Let’s start with the good news. In a national survey released last week by the Pew Research Center, a solid majority of Americans, 55 percent, have positive views of higher education.
But that finding camouflages a worrisome partisan split: The poll noted that while 72 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said higher education had a positive impact on the nation, 58 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning independents said it had a negative effect. Just 36 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said colleges and universities had a positive effect.
What we might call the “favorable-impression gap” stands at 36 percentage points, the highest among the five major institutions — churches and religious organizations; banks and other financial institutions; labor unions; national news media; and colleges and universities — examined in the poll.
Even more troubling is that Republican support has cratered in two years, from 54 percent favorable in 2015 to 36 percent favorable today. There is no way to sugarcoat these findings for an industry that depends on widespread, deep public support to be effective. We ignore them at our peril.
How to explain the partisan divide? First, we should acknowledge what our own research has revealed: that a significant portion of the public, especially among lower-income families, believe that the economic value of higher education — that is, its return on investment — has fallen. This is, of course, untrue: The economic return on higher education, as the College Board’s 2016 “Education Pays” study reveals, has never been greater.
But since the recession that began in 2007, the most-common stories about college graduates have focused not on those who have gotten jobs and made a good start in life. Rather, the public has been bombarded with stories about graduates who live in their parents’ basement, or who have taken out staggering levels of debt and are unable to repay their loans.
The total amount of money borrowed to pay for college has increased in the past decade, and the news coverage of this burden reinforces the view that the rapidly rising cost of higher education, together with poor job prospects, has reduced the economic return on a diploma. Since higher education was, even recently, seen as a fail-safe escalator to economic security, it’s not surprising that public attitudes toward colleges may be affected.
A second reason for declining support, especially among Republicans, is the campus controversies over such hot-button issues as race, gender, and speech. Colleges have not always handled these controversies well, as we know from extensive coverage in the national media.
Particularly among Republicans, there is a feeling that colleges are not adequately protecting the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, and that we are coddling students.
College and university presidents, of course, face the challenge of balancing academic freedom, freedom of speech, and student safety. But to at least one part of the political spectrum, colleges always seem to come down on the side that stifles speech or attempts to protect students from unpopular or controversial ideas.
Campus controversies seem to be a daily staple for conservative news sites. The tone of their stories is generally that colleges are focused on political correctness and put forward a liberal agenda. The impact of this conservative echo chamber is clear in the Pew data: While 65 percent of conservative Republicans have a negative view of higher education, just 43 percent of moderate and liberal Republicans feel that way.
There is no way to sugarcoat these findings for an industry that depends on widespread, deep public support to be effective.
There also is a broader issue confronting higher education that is much harder to tackle: the changing views of truth. Logic, the disinterested search for truth, rigorous scientific research, and empirical verification have been at the heart of higher-education institutions in the modern era. But today, for many citizens, feelings outweigh facts. A disconcertingly large percentage of Americans believe, for example, that global warming is a hoax, despite the compelling scientific evidence to the contrary. In an era when the proliferation of information sources has made it easy for people to receive only “news” that confirms their own views, we in the academy have struggled to convince the public that not all facts are created equal.
This is not the first time that higher-education institutions have found themselves in the political cross hairs. In the 1950s, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s lists of “Communists” included many academics in addition to prominent figures in the entertainment industry. As Ellen Schrecker related in her 1986 book, No Ivory Tower, colleges struggled, often unsuccessfully, to balance public demands to root out Communists with the First Amendment and with institutional commitments to academic freedom.
Later, in the 1960s and early ’70s, civil rights and the Vietnam War turned campuses into hotbeds of sometimes violent controversy. The protests, riots, sit-ins, and building takeovers on campuses across the country defined the era.
In the wake of those widespread student disturbances, administrators wrestled with the charge that they could not control their students. But the era passed, the hard feelings dissipated and, within a decade, campus leaders were expressing concerns about the civic apathy of their students.
It’s possible, of course, that public attitudes toward higher education will return to the levels that we previously enjoyed. But it would be a mistake to assume that will happen. We live in a different era — change comes rapidly, and the social, political, and economic environment is far less forgiving than it used to be.
The partisan gulf that divides us does not appear to be narrowing, and colleges and universities cannot succeed by appealing only to one side. Higher education depends on the support of Americans from across society and across the political spectrum. Right now, we simply don’t have it.
Terry W. Hartle is senior vice president at the American Council on Education.
