Chronicle poll also finds concern over costs, sports, and ‘legacy’ admissions
Americans’ confidence in higher education remains strong and steady, even though elected officials in statehouses and the U.S. Congress expressed plenty of skepticism this past year about how colleges are run -- weighing proposals, for instance, that would have controlled tuition increases or changed what they perceived as a liberal bias on campuses.
That is a key finding of an extensive new national poll of public opinion of higher education, conducted for The Chronicle. For the second consecutive year, the poll shows that the public’s trust in colleges ranks near the top among all kinds of institutions, right along with its faith in the U.S. military and in churches and religious organizations.
Nearly 93 percent of respondents agreed that higher-education institutions are one of the most valuable resources to the United States. And about 6 in 10 said that the four-year colleges in their states, both public and private, are of high quality.
But Americans complained about some of the day-to-day practices of colleges. Three-fourths said that higher education placed too much emphasis on sports, and that colleges should do away with “legacy” admissions, the practice of giving extra consideration to applicants whose relatives attended the same institution.
And while the public lauded colleges for their quality, 68 percent said that institutions could maintain those standards while reducing costs.
“Colleges charge too much,” said Judith Hoffstom, a parent of three public-college graduates from Duluth, Minn., and one of the respondents to the poll. “When the price of almost everything else is not rising, why is college tuition going up so much?”
It is a question that college officials often hear, and one that they typically answer by drawing a picture of an ignorant public that fails to understand all the challenges that go into running a campus -- keeping faculty salaries competitive, maintaining facilities, and staying current with technology, to name a few. But David J. Skorton, president of the University of Iowa, said the poll results over all showed that college officials need to stop being so “arrogant” in answering the public’s legitimate concerns.
“If there is poor public understanding of what we do, it’s our issue, it’s our problem,” Mr. Skorton said. “It’s too facile to say that people don’t understand what we do. If there is poor public understanding, we are the ones who bear the burden of explaining it.”
Whether those explanations will be heard by a public bombarded with political messages is unclear. For instance, even after a year in which public colleges in nearly every state loudly protested cuts in their higher-education budgets, by organizing rallies at state capitols and calling on alumni to lobby lawmakers, 40 percent of those polled said that public funds for higher education in their states had remained the same or even increased. And 19 percent said they did not know how the budget for higher education fared in their states.
“If we face a crisis, it’s easy to be in the news, but the bread-and-butter issues that university presidents face each day are hard to get on the front page,” said Graham B. Spanier, president of Pennsylvania State University. “I marvel at how much I talk about these issues and how little the public hears the message.”
Liberal Bias
The poll, a telephone survey of 1,000 adults ages 25 to 65 from every state except Alaska and Hawaii, was designed by the consultant George Dehne in conjunction with The Chronicle’s staff. The interviews were conducted this past winter by TMR Inc., of Broomall, Pa., and the data were collected and synthesized by GDA Integrated Services, a marketing-and-research company run by Mr. Dehne and based in Old Saybrook, Conn. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
While most of the questions in the poll were unchanged from last year, a few were added to reflect higher-education subjects that emerged as hot-button issues this year, like the supposed liberal bias of college campuses. David Horowitz, president of the California-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture, is leading a national campaign to urge Congress and state legislatures to adopt an “academic bill of rights” aimed at fostering a variety of political and religious beliefs at colleges.
College leaders have long said that the idea that their campuses are havens for left-leaning activists is more a perception than a reality. Still, that belief seems to be cemented among the public, according to the poll. Half of the respondents said that colleges improperly introduce a liberal bias into what they teach and that professors are liberal in their political views. Even among the respondents who described themselves as liberal, a surprising 30 percent said that colleges were biased toward the left in their teachings. Sixty-eight percent of conservatives agreed with them.
Elaine Tuttle Hansen, president of Bates College, in Maine, wonders what evidence those who think there is a liberal bias use to support their belief. “How many of them have actually been in a college class?” she asked. “I’ve never been quite sure where they get these thoughts.”
Like Ms. Hansen, Colin S. Diver, president of Reed College, in Oregon, said that academics often take nuanced views of politics, while the major political parties tend to divide the world into black and white. “To say that campuses are liberal sort of mischaracterizes the debate that goes on campuses,” Mr. Diver said. “You could have someone be a Republican on economic policies, but a Democrat on social issues.”
