Americans’ confidence in higher ed is continuing to shrivel — a troubling sign that could foreshadow further erosion of colleges’ enrollment, funding, and stature in the coming years.
The numbers are the latest indication — and a stark one — of higher ed’s image problem.
Five years ago, roughly half of people surveyed by Gallup expressed confidence in colleges and universities. That share has dwindled to just over one third, according to a new poll released Tuesday. Since 2015, confidence in higher ed has fallen by 21 percentage points.
In the world of public-opinion polling, that’s a “pretty precipitous” drop, said Zach Hrynowski, a research consultant at Gallup.
“It raised our eyebrows,” he said. “It’s something that we don’t tend to see.” Gallup surveyed more than a thousand people by phone.
The numbers are the latest indication — and a stark one — of higher ed’s image problem. Polling in recent years has documented a widening distrust of postsecondary education among broad swaths of the general public, as partisan debates over the value of a college degree have intensified, the cost to enroll has risen, and student-loan debt has ballooned into a crisis.
Most Americans surveyed by Gallup, 62 percent, have “very little” or just “some” confidence in colleges and universities. In 2015, that number was 42 percent.
Since these findings were collected in early- to mid-June, they don’t factor in the Supreme Court’s consequential decisions striking down race-conscious admissions and axing President Biden’s student-loan debt forgiveness plan.
The survey also didn’t investigate the reasons behind the loss of trust. But other recent Gallup polling shows the findings square with a larger crisis of confidence Americans are feeling when it comes to institutions, including the military, banks, and the health-care industry.
Trends more specific to higher ed are very likely still driving the downturn though, Hrynowski said. Rising costs, a typical gripe, are specifically cited in the survey.
Then there’s partisanship. Republicans reported the steepest trust deficit in the survey, with a 17-point drop in confidence since 2018. In 2015, more than half of them — 56 percent — said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher ed. Now, that share is less than a fifth. Confidence among Democrats is dropping, too, though less drastically.
Yet the bigger concern for university leaders may not be partisanship, Hrynowski said. Even college graduates are hemorrhaging confidence in the system. In the most recent survey, less than half of people with college degrees expressed confidence in higher ed. The trust decline over time was even larger for those with advanced degrees.
“In some ways, that should be a little bit more of a flag if you’re a president of a university or dean of admissions,” he said. “It’s even those Americans who have gone to college saying, ‘I’m less confident in these institutions than I used to be.’”
