Better public polling may help restore confidence in higher education

Increasingly, surveys show that US higher education has a public relations problem, both internally and externally.

In 2018, Gallup reported that confidence in US higher education had decreased significantly since 2015, more so than for any other US institution measured. The polling firm found a nine percentage point drop in the proportion (48 per cent) of US adults expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot of confidence” in higher education. Among self-described Republicans, the confidence rate dropped by 17 percentage points across the same three-year period to 39 per cent.

Unfortunately for our purposes, Gallup’s most recent confidence in institutions survey replaced higher education with public schools (it found that only 32 per cent of the adults have a great deal of, or quite a lot of confidence in public schools, while 28 per cent have “very little” confidence).  

Gallup polling also suggests that even academics themselves are cynical about higher education institutions’ motives. Survey results published in February 2020 found that just 38 per cent of the nearly 2,000 US college faculty surveyed strongly agreed that they were treated with respect at work. Meanwhile, only 16 per cent strongly agreed that their institution is “committed to building the strengths of each employee”, and just 25 per cent strongly agreed that their employer “would do what is right” if they raised a concern about ethics and integrity.

Startlingly, rates for all three measures were lowest among full-time and tenured faculty. Familiarity with higher education institutions, it seems, breeds contempt.  

What about students themselves? How do they feel about universities? The NSSE (National Survey of Student Engagement) surveys hundreds of four-year colleges and universities about first-year and senior students’ participation in the programmes and activities provided for their learning and personal development. Yet accessing the most detailed data sets often requires password-protected institutional log-in and there is, of course, nothing in the data about parental and wider societal perceptions.

Well-established polling organisations such as Gallup and Pew could help fill the data gap, keeping faculty, staff and administrators better apprised by taking the general public’s temperature yearly, asking not just for overall confidence percentages but more nuanced queries likely to yield fine-grained data.

As esteem for, and trust in, US education and educators flatlines or declines, the face of the industry – faculty and staff – will no doubt bear the brunt of society’s disapproval. We need to be ready for it – and to be clear exactly what we are up against.

In economics, the Misery Index (the unemployment rate added to the inflation rate) yields a crude yet useful metric of Americans’ relative fiscal comfort or discomfort. Maybe it’s time to construct similar but more multifaceted metrics querying how citizens feel about the fairness, transparency and efficacy of the educational institutions that serve them – as well as how negative views of institutional fairness may be conveyed, wittingly and unwittingly, to students from faculty, staff and administrators. While the results may be difficult for even the most sanguine scholars to bear, they might at least provide some pointers on how we might stop the erosion in confidence.

Such data would allow us, first, to acknowledge the pervasiveness of higher education’s public relations problem, making it harder for academics and administrators to dismiss undeniable truths as mere products of partisan divides.

Moreover, tracking the subtle yet vital ebbs and flows of confidence, faith and trust experienced by higher education’s diverse constituencies, ranging from students to parents, community members and academics themselves, could help establish common cause among these constituencies. The existing proprietary data commissioned primarily for the benefit of one or other of the constituencies tends, rather, to pit faculty against administrators, or parents against professors.

Treated separately, the complaints of students, professors and the general public about higher education can seem like so much petty infighting. Taken together, and substantiated by survey sizes numbering in the thousands, the overarching problems – and their solutions – can be much more easily perceived. And this will empower and compel institutions to seek their solutions much more urgently.

Zachary Michael Jack is professor of English at North Central College.