As I observed in my last post, public confidence in higher education is fairly high compared to other institutions. However, it's lower than it was a decade ago. The figure shows the percent who say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence. There's a definite decline, and it's arguably the largest decline for any of the institutions in the Gallup data over the 2016-2026 period.
Although the Gallup data on confidence in institutions goes back to the 1970s, they didn't start asking about higher education until 2016. The General Social Survey also asks about confidence in institutions, but they don't include higher education. But the Opinion Research Corporation asked about confidence in "colleges and universities" in 1977, 1979, 1981, and 1983, so we can use that to get a sense of long-term change.
There are some differences in terminology--for example, Gallup asked about "the military" and the ORC asked about "the armed forces." There's also a difference in the scale of the responses--Gallup gives the percent in the top two categories out of four, and the ORC gives low, medium, and high.* So you might wonder if they can be treated as measuring the same thing. The next figure compares Gallup and ORC measures of confidence for institutions that they both asked about in 1977. The correlation is about 0.92, suggesting that they can.
Now for the comparison of 1977 and 2026:
Colleges and universities ranked third out of twelve institutions in 1977, behind churches and banks. They were also third in 2026, behind small business and the military. Small business and the military stand out for large relative increases. For small business, some of that may be question wording--the ORC asked about "small companies," which I would interpret as including only businesses that have employees, not people who are working on their own or with family members. But the Gallup question on small business shows a clear upward trend, although it wasn't asked regularly until the 21st century:
One final bit of information: in 1994, Gallup asked about confidence in public colleges and universities and private colleges and universities. 49% said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in private colleges and universities, and 46 in public ones. So that suggests that confidence increased between 1994 and 2016.
The general point is that over the last 50 years, Americans haven't lost confidence in higher education specifically--the decline is typical of other institutions.
*The original surveys used a seven point scale, but I am working from published reports that group them into three categories.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
