Higher education is at least partly responsible for the loss of public trust and perceived value to society. It must act now to restore confidence in its usefulness.
The loss of trust is real and widespread. The share of Americans who say a college education is “very important” has fallen to a all-time low by 31 percent, according to a 2026 Gallup poll. This is a drop of four percentage points since 2025 and the lowest share since Gallup first asked the question in 1978. As recently as 2013, 70 percent of Americans surveyed in a Gallup survey said college was “very important.”
However, every semester in a course I teach on reputation management, when I ask my students to do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis on themselves and ask them about their most important strength, they invariably say something along the lines of “being in a university, learning to learn, and preparing for an uncertain future.”
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Americans in general, like my students, still value higher education. ability to produce certain results: A 2025 Lumina-Gallup survey found that a solid majority of Americans believe higher education spurs innovation, helps build businesses, and leads to better jobs.
Research shows that two things can be true at the same time: “I have less confidence in your worth than I did; you are always important to me. »
Many institutions have implicitly assumed that their value is self-evident. They believed that if they continued doing what they were doing, everything would be okay. To maintain these beliefs, they had to ignore early warning signs, visible before Donald Trump’s second presidency, that a full-scale attack on the value of higher education was underway.
President Trump, from his bully pulpit, has routinely presented deeply incomplete or blatantly false information. statements about higher education which turned out to be very damaging. Higher education leaders have yet to come up with an effective response or strategy.
Other American institutions have also recently suffered a loss of public confidencebut this should be little consolation and is no excuse for inaction.
When asked recently at a public forum whether he had seen any efforts by his peers to organize collective action on UM regarding, for example, higher education ROI, the president of a liberal arts college said he had not seen any.
This is despite the fact that higher education has great stories to tell about itself. Large 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, then evolved into public universities that send hundreds of thousands of graduates into the workforce each year.
Institutions can also highlight 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 supporting democracy by creating better citizens. Stories told through higher education, like ancient myths, can capture and convey important societal values.
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Here’s what we in higher education can do to restore trust and prevent further erosion. The first is to recognize that there is a problem and that many citizens do not know the contribution of higher education to their community, their state, their country, and the world.
Secondly, you need to find the right messages, if possible simple and reflecting the essential benefits produced. To do this, higher education leaders must resist the tendency to say, “We’re already doing it!” » – because the reality is that we don’t do enough, and we don’t do it often enough.
One message that might resonate is to highlight the many ways higher education improves the lives of Americans – obtaining new patents in science and technology, conducting basic research, innovating in engineering, fostering student internships, improving public policy and much more. We do these things every day. Teachers do them. The students do them. Graduates really do them.
An affordable approach is to inject these messages about how we can improve lives into existing vehicles and communication channels. A clever example is a Facebook video American University series in which its president makes FaceTime calls to undergraduates. In a recent interview, he called a student whose college-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 solving real-world problems while improving his job prospects, and it shows the importance of paid internships. It also reveals a social benefit for city residents and highlights a university 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, military personnel returning to school, first-generation college students, and recent legal immigrants attending college.
So let’s do a better job communicating important information public good we do it every day and tell our own stories of how we faced obstacles, transformed ourselves, managed conflicts, helped society, upheld democracy and ultimately triumphed in the best tradition of the mythic hero’s journey.
Doug Barry is a board member of AltLiberalArts, a nonprofit organization that supports liberal arts education. 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 reportan independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Register with Hechinger weekly newsletter.
The article OPINION: Higher education has many important stories to tell. So let’s hear them first in the Hechinger report.
