Confidence In Universities Continues To Fall
Last week, The Atlantic ran a piece, Higher Ed Is Very Sorry: Universities are studying how they lost the public’s trust : Just 10 years ago, almost 60 percent of Americans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education. By last year, that number had fallen to 42 percent. Seventy percent of Americans told Pew last fall that higher education is moving in the wrong direction. The disdain has become so difficult to ignore that, over the past year, several universities and higher-education organizations set out to study how they lost the public’s trust—and how they might restore it. The most insightful of theae studies appears to be from Yale: The report, released in April, is nominally about Yale, but it could just as well be about the Ivy League in general. It identifies three main areas where elite universities have fallen short. First, according to the report, these schools lost trust because of their convoluted pricing system; many set exorbitant tuition a...