spend only half as much as privates on instruction and academic support, one-third as much on student services, and one-quarter as much on other institutional support. While four- and six-year graduation rates lag, on average, at AAU publics, it is striking that they do not lag even further, given the extreme selectivity and lavish spending patterns of AAU privates. Publics, in a word, overperform. Consider these data, from the National Center for Education Statistics:

Postgraduate outcomes at publics remain superb too. Public university graduates experience low unemployment and enter the work force with manageable debt, an average of $27,100 for the 55 percent who have any debt at all. Alumni surveys and economic analyses consistently reveal deep satisfaction and wide-ranging career success.

We have begun hearing lately about the job-market woes of entry-level computer science and other AI-adjacent majors — but that only confirms that the best way to prepare students for an uncertain future is to give them the well-rounded liberal education at the core of nearly every flagship curriculum. Anyone who claims that public universities are failing our students is either provably wrong or in possession of a crystal ball that shows how centuries of educational experience are about to be upended by three years of ChatGPT.

Even the politicians are back in their corner — at least the ones who are responsible for running them: state legislators. After a steep drop following the Great Recession, fiscal support for four-year institutions has rebounded, tuition increases have stabilized, and a chunk of the restored taxpayer money is being used to increase student access and enhance student success, not merely to backfill gaps left by prior disinvestment. As of Inauguration Day 2025, public higher education was in better shape than it had been in years.

What happens now? Consider recent cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and other federal grants. To date, ideologically motivated rescissions of DEI, climate-change, and public-health research have swept through universities like tornadoes, capriciously devastating unlucky individuals and entire scholarly neighborhoods. If the threatened reduction in indirect-cost reimbursements to 15 percent comes to pass, the effect will be more like a Category 5 hurricane: a veritable inundation of financial pain across the landscape.

But if, as seems to be the case, frantic lobbying on Capitol Hill, aided by some creative accounting, will roll back much of the proposed cuts, we may ride out the storm with reparable damage. Congressional delegations of both parties know that it is in their states’ immediate self-interest to shore up the major research universities (and their medical centers) that anchor regional economies. States with fiscal capacity and wise leadership could even help bridge the gap, as Massachusetts is proposing.

The feds are also coming after student loans and grants. Here, the tornado victims are aspiring nurses, social workers, and doctors who will face punitive new limits on what they can borrow. Also in harm’s way are students and faculty at regional and urban public universities. Already facing a demographic cliff making it hard to fill their classes, public universities that are not flagships or land-grants will suffer even more if state monies have to be diverted into backfilling cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

However unjust the circumstances, flagships will exploit their enviable catchments and inherited wealth to weather this latest disruption. They still have their pick of in-state students and generations of alumni donations to help defray the cost. Despite diminishing returns and local challenges, top flagships can still attract high-paying out-of-state students too. Southern states present a rich paradox: Students are flocking to the South in search of lifestyle amenities at the same time that faculty are looking for a way out for fear of censorship and political meddling.

Which brings us to the single greatest threat to all universities — attacks on academic freedom. Let’s say officials give scholars a list of 10 or 100 or 1,000 words they may not use. (It happens.) That will only force faculty to use more words to get their original points across. Such shenanigans also run headlong into the anarchical organization of large state universities. When mandates to cull “dangerous” ideas from the curriculum trickle down to midlevel administrators, they either make a bureaucratic hash of things or ask committees to change some words around.

At the national level, ideological attempts to fetter public universities are self-limiting by the dynamics of interstate competition. If Florida, for example, bans climate-change research, the study of civilization’s biggest challenge will simply migrate to higher ground — Boulder, perhaps — while Gainesville goes the way of Atlantis. Every time a state subverts freedom of thought, it delivers an unsolicited gift to the other forty-nine. That same dynamic is now playing out at a global scale as our federal leaders drive top U.S. talent to Canada, Europe, and China.

None of this matters if, say, the federal government compels accreditation agencies to certify universities for “viewpoint neutrality.” But as with the assessment movement, the legacy of a prior conservative administration, this would probably just spawn an ugly and ineffective compliance bureaucracy. Federal officials are on a fool’s errand if they think they can penetrate the inner sanctum of classroom teaching while they are dismantling the very agency, the Department of Education, needed to enforce their diktats.

The lesson of our century so far is clear. After a decade book-ended by a once-in-a-generation financial crisis and a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, flagships proved unusually disciplined at solving for both access and excellence. They harnessed market competition to serve their public missions. And with the rest of the sector, they withstood a heap of gratuitous abuse.

No one should gloat over flagships’ advantages. All of our higher-education institutions exhibit consistent excellence across institutional types. Remarkably, while elite institutions offer more premium experiences, they do not significantly outperform even unselective ones when it comes to core academic skills and overall satisfaction. Flagships merely occupy a strategic middle rung on the ladder of selectivity and upward mobility.

It is rather the case that with great privilege comes great responsibility, which is why flagships must plow forward, not by resting on their inherited strengths but by refining new strategies honed over a generation of competitive struggle. No one university can resist the power of a hostile government. But a 50-state network of friendly rivals most assuredly will.