Americans Have Not Turned Against Higher Ed - Commentary

Kevin Carey and Sophie Nguyen of New America write:

Americans are losing faith in the value of college. Or so we are told.  As many colleges grapple with declining enrollment and intense political criticism, sagging public support for higher learning has become a journalistic given, the kind of as-we-all-know fact that can be simply asserted as context before advancing an argument or presenting the news of the day. But many of these articles are getting the story wrong. The polling data that form the basis for the narrative of college declinism is far more limited and nuanced than this framing suggests. Much of the data doesn’t actually measure changes over time. News accounts routinely confuse people’s attitudes toward colleges as political and cultural institutions with their desire to attend college or to send their children there. They also ignore basic demographic and economic trends.