Americans’ opinions of higher education slide down, again

Greetings from mid-September, when the fall semester is in full swing.  There’s a lot going on with higher ed now, much not good, which I’ve touched on elsewhere and hope to say more here.

One datapoint: Americans’ attitudes towards higher education have ticked down, again.  A new Gallup survey is out and the results show a continued slide.  Gallup and other surveys have been showing the decline for some time. According, this new data probably won’t surprise many readers, but nonetheless remains a vital report to illustrate the context within which academia operates.  As Gallup’s headline warns, “Perceived Importance of College Hits New Low.”

(Previous posts on the topic: July 2025, July 2024, July 2023, 2020, 2019, 2016, 2015)

The main finding is that we collectively, generally see post-secondary education as less valuable than we used to:

To be precise, the number of Americans who view college and university education as “very important” has slid steadily for the past fifteen years, from 75% way down to 35%.  This is, as Michael T. Nietzel put it, “a fifteen year low.”  The proportion who see higher ed as “not too important” has soared from 5% to 24%.  Meanwhile, the group who deems higher ed to be just “fairly important” has doubled, from around 20% to 40%, the biggest swath of the whole.

Breaking down the top level data, Gallup found that nearly every group expressed decreased support for the “higher ed is very important” view.  Men and women, those with and without college degrees, all ages, both political parties and independents, white and people of color all shared this downward slide, albeit from different starting points:

Gallup notes the way party membership influences the view, with the GOP still far more skeptical than Democrats:

Confidence in higher education has declined much more among Republicans than Democrats over the past decade…

[T]he percentage of Democrats rating college as very important has fallen almost as steeply as that of Republicans since 2013. However, most Democrats who do not view college as very important now describe it as fairly important, while few say it’s not too important (49% and 9% of Democrats, respectively). By contrast, Republicans are equally likely to rate it as fairly important (39%) as not too important (39%). In fact, Republicans are about twice as likely to say college is not too important as to say it is very important (20%).

Why does this matter?

In previous years I’ve mentioned several reasons, starting with a declining popular opinion helping incline state governments to reduce funding to public universities. Now I’d add that a sector under continuous attack from the Trump administration receives even less support than before.  That makes it more difficult for us to win support as we try to defend our work.