Higher education is at least partly responsible for its slide in public trust and perceived value to society. It needs to act now to restore confidence in its usefulness.
The loss of trust is real and across the board. The proportion of Americans who say a college education is “very important” has dropped to an all-time low of 31 percent, according to a 2026 Gallup poll. This was a four-percentage-point drop since 2025 and the lowest share since Gallup first asked the question in 1978. As recently as 2013, 70 percent of Americans in a Gallup survey said college was “very important.”
However, every semester, in a course I teach on reputation management, when I have my students do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis on themselves and ask about their most important strength, they invariably answer something along the lines of, “being at a university, learning how to learn and preparing myself for an uncertain future.”
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Americans in general, like my students, still value higher education’s ability to deliver certain outcomes: A Lumina-Gallup survey in 2025 found that a solid majority of Americans believed that higher education drives innovation, helps create businesses and leads to better jobs.
The research shows that two things can be true at the same time: “I have less trust in your value than I did; you’re still important to me.”
Many institutions implicitly assumed that their value was obvious. They believed that if they kept doing what they’d been doing, all would be fine. To maintain those beliefs, they had to ignore early warning signs, visible before Donald Trump’s second presidency, that foretold a full-scale assault on higher education’s value.
President Trump, from his bully pulpit, has regularly made deeply incomplete or blatantly false claims about higher education that have proved highly damaging. Higher ed leaders have yet to offer an effective response or strategy.
Other American institutions have also recently suffered a loss of public trust, but this should be of little consolation and is no excuse for inaction.
Asked recently at a public forum whether he’d seen any effort by his peers to organize for collective action on unified messaging about, for example, higher ed’s return on investment, the president of a liberal arts college said that he had seen none.
This is despite the fact that higher ed has great stories to tell about itself. Major urban campuses, for example, have worked closely with industries to teach students new manufacturing and management techniques; land-grant colleges helped farmers improve their crops and then evolved into public universities that send hundreds of thousands of graduates into the workforce each year.
Institutions can also point to their role in helping students become better human beings and citizens through the liberal arts. Thomas Jefferson and other Founders saw the purpose of higher education as sustaining democracy by creating better citizens. The stories higher ed tells, like ancient myths, can capture and convey important societal values.
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Here’s what we in higher ed can do to restore confidence and prevent additional erosion. First is to acknowledge that there is a problem and that many citizens don’t know about the contributions higher education makes to their community, state, country and world.
Second is to find the right messages, hopefully ones that are simple and reflect the core of the benefits produced. Doing so requires that higher ed leaders resist the tendency to say, “We’re already doing that!” — because the reality is, we’re not doing enough, and we’re not doing it often enough.
One message among others that could resonate is to highlight the many ways that higher education makes the lives of Americans better — by earning new patents in science and technology, conducting basic research, engineering innovations, fostering student internships, improving public policy and much more. We do these things every day. Faculty do them. Students do them. Graduates really do them.
An affordable approach is to inject those how-we-make-life-better messages into existing communication vehicles and channels. A clever example is a Facebook video series from American University in which its president makes FaceTime calls to undergraduates. In a recent one, he called a student whose university-funded internship in Los Angeles had him helping a city department design a new system for tracking citizen requests.
The video checks a number of boxes: It shows a student involved in real-world problem-solving while boosting his future job prospects, and it showcases the importance of paid internships. It also reveals a social benefit for city residents and highlights a college president who knows and cares about the impact academic programs can have.
There is an endless list of possible positive stories to tell. We could talk about colleges’ community engagement work and partnerships with groups and businesses, new majors, members of the military returning to school, first-generation students and recent legal immigrants attending college.
So let’s do a better job of communicating the important public good we do every day and tell our own stories of how we’ve faced obstacles, transformed ourselves, dealt with conflict, helped society, supported democracy and ultimately triumphed in the best tradition of the mythic hero’s journey.
Doug Barry is a board member of AltLiberalArts, a nonprofit that supports the teaching of the liberal arts. He also teaches reputation management at George Washington University.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about restoring trust in higher education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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