Those interested in questions surrounding the future of higher education, and its role in American society and the economy, should generally be focused more on public schools, like Washington and Michigan, and their less-resourced peers. That’s because for years they’ve been the sites of debate over free speech, diversity initiatives and the value of a college degree. 

The reach of America’s public universities, schools that are funded by state governments, is enormous. Public colleges enroll about 11.9 million undergraduates in America, compared to the 66,000 undergraduates at the schools that make up the Ivy League.

To casual and even close observers of national headlines, it may seem like public colleges have escaped some of the scrutiny related to campus protests surrounding the Israel-Hamas war and what the schools’ reaction to them mean for their commitment to student safety, free speech and diversity. 

But that’s only because public colleges have been wrestling with these issues under the glare of politics for years, said Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware. 

Just a few examples: Earlier this year, Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate, signed a law that banned public colleges and universities from using government money on diversity programs. Pressure from DeSantis on New College, a public liberal arts school in Florida, has already resulted in changes to the school, like the elimination of its gender studies department. 

At the University of Wisconsin, the system’s leadership ultimately agreed to a deal with the state’s Republican lawmakers to curtail diversity programming and staff in exchange for more funding. 

“The public colleges have been the bellwether,” Baker said. “Public institutions are under the same amount of attack, it’s just that the Harvard’s of the world are no longer inoculated.” 

Part of the reason why public colleges have more experience dealing with intervention from politicians is because state lawmakers often have some degree of control over the schools, whether through appointing leadership, appropriating funding or other levers. But it’s also because the community often views them differently from private institutions, Baker said. 

“The public feels a different ownership of their public flagships,” Baker said. “That is what allowed the public universities to be the canary in the coalmine of all of these contested pieces.”

In addition, public colleges have had to grapple with the tension between allowing for a wide range of campus speakers and views, and student safety, because they’re subject to different laws surrounding free speech. Public colleges can only restrict the time, place and manner of an event, but largely can’t regulate speech. 

That dynamic has pushed public colleges to find ways to maintain safety amid contentious events. For example, in 2017, the University of California-Berkeley spent about $4.8 million on security related to appearances from controversial speakers like conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. That same year, when white nationalist Richard Spencer appeared at the University of Florida, the school spent $500,000 on security related to the appearance. 

Berkeley’s Chancellor Carol Christ recently told The New Yorker that the aftermath of the testimony of the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “offers ample evidence of the perils and challenges higher education is facing at that intersection of free speech, diversity of perspective, and the essential import of civil discourse for strong campus communities.” 

“At Berkeley we have been grappling with some of these issues for years, if only because as a public university we have far less discretion than private institutions when it comes to First Amendment compliance.”

For years, public colleges have also been at the center of the economic questions surrounding higher education. 

“There has been a growing sensitivity to the role of public institutions in contributing to public life and particularly in the work that they do for the majority of students in the country,” said Brendan Cantwell, a professor at Michigan State University who studies higher education. 

Over the past several years, experts, policymakers and the media have increasingly recognized the way that many public colleges, including those that aren’t household names like University of Michigan or University of Washington, propel large swaths of students economically. 

Those “pathways for opportunities for many students,” at public colleges “just don’t exist in the most elite institutions because they enroll relatively few students overall and most of the students that they enroll are from already well-off backgrounds.” That means “even if those students have great outcomes, those outcomes don’t reflect a change in life circumstances.” 

In 2017, research by economist Raj Chetty and his co-authors helped to bring this dynamic more into the public consciousness. In addition, the Great Recession, which brought increased attention to the cost of higher education and student debt, and questions around the cost of the value of a degree, brought increased focus on these more affordable schools. 

Most recently, changes in the U.S. News and World Best College Rankings responded to that shift. The latest version of the rankings emphasized certain factors, including schools’ ability to change their students’ circumstances, that propelled some public colleges higher. In its latest ranking, Berkeley outranked Ivy League Dartmouth College and Vanderbilt University; Michigan outranked Georgetown and Washington University in St. Louis; and the University of Texas at Austin outranked New York University and Tufts University. 

“I’m not sure that this is a revolution as much as it is an evolution,” Cantwell said of the recognition of the contribution of public colleges. 

Still, many of the schools doing the bulk of this work, like regional public colleges, haven’t benefited from this dynamic in the same way as public flagship colleges. And though public flagship colleges are often more affordable, at least in-state, than private colleges, they’ve also drawn scrutiny over tuition increases. 

“We’re seeing an intensification of the stratification across higher education in the United States,” said Paul Garton, an assistant professor of education at East Tennessee State University. America’s public higher education system has historically been defined by its variety of options, including community colleges, regional public colleges and flagship public colleges, he said. 

Now, “it’s less one person has options and more we have schools for different social classes,” he said. 

Between 2010 and 2021, enrollment at flagship colleges in 28 states rose, while enrollment at public regional colleges slumped, according to an analysis by the Chronicle of Higher Education. In addition, as state funding has declined, flagship public colleges have enrolled more out of state students over the past several years, in part because these students, who pay higher tuition, are more lucrative. 

The pandemic also played a role in the growing prowess of public flagship universities, said Craig Goebel, a principal at Art and Science Group, a consulting firm that works with colleges. 

In many states, “flagship publics were hit quite hard financially during the pandemic and as a result, they were “extremely aggressive in growing their class sizes,” following the pandemic, he said. “They actually enrolled massive numbers of new students, many of whom might have typically gone to the regional publics.” 

Students are increasingly interested in a large swath of opportunities that larger schools can provide, he said. 

“There’s almost been a generational shift in preference for institutions that are more urban in setting and have greater breadth,” said Goebel, whose firm regularly polls college-bound high school students and their families. These are schools that are either in a major city or institutions that are very large and have an entire ecosystem built around them, he said. 

“They really are turned on by the strong school spirit and being in a major urban center or larger campus, it’s perceived that you’ll have more opportunities for undergraduate research or internships.”  

Still, despite increased attention to public colleges and their role over the past several years, the last few months have shown the limits of that attention. 

In one stark example: The resignation saga of former Harvard President Claudine Gay dominated headlines over the past week and a half. During the same period, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, a regional public school, was ousted for making pornographic videos with his wife. He’s argued his termination violates his free speech. That episode hasn’t received nearly the same level of attention in the national media. 

Part of the reason the media, lawmakers and financial executives and other people in power focus so much on schools like Harvard is because these schools are a pipeline to those kinds of positions. The students on these campuses are often “the kind of people who are really engaged in current events and the world and thinking of themselves as future leaders who will shape public life,” Cantwell said.  

As a result, “the contest and the conflicts that they have about current events are more intense then if you go to a regional public university, for example, where many of the students are working 20 or 30 more hours a week, where they may be older and have dependents that they’re caring for.” 

In addition, federal lawmakers, the media and others often have “personal ties” to these schools, Cantwell said. Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican whose questioning of Ivy League presidents was a major factor in the presidents of Harvard and Penn resigning, attended Harvard. 

Baker’s research has found that more than half of the people who regularly write about student loans in major media outlets attended an Ivy League school, a very selective private institution, or flagship public college (this is where I disclose that I went to the University of Michigan, a flagship public college playing Monday). In the U.S., only 8% of students overall attend these types of schools. 

“Our media is obsessed with Harvard and its ilk,” Baker said. “Some of this can be driven by where these folks went to college, both reporters but also their editors. Some of this can be driven by who they see their audiences as and what they see their audiences as being interested in. That all comes into the mix there.” 

“There’s no way after this past month, you can tell me that public universities get the same amount of inquiry, introspection,” she added.