Americans have completely lost confidence in college. That’s the common narrative in a seemingly never-ending scroll of media reports and surveys raising the alarms about falling enrollment and political controversies on campus.
But “many of these articles are getting the story wrong,” says the latest analysis from New America, a research organization and think tank that is taking a deeper look into what it calls “college declinism.”
“News accounts routinely confuse people’s attitudes toward colleges as political and cultural institutions with their desire to attend college or to send their children there,” the nonprofit’s Kevin Carey and Sophie Nguyen write. “They also ignore basic demographic and economic trends.”
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New America lays out five reasons for the wave of misinterpretation of higher ed’s popularity:
1. Colleges are institutions, and people have lost confidence in institutions of all kinds. Gallup polls, which are often cited in stories about the loss of confidence in college, reveal that Americans’ have a lower opinion of most institutions, such as Congress, television news and banks. In a recent survey of most trusted institutions, higher ed ranked fourth behind small business, the military and the police, and ahead of organized religion and public schools.
2. Feelings about higher education are driven by politics. Like just about every other sector of society, higher ed has gotten snagged by the nation’s increasingly stark political divisions. A Pew survey reveals that the percentage of Republicans who think colleges and universities have a negative impact on the country has skyrocketed while the views of Democrats, a large majority of whom trust higher ed, are unchanged.
3. Enrollments are declining for reasons that have nothing to do with public enthusiasm for college. “Fewer people are going to college but that is because there are fewer people to go to college,” New America says. The largest class of high school seniors in the nation’s history graduated in 2008 but birth rates plummeted after Great Recession and haven’t rebounded.
4. People who answer polling questions about college are sometimes confused. “The percentage of parents who want to send their children to college is closer to 90%,” New America contends. The confusion may have a lot to do with the word “college.” When Americans are surveyed, they are less likely to say they want to send their students to “community college” but do want their children to get training in a “specialized technical skill” that can be acquired in community college.
5. People still want the government to make college affordable. Varying Degrees, New America’s annual survey on higher education, found that cost is seen as the biggest barrier to higher education. A majority of Americans want state and federal governments to spend more on higher ed to make college more affordable.
“There is a difference between expecting more from an institution and abandoning it,” the report concludes. “Despite their various dissatisfactions, Americans overwhelmingly still want to send their children to some form of education and training after high school, and they strongly believe that the government should spend more money to make that education affordable.”
