Free speech, government overreach, and student concerns over return on investment amidst continued tuition inflation are all issues plaguing higher education, specifically elite private universities. Three presidents from local institutions caught between these modern tensions addressed what they see as “The Future of Higher Education” during the first day of this year’s Boston Globe Summit.

The panel featured Dartmouth College President Sian Beilock, Babson College President Stephen Spinelli, and Greg Weiner, the president of Assumption University. It was moderated by Diti Kohli, a general assignment reporter at The Boston Globe business desk. Kohli graduated from Emerson in 2021, and often covers impacts to higher education in New England.

Before the panel began, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, the Chancellor of UMass Boston, gave remarks on the history of educational excellence in Massachusetts, as well as its emergence as a central location in the political crossfire of President Trump’s anti-DEI campaigns and threats to academic independence.

“In these wicked times, universities must build resilience,” Suárez-Orozco said.

Beilock, in her introductory remarks, said she sees now as a time to “double down” on the mission of universities. She said this mission must also be more clearly articulated in a time when many students are calling on their higher education institutions to speak on political issues.

“We’re not political organizations like the RNC or DNC. We’re also not social advocacy organizations,” she said, adding that facing pushback as a place of higher learning is not a new phenomenon to the current administration. “Our mission is to educate … and you do that by bringing the best and brightest to campus regardless of their means. And you teach them how to think, not what to think.”

Beilock also highlighted a program on facilitating diverse conversations she started in 2024 called Dartmouth Dialogues as a way to address these desires and divides. According to an assessment of the program made by the college this fall, more than half of incoming students identified dialogue as a factor in choosing Dartmouth over other elite institutions, and slightly less than half said institutional restraint played a similar role in attracting them. Over 90% of students additionally stated that engaging with opposing viewpoints is essential to their education.

Calling Babson “the business equivalent of the music conservatory,” Spinelli discussed the way his college, in addition to educating on business, represents a “crisp value proposition” in a market where return on investment has become a major concern for students and their families.

All three institutions represented on the panel differ in tuition costs, ranging between $51,000 and $57,000 per year for Babson and Assumption, all the way to roughly $69,000 for Dartmouth in 2025. Even with this variance, all three are more expensive than their statewide tuition averages, though they fall close in cost to comparable elite-level private universities.

Echoing Beilock, Spinelli said he thinks much of the anxiety around the value of higher education stems from not being honest with its customers about the goals and advantages of their experience. 

He and Wiener discussed what they called “lifetime return on investment” of a degree, as a better indication of value than trying to analyze worth after just a few weeks in the job market, which they said is common for alumni.

“The advantages of both a liberal arts and a pre-professional education accrue over time,” Wiener said.

He also expressed a hopeful long-term perspective as he reported that enrollment at Assumption, a small Catholic liberal arts school in Worcester, Massachusetts, that enrolled less than 2,000 undergraduates in 2024, is now up in enrollment for the first time in three years.

“A key is not to treat the moment as though the erosion of trust in higher education erupted in January of this year,” Wiener said. “It’s been a long decline, and it requires us to model what we hope to inculcate in our students, which is intellectual humility. It’s a moment for self-reflection.”

Dartmouth College, a high-level research university and member of the Ivy League, has been on the front lines of higher education tensions with the Trump administration, receiving roughly $3 million in funding cuts to its research. It also supported a lawsuit by Harvard University against the Trump administration in a similar fight. Since receiving funding cuts last spring, Harvard has become a keystone battleground in deciding the success of the government’s powers over the higher education landscape.

Reflecting on the collegiate business model, Beilock emphasized the importance of supporting research schools, especially since taking grant money almost always results in an overall monetary loss due to the financial realities of funding research, no matter the circumstance, she said. Dartmouth specifically is the “most rural academic medical center,” offering what Beilock called a unique educational service.

“We believe what we are producing is a public good, but we need to do that in a way that the American taxpayers understand,” she said. “I’m excited that we’re working in conversation to improve that apparatus.”

Reflecting on where education goes from here, Spinelli championed the possibilities of a world where information transmission has gone virtual. In response, Beilock extolled the values of a residential college experience, which she said will become highly important to preserve in an age of AI.

“I hope as we push forward with what the next generation of education looks like, we don’t miss that human element,” she said.

Kohli then asked Wiener about a New York Times op-ed he authored last March. In it, he wrote, “The portrait of college campuses as places suffused with one-sided ideology may be a caricature. But a caricature is an exaggerated portrait of something real.”

Wiener reflected on his position by harkening back to his time as a professor, where he said he used to teach American politics without ever referring to current events. This choice, he said, was due to their ever-changing nature compared with what he called “the totality of the education” provided by universities.

“I’m a strong believer in academic freedom as an absolute value,” Wiener said, and called for more consistency in its defense across ideologies by public figures and universities. “We should be willing to risk quite a lot for that,” he added.

For Spinelli, echoed by the others, “the business model” of a college education remains about offering knowledge and a space for respectful debate and independent thought.

“If we don’t do that, then the institution is at risk,” he said. “I don’t know that we have a choice. We either do that or we fail.”