Dive Brief:
- Americans’ confidence in higher education has increased for the first time in a decade, according to research released Wednesday by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation.
- Among those surveyed, 42% of adults expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the sector, compared with 36% in 2023 and 2024. The percentage of respondents with little to no confidence declined from 32% last year to 23% in 2025.
- However, the share of adults with high confidence in higher education is still well below 57%, the share who held those views when Gallup first posed the question in 2015.
Dive Insight:
Along with breaking a decadelong trend, Wednesday’s findings are noteworthy because they come amid increasing conservative attacks on the sector and continued questioning of the value of college.
Researchers polled just over 1,400 adults via phone from June 2 to 26.
When asked to explain their responses, 30% of participants confident in higher education pointed to the value of being educated. And 24% said colleges provide good training, with some respondents citing learning to think for oneself and others citing the ability to appreciate different viewpoints.
Other reasons were named more frequently than they were in previous years. Last year, 5% of surveyed adults cited the innovations higher education fosters as inspiring confidence. This year, that share jumped to 15%. And 14% said U.S. colleges are some of the best in the world, up from 7% last year.
In contrast, the share of respondents who pointed to the strength of college instructors and administrators declined from 7% last year to 4% in 2025. And just 1% of adults said college is available to anyone who wants to further their education, down from 2% the previous year.
More than a third of respondents who said they lacked confidence in higher ed, 38%, cited concerns about political agendas, up from 28% in 2024. Those who had little confidence in the sector also expressed concerns about the cost of college and institutions not focusing on and teaching the “right things,” though mentions of both reasons declined from 2024 to 2025.
When researchers asked all participants what would increase their confidence in higher education, they said colleges could focus more on practical job skills, lower their costs, and remove politics from the classroom.
Confidence increased among respondents across the political spectrum, researchers found. But Republicans — who drove much of the decline in confidence in the sector over the past decade — continue to hold more negative views of higher education.
Among Democrats, 61% expressed confidence in higher ed, up from 56% last year. By comparison, 26% of Republicans said the same, an increase from 20% in 2024.
About 2 in 5 respondents who identified as politically independent, 41%, expressed confidence in higher ed. That’s up from 35% last year.
Republicans are more likely to express confidence in two-year colleges than four-year colleges, the research found. Almost half of surveyed adults in the party, 48%, expressed confidence in two-year institutions, while just over a quarter, 26%, said the same of four-year colleges.
A majority of surveyed Democrats had high confidence in both institutional types.
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