Public confidence in higher education is showing signs of recovery. According to a recent Gallup–Lumina survey, 42% of Americans now say they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in colleges and universities, up from 36% just a year earlier.
But you wouldn’t know that from reading the headlines. National news remains fixated on controversies at elite campuses, skewing the public’s perception of the institutions that serve the majority of students.
Community colleges alone enroll roughly 44% of all undergraduates, yet they are rarely featured in mainstream narratives. Low-cost state colleges and universities serve many more. This mismatch between perception and reality has real consequences, fueling the notion that higher education as a whole is elitist and out of touch, hiding the work of the colleges that educate millions of working- and middle-class families. It’s time to reframe the narrative of higher education to spotlight a wider array of institutions and students and build a more accurate and productive national conversation.
