Have Americans Actually Lost Faith in Higher Education?

In the last year, a growing collection of polls has suggested grim prospects for the public perception of higher education. Most notably, Gallup found in 2023 that only 36 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education—down about 20 percentage points from 2015. At the same time, many higher education institutions have faced sharp drops in enrollment and intense political scrutiny, leading media organizations to link the drop in confidence to a decline in both the perceived value of a college degree and the number of prospective students. But analysts from the left-leaning think tank New America argue in a policy brief released Monday that that might not be the case after all, and that rumors of higher education’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, to borrow from Mark Twain’s famous words to the New York Journal.