The Problem of Public Trust

Public polling on higher education lately has set off some alarm bells. If confidence is indeed falling, what does that augur for colleges?

To add depth and nuance to the conversation, The Chronicle surveyed the American public this summer and found general but weak support for the sector. Almost eight in 10 degree-holders believe the cost was worth it, and about the same share of all people would recommend pursuing a bachelor’s degree. But most of them see good alternative paths to a successful livelihood, and few think colleges greatly benefit their graduates, local community, or society.

The Public-Perception Puzzle

This project examines higher ed’s public-perception problem — and the solutions to it — in our reporting and in an independent national survey conducted by The Chronicle with Langer Research Associates. The survey’s aim is to add depth and nuance to the growing body of research on how people perceive higher ed.

Explore the series.

This month we sat down with three campus leaders — Mike Muñoz, superintendent-president of Long Beach City College, in California; Gregory Washington, president of George Mason University, in Virginia; and M. Roy Wilson, president emeritus of Wayne State University, in Michigan — to talk about the extent to which higher education is experiencing a crisis of public confidence, how that is manifesting itself, and how to build trust.

Leaders are grappling with at least a few conundrums. Prospective students’ aspirations run high, but so do their doubts about whether college is a risk worth taking. Institutions have perpetuated a transactional relationship with students and need to transcend it to demonstrate higher ed’s broader societal value. Public disinvestment has exacerbated, if not created, a trust gap, and that, in turn, is further limiting state support. The way forward, these leaders say, lies in more intentionally identifying students’ and communities’ needs, and finding new ways to serve them.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Sara Lipka: What is your sense right now of the public perception of college?

M. Roy Wilson: The lack of trust is reaching a crisis. It’s not there yet, but it’s butting right up to it, and we have to do something to address it. Otherwise it will become a crisis.

Mike Muñoz: It’s a paradox, because if you talk to people, young people in particular, their aspirations are still very high. And most people still recognize that the best path for them to reach those aspirations is through higher education. So there’s dissonance, because there’s this narrative out in social media, and in media in general, that everyone’s questioning whether or not higher ed is worth it.

Gregory Washington: You don’t have to go too far back in our history to where most college graduates said it was a good investment, and most young adults said college was very important. More of the country is now questioning whether the degree is worth it and whether universities are having a positive impact. It’s changed substantially in a period of about 15 years.

Lipka: Where do these public misgivings show up for you as leaders or for your institutions?

Illustration by The Chronicle, George Mason U.

Washington: When I go to engage government for support. We’re a public four-year institution, the largest in Virginia. Unlike my friends in California and elsewhere, we don’t have a system here, so each university has to engage the state for support for that institution. And the reality is that’s becoming more and more difficult to do, because people are questioning the value of the outcomes they’re getting.

Muñoz: It makes us have to work harder and be really connected to our community. We’re a very large two-year community college in California, and this fall we’ve actually surpassed our enrollments for 2019, the last pre-pandemic fall. One of the ways we’ve been able to achieve that is helping people understand what pathways we have that will lead them either to transfer to a four-year university or into a career.

Also we’ve really focused on helping students coming out of the pandemic understand that they will belong here. We launched a huge “BeLong Beach City College” campaign across the city that’s resonated very well with residents. We actually saw a 10-percent increase in enrollment for Black and African American students this fall over the previous fall. And I think that’s because we’re being intentional about who we want to reach. It really has forced us to be more thoughtful about our engagement strategies and the campus culture we want to create to retain our students.

Wilson: You know, there are more university spots than high-school graduates to fill them. So there are going to be winners and losers in the enrollment game. And where the disillusionment with higher ed impacts many of us is in our enrollment. All of us have to make a concerted effort to really differentiate ourselves. For us, we are a public urban research institution, and each one of those words means something. We’ve got to better explain the value of each one of those words in terms of how we define ourselves to the public.

Lipka: How much do you feel as if this is a conversation not about individual institutions and differentiation, but about participating in higher education or not, whether for traditional-age or older students?

Washington: Look, the reality is we need more college graduates now than we did 10 years ago. And if you believe the demographers, we will need more college graduates 10 years from now than we’re producing today. That argument flies right in the face of what is actually happening in the country, where there is a concerted effort among some in industry and many in government to tell students that they actually don’t need to get a degree.

Some of this is happening for good reason. They want people to feel that if you don’t get a college degree, there are other things you can do with your life. That part of it I get and I appreciate. But we have to be careful how we parse that argument. A college graduate will make about $1.3 million more over their lifetime than a person who doesn’t have a degree. A person with a master’s degree will make about $2 million more. That’s data — you can’t run away from it. It doesn’t mean that everybody will be successful, but it does mean that your chances are greater. And I think that is the actual message. The college degree is not a requirement for success, but it definitely increases the opportunities available to you, especially in an environment where technology is dramatically changing how we live, work, and play.

There’s a messaging piece that I think is wrong. Google had a program with 300 people they hired as programmers who they sent through a boot camp and got trained. Then they used that to tout the fact that you don’t need a college degree. But in that same year, they hired 30,000 people with college degrees to program for them. So they clearly didn’t believe the stuff they were preaching. And that’s the kind of rhetoric we have to challenge. As university leaders, we’ve got to tell folks, Hey, this is not accurate. When a young person in an inner-city neighborhood or rural area is told not to get a degree and has no real prospects for a future, you suck the hope out of them, and you don’t give them a pathway toward success.

