Leading

Welcome to Leading. I’m Sara Lipka, an editor at The Chronicle, filling in for Laura Krantz this week. Thanks for reading.

What topics are you thinking about and would you like to see covered in the newsletter? Share an idea with Laura via email or LinkedIn, where you can also join other leaders in our private group.

The polling isn’t all bad

Seeing so many surveys find falling confidence in higher education or a growing belief that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country can be demoralizing for campus leaders. It made us curious. Are people losing faith in this vast sector? What does that even mean?

This week I’ll unpack initial findings from a new Chronicle poll, draw in two policy scholars to help us make sense of them, and tell you what’s coming next.

The picture our results paint has some bright spots, but it shows some real skepticism, too. As my colleague Eric Kelderman explained in the first of a series of stories, people view higher education as 🎓 an important vehicle for individual success but 🏛 not necessarily for the greater good.

Some positive findings:

• 79 percent of degree-holders believe the cost was worth it. The most significant differences are along financial lines — higher ratings came from respondents with higher income and no student-loan debt.
• 78 percent of people would recommend pursuing a bachelor’s degree to a close friend or relative. That includes 75 percent of respondents without a college credential and 57 percent of those who say their own associate or bachelor’s degree wasn’t worth it.

A few caveats:

• At least 80 percent of people see alternative paths to a successful livelihood: Trade school, a work apprenticeship, and other professional or technical training, they said, are about the same as or better than a bachelor’s degree.
• 24 percent of people think colleges benefit their graduates a great deal, and four-year degree holders aren’t more positive. Ratings of how well colleges educate their students are higher among people who haven’t gone beyond high school and lower among those with some college or a bachelor’s degree.
• 15 percent of people think colleges in their area provide a great deal of benefit to the local community. Similar shares see that level of benefit for the state and society.
• 30 percent of the American public thinks colleges are doing an excellent or very good job of leveling the playing field for success in society.

“It would be a surprise if there weren’t some decrease in faith,” said Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy, communication, and information at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them.

He has traced the general trend back to the 1970s — the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, Watergate, and a dropoff in confidence in government. “You often find your own Nixon moments in other fields,” he said: sexual abuse in the Catholic church, for example, and the 2007-08 financial crisis. Among the institutions he studied, only the military, which had a low baseline, and small business didn’t see a dip.

Higher ed isn’t having a Nixon moment. But “now everyone is saying we have to go to college,” he said, while tuition, student-loan debt, and social inequality are all rising: “That feels like a really complicated bargain.”

Still, people tend to separate their individual experience from more-general perceptions. “The pattern of people being happy about their own decisions but lacking faith in the institution is one we’ve seen in many cases,” he said. They tend to like their own congressperson, but not Congress. Or value their own college degree, but doubt the system.

“Our major way of connecting with the public is through big-time athletics,” Christopher Loss, an associate professor of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt University, said of the sector as a whole. In fact, in our survey, operating sports programs ranked near the top for how well people think colleges are doing on various activities and goals, but toward the bottom on how important they believe it is.

When it comes to responding to the public’s misgivings about higher ed, says Loss, “We haven’t found that message.”

Perhaps part of the answer is incentivizing more community-engaged research or other activities fit for impact statements. Maybe it’s shifting stratification in enrollment, more coordination across institutions to correct misconceptions about sticker price, or trying to get traction with a joint marketing campaign.

Next up in our reporting on the Chronicle poll is:

• A close look at the partisan divide in views of how colleges shape their students’ thinking, personal values, and political views, as well as surprising bipartisanship in opposing government influence over what’s taught in the classroom.
• A live discussion on Thursday about state legislative influence on the faculty, academic governance, and campus climate.
• Interactive data to show how people rate 10 college goals — beyond educating individual students — in terms of importance and performance.

In brief

Connecting public opinion and enrollment: An article in The New York Times Magazine ties together declines in both, arguing that while graduates benefit from a wage premium, the wealth premium has evaporated, and the downside risk of dropping out with student-loan debt and no degree has created a “higher education casino.” A new survey of community-college graduates and former students published by the Strada Education Foundation finds career motivations are most influential in enrolling but least likely to be fulfilled. But a prominent enrollment leader doesn’t see “a society so fed up with education that it’s swearing off it.”

The shape of DEI efforts: The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education found in an inaugural survey of chief diversity officers that perceptions of institutional support are lower the longer a position has existed. On resources and staffing, 32 percent of respondents reported annual operating budgets of $39,000 or less, and 44 percent said they had between zero and two full-time employees who report to them. In an opinion essay in The Chronicle, Eboo Patel argues that fewer people are willing to serve on campus diversity, equity, and inclusion committees because of stark binaries. “We need to find a way for ‘the exhausted majority’ to re-engage,” he says, and proffers the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism paradigm.

Town, gown, and race: Higher education’s decades of postwar expansion came at a great cost to Black communities, as many institutions lobbied to seize more acreage, displacing families in the process, according to an investigation co-published by The Chronicle, ProPublica, and the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism. The article focuses on Christopher Newport University, in Newport News, Va., but describes neighborhoods taken over by the Universities of Georgia, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania. “There’s a whole area of consequences that we have rarely looked at until very recently,” says Davarian Baldwin, an American-studies professor at Trinity College, in Hartford, Conn., who has helped push for compensation and support for displaced communities.

Moves

The West Virginia University faculty passed a resolution of no confidence in the president, E. Gordon Gee, and called for a halt to the “academic transformation” process with its proposed cuts there, The Chronicle reports. While no-confidence votes have mainly symbolic value, the rift between the faculty and administration on the Morgantown campus may hold lessons for other leaders facing similar financial pressures.

Among approximately 100 historically Black colleges and universities nationally, about 25 president jobs have opened since 2022, with a dozen departures since March of this year, The Washington Post reports.

Jeremy Whitaker was named acting president of Limestone University, in Gaffney, S.C., after the interim president, Monica Baloga, resigned, WSPA reports. Whitaker had been serving as vice president for finance and administration, and Baloga, formerly the provost there, took the helm as acting president in January.