Trust—in institutions, expertise, and leaders—is in steep decline.
The erosion of trust is due to both positive and negative factors. On the plus side, a better-educated public and democratized access to information have empowered individuals to question established authorities and seek out alternative perspectives.
However, these gains are counterbalanced by negative influences such as the prevalence of fake news, misinformation, biased and sensationalist media, algorithm-driven echo chambers, and filter bubbles, as well as corporate and government misconduct, public health failures and political polarization.
Colleges and universities aren’t exempt from this erosion of trust. Critics claim that colleges are self-serving institutions that are failing to do enough to minimize costs, sustain high academic standards, and ensure robust student learning and employment outcomes. Detractors also claim that college isn’t necessarily a safe investment, especially for low-income students.
Rising tuition and student debt outpacing inflation and family income growth, combined with the declining premium for a college degree, have reinforced the perception that higher education is not worth the cost. Stagnating graduation rates and protracted time to degree add force to this concern.
Graduates who struggle to find well-paying jobs that match their qualifications aren’t alone in questioning the value of a college degree. There are also questions about the value and relevance of the college curriculum, with critics arguing that colleges are overly focused on social and political issues rather than on practical skills and knowledge that directly translate to job readiness. Reports that graduates lack the essential analytic, communication and technical skills needed in the workplace have also undermined confidence in higher education.
Public concern over administrative bloat and the inefficiency and misallocation of resources within colleges has intensified skepticism about colleges’ financial stewardship and priorities. A series of scandals involving plagiarism and research fraud has also affected perceptions of higher education, contributing to the view that much of the scholarship campuses produce isn’t trustworthy or valuable.
Then, there’s the perception that campuses have a liberal bias and suppress or marginalize conservative viewpoints. At the same time, controversies over free speech on campuses, including instances where speakers were disinvited or protests disrupted events, contribute to the perception that colleges and universities are not upholding principles of open debate and intellectual diversity.
The loss of public trust carries profound consequences not only for the institutions themselves but for the broader society. As trust in higher education diminishes, prospective students may choose alternative paths such as vocational training, apprenticeships, certificate programs or direct entry into the workforce that are perceived as more flexible, affordable, accessible and directly tied to employment outcomes. Trust issues apparently deter many of those from disadvantaged backgrounds from pursuing higher education, limiting their opportunities for social and economic advancement.
With fewer students enrolling, many broad access institutions face significant drops in tuition revenue, resulting in budget cuts, staff layoffs and program closures, undermining efforts to create a more equitable society. The loss of trust has also resulted in reduced political and public support for higher education, threatening cuts in state and federal funding.
Although Republicans are more likely than Democrats to distrust academic institutions, the trust bust isn’t purely partisan. A recent Pew survey reported that just 22 percent of adults say that the cost of a college education is worth it if a student must take out loans.
Failure to address higher ed’s trust gap is a big mistake. But as the popular adage about addiction and mental health puts it: The first step to recovery is to recognize that you have a problem. Self-awareness and acknowledgment of an issue are the crucial starting point for any recovery or improvement process.
Higher education is entering a perfect storm, a convergence of circumstances—political, economic, social and demographic—that threatens drastic consequences for many institutions.
While much public attention focuses on student protests, grade inflation, legacy admissions, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), cancel culture and heckler’s vetoes, and claims that faculty are propagandizing in the classroom at the most selective, richly resourced institutions, other serious challenges are mounting. Let me briefly focus on five looming threats.
Threat 1: Rising Compensation Costs
In 2022, after a six-week strike that was the largest in American higher education’s history, 48,000 University of California System graduate student members won a new contract with a more than 50 percent increase in base pay.
A significant rise in universities’ compensation costs looms. Mounting demands for higher salaries and stipends from various campus groups—including adjunct faculty, lab assistants, post-docs, RAs and teaching assistants—is driven by economic pressures, labor movements, equity considerations, competitive factors and public policy changes.
Gross disparities in compensation, symbolized recently by the resignation of a University of California, Santa Cruz lecturer after learning that her TAs receive $300 more a month than she did, has become a major focus of labor advocacy efforts.
Successful unionization campaigns and strikes at some universities set a precedent and encourage similar efforts at other institutions, creating a ripple effect across the academic landscape. At the same time, changes in state and federal minimum wage laws and overtime rules will soon directly affect the wages that universities must pay their employees.
