Drawing from national leaders in education, business, and government, this commission analyzed the current state of undergraduate education and offers recommendations to improve the quality of student learning, increase college completion rates, and ensure all students have access to an affordable postsecondary education.

A group of scholars from the historical, psychological, psychiatric, and social science disciplines met in a series of seminars to explore the interplay between individual psychology and historical change.

This project traced the development of the modern general-purpose philanthropic foundation and assessed its role in philanthropy as a whole, as compared with the roles played by government, business corporations, company-affiliated foundations, individual donors, community-service organizations, and other participants in philanthropic activity.

The International Criminal Court is designed to bring to justice individuals who commit genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The Academy brought together legal, political, and military experts to examine the proposed International Criminal Court and its meaning for US security.

This study examined the scope of mass incarceration, its political significance, and its social impacts, weighing the concerns about crime control, rehabilitation, and more fundamental issues of social justice.

The Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences claimed a space in the national dialogue for the humanities and the social sciences and recommended specific steps that government, schools and universities, cultural institutions, businesses, and philanthropies could take to support and strengthen these areas of knowledge.

The Academy initiated this study in 1964 to imagine the future and identify the problem areas and social and intellectual questions likely to be central by the year 2000.

The Forum, a collaboration of higher education leaders and scholars, launched in 1984 and moved to the Academy in 2022. The Higher Education Forum is an opportunity for the Academy to provide leadership and learning on pressing issues in higher education with a cross-disciplinary and cross-sector approach that draws on the strengths of its members and Affiliates.

The Humanities Indicators is a nationally recognized source of nonpartisan information on the state of the humanities, providing researchers, policy-makers, journalists, humanities practitioners, and engaged citizens with better tools to answer basic questions about the past, present, and future of the field.

The Commission on the Arts is a multi-year project with distinguished cochairs, more than $1 million of support from foundations and individuals, and a commitment to exploring the role of the arts in American life, with an emphasis on arts education and infrastructure.

Less than one-third of American undergraduates major in the natural sciences, mathematics, or engineering. This project examined the goals of science requirements for nonscientists, and how students fulfill those requirements, in an effort to inform curriculum policies at higher education institutions.

Most Americans seek a more coherent, collaborative, national conversation in which individual interests can be aligned with the greater good. This project analyzed American institutions to develop a better understanding of their role in the American democratic system and to develop proposals to increase civic participation and public confidence in American leaders and institutions.

This project studied the influence of Paul Tillich⁠—a distinguished philosophical and cultural theologian and an eminent interpreter of the 20th century⁠—on contemporary life.

In 1969, during a time of great student unrest across the country, the Academy founded The Assembly on University Goals and Governance to study a series of issues in higher education that were not directly linked to the problems of disorder.

This study explored the impact of growing racial and ethnic diversity on college and university campuses and the responses of faculties and administrative leaders to these demographic changes.

In 1985, the Academy hosted a major international symposium commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist and the “father of quantum mechanics.” The symposium’s papers were published in collective volume in 1988.

This project examined higher education and research in Germany and the United States.

The Academy appointed a study group to examine the issues raised when American universities consider education, research, or service agreements with institutions in countries possibly involved in serious violations of human rights in general and, more specifically, of academic freedom.

In 1973, the Academy formed a planning committee to explore the development and creation in the United States of an institute for advanced humanistic studies, somewhat analogous to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

In the early 1990s, the Academy held a four-day conference to address America's crisis in health care spending and the idea of equitable and adequate health care for all. The edited report was distributed to health care leaders around the country.