Often, said Mr. Spanier of Penn State, the opinions of a few faculty members, whose views tend to get quoted in the news media, lead people to conclusions about an entire campus. “We have 5,000 faculty,” he said, “and they don’t all share the same opinion.”
Worried About Access
As in last year’s poll, respondents worry about access to college: first, getting admitted, and then, paying the bill.
Nearly half of Americans believe that it is more difficult to be admitted to a four-year college today than it was a decade ago. Ms. Hansen at Bates attributed that belief to the fact that many top students are applying to more colleges than ever before and, as a result, are getting rejected from more of them.
“It’s not unusual anymore for a student to apply to 10 to 15 schools,” she said.
Among parents polled who said their children were unlikely to attend a four-year college, about one-fifth cited the high cost of four-year institutions as the main reason. The price tag of a college was of particular concern to lower-income families. It was mentioned by 28 percent of respondents making $50,000 or less, for instance, but only 15 percent of those making between $51,000 and $100,000.
Despite the widespread perception among college officials that parents tend to overestimate college costs, about half of the respondents either gave an accurate estimate or a low one. According to the College Board, the average cost of a four-year public university (including tuition, room, and board) this academic year was $10,636. Twenty-five percent of respondents put the cost at $10,000 to $14,999 for a year at a four-year public institution, while 26 percent put the cost at $5,000 to $9,999 per year, or lower. Thirty percent said the cost was more than $15,000.
About 55 percent of the respondents accurately estimated or underestimated the cost of four-year private colleges, which was $26,854 this academic year, according to the College Board.
Little Interest in Savings Plans
While an overwhelming 83 percent said that many students have incurred too much debt to pay for college, most parents polled did not rely heavily on loans to cover the cost of their child’s education. Some 85 percent said they used personal funds to pay some of the costs of college. Sixty percent said their child took an off-campus job. About one-third used a federal Stafford Loan.
And despite all the media attention given to tax-deferred college-savings accounts in recent years, only 4 percent said they had used funds from those accounts, widely known as 529 plans, after the section of the federal tax code that applies to them. Among parents of children who are not yet college age, only 18 percent said they had opened 529 accounts for their children. Most of those, 36 percent, come from households making $100,000 or more a year. Only 7 percent of those from households making $50,000 or less had opened accounts.
The fact that higher-income families are taking the most advantage of the savings plans did not come as a surprise to many higher-education officials. “It’s all about financial literacy,” said Travis J. Reindl, director of state-policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. “People who have advisers at Merrill Lynch get advice on 529s, but people sitting around doing their own 1040s don’t have the time to ponder the fine points of them.”
The poll’s findings on how parents paid for their children’s education also confirmed a recent trend that more states and colleges are awarding student aid based on merit rather than need. About 34 percent of respondents said their children had received merit scholarships, while only 19 percent said their children had received need-based aid from their colleges.
Those results worried Mr. Diver at Reed College, which awards the bulk of its student aid based on need.
“It’s getting harder and harder to compete in a marketplace where scholarships are given on merit to students from wealthy families,” he said.
Fair and Democratic
Over all, Mr. Diver said, the poll’s findings show that Americans want access to higher education to be fair and democratic. Few respondents supported legacy admissions. Fifty-eight percent said that the SAT and the ACT are a fair way to judge the academic ability of college-bound students. And 45 percent opposed race-conscious admissions. Among black respondents, 71 percent supported affirmative action, while only 50 percent of white respondents did.
“People like higher education being a source of opportunity,” Mr. Diver said.
As a result, Americans urged colleges again this year to focus on the basics: general education, adult education, leadership and responsibility, and teacher training. According to the poll, the most important role for a college is preparing undergraduates for a career. Respondents placed a lower value on the things that college presidents often emphasize the most, like research and economic development.
“Colleges are there to educate and give degrees,” said Paul Cobb of Pasadena, Tex., one of the respondents. “Everything else they do -- sports, research -- is extra. It seems to me that they’ve been focusing too much on those extras and not enough on what really matters.”
Eric Hoover contributed to this article.
http://chronicle.com Section: Special Report Volume 50, Issue 35, Page A1
