American views of higher ed decline, once again

I’m skeptical that this poll actually measures what people think about a college education — as in, how do Americans value reading and writing, participating in class discussions, conducting lab experiments, and immersing yourself in performing arts or the college newspaper. Rather, I think this poll measures what people think about what a college degree provides in economic, social, and political opportunities. That nosedive began after the Great Recession disproved the theory that college grads were impervious to unemployment and wage problems, after we started seeing horror stories about borrowers still unable to clear student loans after 20 years, after economic inequality reached dizzying heights, and after one political party increased its attacks on higher education. The question that they are answering is more along the lines of, “Is it worthwhile for a student to spend money, much of which may have to be borrowed, and four years to pursue a bachelor’s degree, given our current economic context, when they could probably earn $40-50 thousand after spending two years and $15,000 to attend an HVAC program?”

And, of course, these poll results come after 60 years of Republican attacks on higher education, which increased in intensity since about 2010. The religion scholar Ryan Burge has argued that religious identity for most Americans is now downstream from political identity, i.e. you choose your church based on how you vote. That’s probably true of attitudes towards college as well. And the message is undercut by the fact that conservatives still care quite a lot about their own families’ ability to get into elite colleges; the plaintiffs who asked SFFA to sue Harvard were all pretty conservative.

You are right that Democrats and Independents in the poll also show declines in support, but I’ve seen other polling that shows that those groups have different objections to higher education — e.g. it’s too expensive, it’s insufficiently diverse.

I’m not trying to say that we don’t have to be concerned about this, only that there are many ways to interpret a top-line finding.

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