The Public Trust Ledger™

History · 1947 to 2026

The letter in its line

The federal executive has addressed college and university leaders as a class many times since 1947. By a strict count, it has asked every institution to publish something voluntarily only twice: in 2006, through the Spellings Commission, and on August 3, 2026. What the sector did after the first time, and what the federal government did with its own attempt to score colleges, is the reason the Ledger is built the way it is.

The count, and the definition behind it

Definition: a call from a Secretary of Education or the federal executive, addressed to all postsecondary institutions as a class, asking them to publish a public statement or public data voluntarily. Not a rule, not a targeted letter, not a report to Congress. Under that definition the count since 1947 is 2. Under a broader reading that counts the Spellings-era transparency push separately from the report itself, the count is 3. The 2013 plan to rate colleges does not qualify, because the government proposed to publish the scores itself. The 2011 and 2025 "Dear Colleague" letters do not qualify, because they were enforcement guidance. The count is a judgment from the record below; the record is what a reader can check.

The record

  1. 1947

    The Truman Commission, "Higher Education for American Democracy"

    Vision, not a call to publish

    President Truman's Commission on Higher Education, chaired by George F. Zook, issued the first volume on December 11, 1947 and completed 6 volumes in 1948. It set a national aim of expanded access, including the community college idea. It asked institutions to publish nothing. It is the origin of the federal government speaking to higher education as a system.

    Source: Truman Library; the report volumes.

  2. 1987

    Secretary Bennett, "Our Greedy Colleges"

    Public pressure

    A sitting Secretary of Education argued in The New York Times on February 18, 1987 that federal aid enabled tuition increases. The op-ed shaped 3 decades of the cost debate and produced no publishing requirement.

    Source: The New York Times, February 18, 1987.

  3. 2006

    The Spellings Commission, "A Test of Leadership"

    Voluntary call to publish · precedent 1

    Secretary Margaret Spellings's Commission on the Future of Higher Education reported in September 2006, calling for comparable public data on cost and outcomes. The sector read it as the prelude to a mandate and moved first.

    Source: U.S. Department of Education, A Test of Leadership (2006).

  4. 2007

    The Voluntary System of Accountability and College Portrait

    The sector's answer, and what became of it

    APLU (then NASULGC) and AASCU launched the VSA in 2007: public four-year institutions posting standardized data in a common template. By 2008 more than 300 institutions had joined, close to 60% of the 2 associations' 520 members. NAICU built U-CAN for private colleges. Over the following decade the College Portrait site was retired and the effort migrated to other measures. Voluntary, opt-in transparency drew broad early participation and then faded.

    Source: NASULGC and Michigan State University announcement (2008); VSA Analytics.

  5. 2011

    The Title IX "Dear Colleague" letter

    Guidance, with enforcement behind it

    Issued April 4, 2011, it reshaped campus adjudication at nearly every college; close to 400 federal investigations followed. It was rescinded on September 22, 2017. Guidance letters move institutions, and they are reversible. Statements institutions publish outlive the letters that prompted them.

    Source: U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (2011; rescission 2017).

  6. 2013–2015

    The federal college ratings plan, proposed and abandoned

    The government's own no-score decision

    Announced in August 2013, the plan would have had the federal government assign a rating to each of the nation's roughly 7,000 institutions. After opposition from institutions and lawmakers across the spectrum, the administration dropped the ratings in 2015 and on September 12, 2015 released the redesigned College Scorecard: costs, graduation rates, and earnings, with no score and no grade. The Ledger follows that decision.

    Source: The New York Times, September 12, 2015; U.S. Department of Education.

  7. 2023

    Letters to 16 governors on land-grant HBCU funding

    A call to states, and a record of achievement

    On September 18, 2023 the Secretaries of Education and Agriculture wrote to 16 governors that 1890 land-grant HBCUs had been underfunded relative to their 1862 peers by more than $12 billion between 1987 and 2020. The letters credited those institutions with remarkable progress under those conditions; Tennessee State University's documented gap alone was about $2.1 billion over 33 years. The call went to states, not to institutions, and asked no institution to publish.

    Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture press release, September 18, 2023; Inside Higher Ed, September 20, 2023.

  8. 2025

    Three actions in one year

    Guidance, executive order, and an offer to 9

    February 14, 2025: an Office for Civil Rights "Dear Colleague" letter on race-conscious programs, enjoined by a federal court on April 24, 2025 and not revived. April 23, 2025: an executive order on accreditation reform. October 1, 2025: the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, offered to 9 universities; none signed, and 7 declined in writing.

    Source: court records in the NEA litigation; the White House; Inside Higher Ed and Higher Ed Dive compact coverage, October 2025.

  9. 2026

    "A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards"

    Voluntary call to publish · precedent 2

    Issued August 3, 2026. Every postsecondary institution is asked to post, by the end of 2026, a public statement addressing 7 questions. The letter contains no mandate, no penalty, and no funding condition. It arrived 3 days before the Department of Justice's August 6 findings on a law school's admissions, which turned on the distance between published policy and internal practice, and 8 days before Federal Student Aid reported that more than 1,900 institutions had unreported or under-reported FVT/GE data.

    Source: U.S. Department of Education, August 3, 2026; U.S. Department of Justice, August 6, 2026; Federal Student Aid GENERAL-26-49, August 11, 2026.

What the record teaches the Ledger

Voluntary transparency fades unless it is tied to work institutions already do. The VSA drew more than 300 institutions and then thinned. The Ledger ties each domain to a filing the institution already owes: FVT/GE and STATS on October 1, 2026 and January 15, 2027; Section 117 on January 31, 2027; the Clery report each October 1.

The government tried a score and stopped. The 2015 decision to publish data without a rating is the reason the Ledger reports 5 dimensions separately and never adds them up.

Letters are reversible; statements are not. The 2011 letter lasted 6 years; the 2025 letter lasted months. A statement an institution posts in 2026 will be read against its practice for as long as it stays up. The Ledger's evidence codes exist so that nothing is posted above what the institution can show.

HBCUs have answered federal calls with less and achieved more. The 2023 letters put that record on paper. The Ledger is built so a mission-driven institution can put its own record on the public file, in figures a reader can check.

Public confidence frames the whole line. Gallup first measured confidence in higher education in 2015, when 57% of American adults expressed a great deal or quite a lot of it. In July 2026 the figure was 38%.

The Public Trust Ledger is an instrument by Sue Mukherjee, Ph.D., Mukherjee & Associates LLC. Sources for every entry are listed in the instrument's Sources and on this page. It is not legal advice.