The Department of Education’s August 3rd letter to university presidents and governing boards raises several important questions. But the way those questions are presented may make it harder for institutions to engage with them productively.
The letter asks institutions to examine issues, including:
- Admissions transparency
- Free speech
- Intellectual pluralism
- Affordability
- Academic rigor in the age of AI
- Foreign influence in research
- The role of higher education in advancing U.S. economic and national interests.
The ideas themselves are worth considering, but the problem is in the way they are presented. The ED’s letter frames them as a broad critique of higher education and a call for accountability, making it harder for institutions to engage with them as strategic questions.
A Lesson from Consulting
I’ve spent years consulting with college and university leaders on financial strategy. The most important thing I’ve learned has little to do with budgeting or enrollment management. It’s about how change actually happens in institutions.
When people feel that they are being criticized, you lose them. They stop listening. They become defensive. Often, it becomes impossible to have a conversation about what needs to change.
This applies to consulting engagements. It applies to board conversations. And it applies to national policy letters that call for institutional change.
The Department of Education Letter
The August 3rd letter contains seven questions. If you strip away the surrounding context and read only those bolded questions, many of them are genuinely worth considering.
For example:
“How will your institution ensure admissions decisions are based on merit, achievement, and your university’s educational purpose?”
And:
“How will your institution encourage intellectual pluralism in all its academic units? How will your faculty hiring and evaluation practices support academic vitality and ensure that all relevant perspectives are taken seriously?”
These are legitimate strategic questions. Most institutions would benefit from answering them rigorously and in writing.
The problem is that the questions are embedded in a broader accountability framework. Rather than inviting institutions to self-assess, the letter frames them as a rebuke, a list of things institutions are doing wrong and need to correct. The surrounding context turns it into a matter of compliance and governance expectations.
Accountability vs. Collaboration
Consider two options for presenting the same questions.
An accountability approach:
“Here are seven areas where institutions may not be meeting expectations. Demonstrate that your organization is in compliance.”
A strategic approach:
“These are areas that can affect institutional strength and long-term performance. How is your institution approaching them? Where are you making deliberate choices, and where is there room to improve?”
Same questions. Completely different institutional response. One produces defensiveness, and the other produces engagement.
Why This Matters Now
Higher education is already facing significant pressure to rethink how it operates. As I wrote recently in “When Markets Shrink: What Higher Ed Can Learn from Healthcare, Hospitality, and Media,” institutions need to confront hard questions about cost structure, program viability, and whether their delivery models match changing market demand.
The institutions making progress on those issues are not waiting for an outside organization to tell them that change is necessary. They’re examining their own assumptions and deciding what needs to change. A federal letter that frames institutional strategy primarily as a compliance issue can add another layer of pressure to work that is already difficult. Boards and leadership teams dealing with enrollment uncertainty and financial concerns hear the letter as confirmation that they’re under federal scrutiny. The result is slower, more cautious, and more defensive action.
If the goal is to accelerate the kind of strategic thinking and institutional change that actually works, accountability language is counterproductive.
What Boards and Presidents Should Do
Don’t ignore the seven questions because of the letter’s tone. Strip away the compliance language and treat the letter as a legitimate strategic prompt.
Ask yourselves:
Are we clear about what our institution uniquely delivers, and are we being intentional about it? Or are we maintaining the same program portfolio we had twenty years ago?
Do we have genuine intellectual pluralism in our academic units, or tokenism? Is faculty hiring built around scholarly vitality, or built around filling the seat that opened?
Are our governance structures aligned with our educational mission? Which structures exist because they serve a current purpose, and which have simply been carried forward over time? If we redesigned our governance model today, what would be different?
These questions should be part of the work of the full board, not simply a committee exercise focused on federal requirements.
And if you’re already doing this work, already asking these questions, already building new delivery models, already rethinking your cost structure, don’t let the framing of the letter undermine your confidence. Many institutions are ahead of where the letter assumes they are. The strategic work you’re doing is exactly what sustainable higher education requires.
The Real Test
This is another one of the lessons I’ve taken from consulting: strong institutions are willing to review where they are before circumstances force them to. They ask difficult questions because they want a clearer understanding of who they are, what they deliver, and what they need to do to remain sustainable. Compliance is one consideration, but it shouldn’t be the sole reason for examining your institutional strategy,
The seven questions in the ED letter are worth considering. But you don’t need a federal accountability framework to ask them. You need board leadership that understands the market, respects the complexity of institutional change, and is willing to make deliberate choices rather than reluctant reductions.
Related Reading
The Confidence Paradox: Why 2026’s Optimism Masks a Structural Crisis
When Markets Shrink: What Higher Ed Can Learn From Healthcare, Hospitality, and Media
FuturED Finance helps CFOs and campus leaders build the financial models, scenario planning capacity, and strategic frameworks required to navigate market transitions deliberately rather than reluctantly. Let’s talk about what your institution’s strategy looks like over the next five and ten years.
“US Department Of Education” by Maryland GovPics is licensed under CC BY 2.0.