Trust and faith in higher education
Inside Higher Ed reports today that recent pro-Palestine protests on college campuses have “further undermined public trust in higher education”, according to a SimpsonScarborough survey. Primarily, the study found that “Nearly half [of Republican parents] said their trust was diminished by the protests”; IHE also reported that “Parents and students alike associated only a handful of institutions with the protests”: Columbia, Harvard, and UCLA.
The headline caught my eye first because of the ambiguous title: what does it mean for protests to have “harmed trust” in higher education? Depending on who you ask, probably different things. Republican parents, e.g., likely mean that they no longer trust that colleges will maintain order on college campuses; someone like myself, on the other hand, may instead feel betrayed by colleges’ attempts to crack down on students’ free speech. So, already we’re off to a bad start, since it doesn’t really mean anything to say that protests have harmed trust in higher education without any additional context.
In this case, I don’t believe the context helps. The article notes that “22 percent of Democratic and 30 percent of Independent parents noted that their trust” had declined. In other words, for 78 percent of Democratic parents, there was, at minimum, no change; for independent (presumably centrist?) parents, 70 percent had, at least, no change in opinion.
Even among Republican parents, though, the numbers aren’t as clear-cut in my view. The article states that “nearly half” said their trust was diminished, but that “nearly half” is 49%; on the other hand, the 47% who said their trust was not affected are not beneficiaries of the “nearly half” descriptor. Moreover, for Republicans, we’re given at least some semblance of understanding of how the rest break down: based on the figures, we know that 49% felt diminished trust, 47% were unaffected, and the rest (~4%) felt increased trust. We don’t get that breakdown for Democrats and Independents, though: we only know what percentage of respondents felt less trust; we’re not given the figures on how many Dems and Independents now feel more trust. (IHE doesn’t really mention students at all.)
The report itself, I think, offers a more accurate framing in response to a question that asks how we’re supposed to respond to a major set of events that’s been dominating the news cycle, for the record: for both students and parents, more than half of respondents said that the protests had either no impact on them, or that their trust had increased. You might say that that still means that in both cases, nearly half of respondents said that their trust had decreased, but I’d argue that the prominence of the protests means that most people will have a response or feeling of some kind, especially if they or their loved ones will soon be part of those same communities. We hear about things and form opinions, which affects our overall attitudes.
Further, the article doesn’t discuss why they might feel less or more trust in higher education. As noted above, “trust” is very ambiguous here: it is very important to know why respondents do or don’t trust higher education in response to this particular issue. Beyond the why, we also need to understand how the respondents arrived at their conclusions. Mainstream media as a whole have not been kind to the protesters, but is it all that surprising that Republican parents, who likely follow right-wing news outlets that have been far less kind, have diminished trust following the protests? Is it surprising given the throwaway line acknowledging that “public trust in higher education hit an all-time low last year”? Why would turmoil of any kind increase trust that was already diminishing?
Looking at the report itself yields some interesting tidbits, as well. The article sums up parental familiarity as a whole as being better than students’ (here, college-bound high school seniors), and the report frames the summary as that “Parents were 2x more likely than prospective students to say they were highly familiar” with the protests (5). Technically, these are both true, but it doesn’t really tell the whole story. The report breaks familiarity down into high, some, little, or no (“not”). The percentages for “some familiarity” are almost identical (36% for students versus 33% for parents); ditto for “not familiar” (7% vs 4%). The main difference comes between high and little familiarity: 42% of parents said they were highly familiar versus 20% of students; on the flip side, 37% of students said they had little familiarity versus 21% of parents.
So, are parents more familiar with the protests than students as a whole? Maybe — I have a lot of students who don’t appear to follow the news too closely. (NB: This is not said as a critique, just an observation.) But there are other potential explanations, as well. Are parents, who (believe they) are in a position of responsibility and knowledge about the world, overstating their familiarity? Are students, who are still learning a lot about the world, understating it? (Is this a Dunning-Kruger effect in action?) Are parents shielding their children from discussions about this under the impression that they don’t know enough to form a real opinion about it? Are they shielding students from discussions about protests because they’re worried their kids will want to go to one of those schools? And how do we reconcile this with the claim that young people are all being brainwashed about Israel-Palestine on TikTok and other apps — they are simultaneously unaware of the protests but also feverishly part of them?
I understand that the IHE article is primarily meant to report findings, not necessarily dig into the nuance; however, even at that, I think the findings could have been represented much better. At the very least, let’s hedge some of the claims: rather than suggesting that the protests were fundamentally harmful to parents’ perceptions about and trust in higher education, let’s at least situate those perceptions in the larger context of diminishing trust in higher education as a whole — again, there is a throwaway line at the end of one paragraph, but I think it’s hard to view this without considering why trust in higher education — and, as the other article notes, in institutions as a whole — is diminishing overall. I certainly don’t think we should be reporting these statistics with greater accuracy for some groups (Republican parents) than others (basically everyone else, including students), and I don’t think we should be suggesting that students are less-informed when even the report doesn’t actually make that claim.
But, I’d really argue that without data on why the respondents answered the way they did, the report isn’t particularly helpful, and that should be part of the discussion in the article. The article is operating through this veneer of objective neutrality, but hopefully the above shows that in making the specific decisions it does, it abandons that pretty quickly. More to the point, though, without that context — that subjectivity — these data are meaningless. I started this post by asking, what does it mean for trust to have been harmed in this particular instance? Without those answers, it doesn’t mean anything.
