Four new projects bring range of perspectives to contemporary topics

Two executive orders signed by the president of the United States in April 2025 aim to fundamentally reshape how accountability for colleges and universities is both monitored and maintained. One order gives universities the option to choose an accreditor, while the other executive order dismantles the Education Department. With these executive orders, senior university leaders are seeking to understand how to successfully guide their institutions through a rapidly changing policy and fiscal environment.

We propose a project that brings together researchers, university leaders, and higher education policy experts to create innovative solutions for these real-time challenges through a two-part initiative: a research project and policy summit. Most importantly, we invite graduate students—the future leaders who will inherit this new accountability system—to participate in this pivotal policy summit hosted at AEI national headquarters in Washington, D.C.

There are numerous extant surveys measuring public trust in science, health officials, and decision-makers. However, to our knowledge there are no surveys of public health officials' perspectives on trust in the public and in individual decision making about health. Numerous recent works in popular media have demonstrated that often people whose behaviors are at odds with health authorities' guidance have reasonable questions and concerns about that guidance. Taking a person-centered approach to communication and decision-making may support greater trust and better outcomes. This requires an understanding of how health officials approach public engagement around decision-making.

We propose a collaboration between AEI and Johns Hopkins, including joint research and public dialogue across difference, that can help shift the paradigm toward rebuilding trust in health and create a path for future partnerships across ideological difference. The project will engage scholars, students, and the public to implement a survey of public health authorities on trust in individual health decision-making and dialogue-based public dissemination to identify opportunities for trust building and future research questions.

Economic research increasingly uses measures of subjective expectations to understand how individuals make choices, yet little data exist on potential migrants' beliefs about immigration risks, benefits, and costs. To address this gap, Johns Hopkins University and the American Enterprise Institute will jointly design and field a novel survey of Central American residents' migration plans and expectations.

This project will leverage AEI's policy expertise with JHU's academic research strength and prioritizes ideological inclusivity by systematically incorporating immigration theories from conservative, liberal, and bipartisan perspectives, ensuring our survey design can evaluate competing claims scientifically rather than foreclosing certain viewpoints from the outset. Through joint interdisciplinary meetings during survey development, we will create a comprehensive dataset of potential immigrants' subjective beliefs about factors affecting migration decisions, including wage differentials, security risks, and deportation likelihood. Deliverables include qualitative and quantitative datasets, a policy brief, and academic papers that improve understanding of how beliefs drive migration choices.

America's role in the world is in flux. Polling and focus group work made available to JHU shows how American voters hold increasingly confused and fluid views about challenges and opportunities facing the nation's foreign policy. This project will gather think tank experts, academics, and journalists across the political spectrum and across intellectual perspectives to explore how to communicate foreign policy issues to the general public. We will also invite local media and local-level social media influencers into the conversation, as they are the people who engage important audiences.

We will build on the initial conversations to design survey research and qualitative analysis that can shed light on how foreign policy issues and information can be communicated to the American public. The results will be summarized in a guide on how to engage Americans on critical foreign policy questions in order to foster a common national conversation that will be of practical use to stakeholders.