I suspect that the lowest hanging fruit achieved through operational efficiencies, tuition increases, fundraising and new revenue sources has already been harvested. At all institutions except the wealthiest, this will require strategic budget reallocations that will threaten entrenched interests. To accommodate rising compensation costs, universities will need to reduce the size of doctoral programs, cut capital projects and trim services.
Threat 2: Challenges to Graduate Education
No doubt you saw the Twitter storm that erupted when a U.S. History post-doc, a man of the left, complained that he, as a white male, was unable to find a suitable academic job despite applying for 40 positions. The underlying problem, of course, was not reverse discrimination (which the posts seemed to imply), but the overproduction of Ph.D.s in U.S. History and an abrupt shift in departmental hiring priorities.
Graduate education at the master’s and doctoral levels is likely to undergo significant changes driven by financial, market and regulatory pressures. Universities will need to address accusations of predatory practices in master’s programs by ensuring these programs meet gainful employment standards. The shrinking academic job market will likely force a reduction in the size of doctoral cohorts to better align with job opportunities. Rising costs due to unionization will add financial strain, with research institutions seeking to balance limited resources with the desire of faculty to work with graduate students, the need for TAs to staff service courses, and the prestige that comes from having doctoral programs.
These changes will also affect faculty-student relationships, making them more professional but also more transactional. Universities will be under intense pressure to enhance their career services and improve program evaluation and accountability. They must also better prepare graduate students for the jobs that they are likely to get, rather than traditional academic positions.
Threat 3: A Revolution in College Athletics
The implementation of payments for college athletes is also likely to have vast consequences for universities and the athletes themselves, but the implications are far from clear. The one prediction that seems incontrovertible is that bitter and protracted litigation is a likely consequence, as conflicts arise over a host of questions:
- What constitutes “fair” compensation?
- Should payments be related to the revenue individual sports generate or be distributed equally among all athletes?
- Can some individual athletes be paid more than others based on their performance or popularity?
- Can athletic conferences take steps to prevent disparities in payments to athletes in order to ensure that wealthier schools do not have a competitive edge?
- Will institutions with less profitable sports programs eliminate nonrevenue sports, trim athletic rosters or make cuts in academic programs?
Threat 4: Mounting Doubts About the Value of a College Education
Is college worth it? It depends on:
- The availability of viable options (such as an apprenticeship, vocational training or certificate programs).
- Whether one graduates.
- The cost of attendance.
- One’s institution and field of study.
- One’s first post-college job.
- Whether one is talking about a degree’s financial benefits, career opportunities, or personal or professional growth.
Certainly, on average, a college degree has a big financial payoff, although the premium has diminished over time. The biggest problem is that nearly 40 percent of those who enter college never earn a degree and therefore don’t get the economic benefits that a diploma offers.
But many of higher ed’s benefits are not economic. Beyond college’s financial returns, college fosters intellectual growth, personal discovery, social skills, civic engagement, cultural awareness and health, all of which enhance quality of life and personal fulfillment.
College graduates tend to adopt healthier lifestyles, including better diet, exercise and preventative healthcare practices. They’re also are more likely to engage in work they are passionate about. In addition, the broad skill set and adaptability developed through a college education prepare graduates for changing job markets and diverse career paths.
However, many of college’s benefits are currently the products of serendipity, rather than design. Colleges, in my judgment, ought to be much more intentional in promoting students’ personal and professional development.
Threat 5: Research Misconduct
The publishing company Wiley recently announced the closure of 19 scholarly journals amid a massive influx of papers compromised by data fraud and other violations of academic integrity. This announcement follows on the heels of a host of reports of a replication crisis in which researchers are unable to reproduce the results of thousands of social scientific and medical studies.
Can the public trust peer-reviewed research? There are genuine reasons for concern.
Research misconduct—including “sanitized” data, manipulated images, unacknowledged borrowing of text or data—appears to be far more prevalent than previously thought. Reports of paper mills and manipulation of citation indexes abound.
Whether or not the actual incidence of misconduct is increasing, there can be no doubt that the visibility of the problem has grown. Among the problems: the misappropriation of other people’s ideas or intellectual property without acknowledgement or consent, the misrepresentation, falsification and fabrication of data; research claims that are inconsistent with the evidence; and the failure to declare conflicts of interest or obtain IRB (institutional review boards) approval or informed consent.