Wilson: The argument about earning power is certainly a good one. But it’s not just the earning power of a college graduate. The wealth gap takes into account the debt they’re in. And there is very little, if any, wealth gap between a young Black college graduate and a nongraduate. It’s based on the cost and the investment necessary to go to college, and we’ve got to be able to deal with that, the cost of education now.

Lipka: The recent New York Times Magazine essay by Paul Tough describes that wealth premium as nonexistent or not evident, and it uses the term “higher-education casino” to argue that the risk of dropping out with student-loan debt makes college a gamble. What do you think of that characterization?

Illustration by The Chronicle, Long Beach City College

Muñoz: I feel like we have experienced it. Like many other colleges, we saw a dip in our enrollment during the pandemic. We surveyed students who had left us to try to figure out how to re-engage with them, and they listed the reasons it was difficult for them to come back — all these barriers like I don’t have child care. They had to decide, Hey, does this make sense for me? Do I take this risk to try to improve my quality of life and my education and my social standing? Or do I deal with everything I’m grappling with right now to just try to survive?

That’s really important because if you start doing the calculus in your personal life, then it’s easier to take the $20-an-hour job at Target because that’s less risk. We have to do a better job identifying what those barriers are, to shoulder some responsibility. We opened up a Boys & Girls Club on our campus, so we have after-school care for our students’ children, ages 6 to 18, from 2 to 8 every night. And we’ve seen single moms who were taking only one class at a time enrolling in four classes a semester now. That means they’re able to accelerate their time to completion, which gets them into a living-wage job faster.

Wilson: It’s more imperative if we bring students in that we graduate them. Higher ed in general has been slow to do exactly the kinds of things Dr. Muñoz is talking about. We’ve blamed the students if they drop out and not the system, not our own institution.

Lipka: President Washington said maybe the message is that college gives you a greater chance of success. What else do colleges need to do or to prove to make that message resonate more?

Washington: We have to start talking about discipline and value. The challenge in the African American community is that there are too few STEM degrees. When 85 percent of your gross domestic product is STEM, and less than 10 percent of your graduates are in that space, then they can’t take part in the actual economic vitality and growth of the country. There’s no way around it. You need to have degrees or training in the areas where there are economic opportunities. As of this moment, there are more than 10 million unfilled jobs in the country, and most of those jobs are in technical areas.

Rather than blindly steering kids toward college, we tell them, Perhaps you’d want to think about getting degrees in these areas. We were one of the regionals that did not shrink during the pandemic. We’ve had more than 15 years of constant growth. We’re the largest institution in our state now. We have a very active transfer pipeline. So there are things institutions can do — you just have to rethink the traditional notions that we’ve had.

Illustration by The Chronicle, Wayne State U.

Wilson: One of the areas where I’ve seen change over the past couple of decades is the whole notion of whether college is a private good or a public good. In the past, the public-good part of it was at least as prevalent as the private good. It’s hard, however, to argue that it’s a public good if it’s not funded publicly. And so, as the cost became a burden on the individual student and family, this whole notion of the societal good took a backseat. It’s become more of a transactional relationship between student and college now.

I personally feel conflicted about steering students into STEM — and I’m a biomedical researcher — because I believe so much in the value of the arts and humanities. But the reality of it is, Dr. Washington is absolutely right. Because of that transactional relationship, students are looking for that return.

Lipka: Beyond demonstrating the value of a degree, how can colleges — on their own or together — try to build trust and good will? What can help on those broader measures of confidence, of social value in addition to individual value?

Muñoz: We have to be very intentional about what it means to be accessible. For many years, as a system of higher ed, we’ve just relied on the K-12 pipeline cranking out students. We actually have to do some work to get students now. And that means being engaged, understanding what students’ needs are, understanding what the community needs are, what the work-force needs are, partnering. We’re home to the largest number of commercial space businesses in Long Beach. And we don’t have a program that leads to jobs in that sector. So we’re creating one now. That requires us coming together, across multiple sectors, to create an on ramp that’s smooth and accessible. That’s what we need to think about creating in our institutions.

Presidents Under Pressure

Photo by Michael Theis, The Chronicle

College leadership has never been a job for the faint of heart, but few would disagree that these days it’s especially tough.

The stories here help explain why, and what that means for the health of higher education institutions.

Wilson: I still do believe in the societal good of higher education. Being able to reason better, being able to communicate in a world that’s diverse, understanding different cultures — not only quantitative measures, but more qualitative things are important. It’s just that, unfortunately, we’ve evolved into a transactional relationship, and part of that is our fault. Now we need to really think about how we can evolve with the changes that our students are asking for.

Washington: We don’t necessarily have to be in the degree business. If we can help people who want to start businesses be more successful, or if a person needs only four or five courses for job opportunities to meet a need in a community, we should be working together to provide a pathway for them to get that.

We have lost our way, and we are wedded to a mechanism of education that hasn’t changed that much in a long time. Society is telling us that they need something different, and we’re not being as flexible and adaptable as we need to be. People are looking at the value based on that. I need this education and training in order to better myself. I don’t need all this other stuff. So why don’t we just give them that? And then, when they figure out that they actually do need some other things, give them that, too. We’re forcing people into a box, and for significant portions of the society, it’s not working.