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Dive Brief:
- Just 38% of U.S. adults report having high confidence in higher education, down from the 42% who said the same last year, according to a Lumina Foundation and Gallup poll released Tuesday.
- The overall decline was driven by Democrats, even though this group still showed more faith in the sector than did Republicans or independents.Just half of Democrats reported having high confidence in higher education — a new low and an 11 percentage-point decline from last year.
- Among survey respondents who expressed a lack of confidence in higher education, the most commonly cited reasons were that colleges are home to political agendas,are costly and poorly prepare students for the workforce.
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Dive Insight:
Even though the data reflects a modest decline from last year, it’s slightly better than confidence levels reported in both 2024 and 2023, when only about 36% of respondents said they had high faith in higher education. Those years marked the lowest levels of confidence reported since Gallup first began tracking such data in 2015.The newest poll also found an increased share of adults expressing “some” confidencein the sector, rising from 33% last year to 37% this year.
Even though Democrats drove this year’s declines, Republicans spurred the steepest drop in confidence in the sector over the past decade or so. Just 23% of Republicans reported high faith in higher education, down a whopping 33 percentage points since 2015. That’s compared to an 18 percentage-point drop among Democrats during that period.
Independents remained the most stable. Over one-third, 39%, had high confidence in higher education in the latest survey, down 9 percentage points from 2015.
College graduates reported more confidence in the sector than those without a four-year degree, 43% versus 35%. The difference between those two groups has been separated by about 10 percentage points since 2015.
However, the last three years’ worth of survey data show that divide is “entirely accounted for” by adults with a postgraduate degree, 49% of whom expressed high confidence in higher education. Meanwhile, just 36% of adults with only a bachelor’s degree report the same — only 1 percentage point higher than those without a four-year diploma.
Among respondents reporting high confidence in higher education, 33% said college teaches students skills like critical thinking, 30% said it makes them more knowledgeable and 19% said it boosts their career prospects.
For the first time, Gallup asked respondents whether they think the rise of artificial intelligence will make a college education more or less important in the next five years. Nearly half of respondents, 46%, said they think AI will threaten its value,while 20% said they think it will make college degrees “somewhat” or “much more” important.
The survey results were based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,001 U.S. adults conducted June 1-15.