Ensuring research integrity is critical for maintaining trust in academic research. Plagiarism, research fraud, and sensationalized and politicized research significantly undermine the credibility of academic institutions and the scholarly community. Yet in all too many instances, academic dishonesty goes unpunished, especially among those most eminent faculty members.
To promote and safeguard academic integrity, universities and journals must:
- Develop and enforce codes of conduct that clearly define academic integrity and the consequences of violations.
- Implement mandatory training programs for faculty, researchers and students on academic integrity, ethical research practices and the proper use of sources.
- Establish and empower ethics committees or institutional review boards to oversee research practices, review proposals for ethical compliance and address allegations of misconduct.
- Reengineer incentive structures that emphasize quantity over quality and that privilege the publication of papers with novel findings.
- Conduct regular audits and peer reviews of research processes and publications to ensure adherence to ethical standards.
- Provide resources and support for individuals who face ethical challenges or wish to report misconduct, ensuring that whistleblowers are protected and supported.
- Demand transparency and accountability in research, by requiring pre-registration of research studies, including hypotheses, methodologies, and analysis plans to prevent selective reporting.
- Demand the open sharing of research data to allow for replication and verification by other researchers.
- Train peer reviewers on how to identify potential ethical issues and ensure rigorous and fair evaluation of manuscripts.
- Consistently punish misconduct through academic sanctions and the retractions of published papers.
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If higher ed is to address its trust problem, it must take several steps. First, it must enhance its value proposition. It must cut or redesign programs of uncertain quality and unproven outcomes. It must bring substantially more students to academic and professional success.
Second, the academy must rebuild public faith in its credibility, integrity, impartiality and fair-mindedness in its teaching and research. That will require transparency and accountability, and clear, consistent consequences for academic misconduct. It will also require curricula that include diverse perspectives and encourage critical thinking. Controversial topics need to be presented in a balanced manner, open debate and discussion encouraged, and differing viewpoints respected.
In response to a New York Times Magazine article on the recent student protests, a reader wrote a comment that invoked three clichés: That the chicken has come home to roost, that the genie is out of the bottle, and that universities are getting a taste of their own medicine. What the reader meant is that universities have lost sight of their primary mission and need to rededicate themselves to their core commitments: to open debate, thoughtful and informed discussion, and the value of professional expertise.
The reader argued—and I wholeheartedly agree—that most campuses have not done nearly enough to treat the Israel-Gaza war as a learning opportunity that contributes to students’ understanding of complex issues. Not just the history of the Middle East, but issues involving free speech, academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, civility, language policing, speaker cancellation, and scholarly evenhandedness and trustworthiness.
It does seem clear that the current protests are concentrated at a rather small number of highly selective universities; that a relatively small proportion of students participate in the protests; and that most students are going about business as usual. The Ivy-plus faculty members and administrators that I have spoken to tell me that media accounts of the protests are exaggerated and sensationalized.
Still, many leading colleges’ reputations lie in tatters, donations have fallen sharply, campus morale has plunged, and faculty are riven in ways that hasn’t been true since the 1960s.
What steps can campuses take? My advice is to do what colleges do best: bring expertise to bear, promote open debate and dialogue, and model civility and mutual respect, teach conflict resolution skills, and foster a culture of inclusion and belonging. Here are some ways to do these things:
- Implement structured dialogue programs that bring together students and faculty with diverse viewpoints in a facilitated setting. Use trained moderators to help guide discussions, ensuring they remain respectful and productive.
- Offer workshops and training sessions on conflict resolution, active listening, and effective communication to equip participants with the skills needed for constructive dialogue.
- Establish support groups for students and faculty who may feel marginalized or threatened by the prevailing political climate, providing them with a platform to share their experiences and concerns.
- Establish peer mediation programs where trained student mediators help their peers resolve conflicts. This empowers students to take an active role in maintaining a respectful campus environment.
- Encourage faculty to present a balanced range of perspectives in their courses and to invite guest speakers with diverse viewpoints.
- Develop courses and programs that address polarizing issues from multiple disciplinary perspectives.
- Organize joint events and panel discussions that bring together experts from different fields to discuss and debate contentious issues.
Denial is commonplace when individuals and institutions face an existential threat. And the higher education trust bust does indeed pose an existential threat. Evasion is not an option; The only appropriate response must be proactive, strategic and collaborative.
