Whatever your opinion about the state of higher education, Tyler Austin Harper’s recent Atlantic cover story, “Why I Quit The Tenure Track,” will likely make you feel something—exhaustion, aggrievement, frustration, fascination, disbelief, or admiration. I certainly felt a mix of feelings, but I more so felt incredibly curious about what the article, and the reactions to it, tell us about how Americans view institutions of higher learning.
Harper’s story documents his experience as a Black professor at Bates College—specifically the school’s clumsy and often heavy-handed efforts aimed at addressing racial inequality. Harper details how these practices held white and non-white students and faculty to different standards and how the university’s goal of achieving a “culture of repair” led to mandates and practices that infantilized Black students. The experience was bewildering, frustrating, and eventually alienating—it precipitated Harper’s departure from his once dream job. For many critics of higher education, it was less an exposé than an effective articulation of the self-inflicted problems besetting America’s colleges and universities. The piece provides one possible explanation for why Americans have lost faith in higher ed—the politics. Harper’s account is compelling, but survey data complicate the story it tells about why more Americans are giving up on the promise of a college degree.
The Public’s Problem with Higher Education
Most people believe there is a problem with higher education. In the last 10 years, confidence in college has collapsed among the public. Gallup found that only 38 percent of Americans report having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, a nearly 20-point drop from 2015. Politics is an obvious culprit for the country’s diminished confidence. Republicans have experienced a more precipitous slide in support than Democrats, widening a modest partisan divide in views of higher education into a chasm. But there is another issue that looms even larger over higher education. Its cost. A Pew poll asked all Americans what they saw as the biggest problem in higher education and found the nearly universal issue was lack of affordability. Most Americans say that colleges are doing a lousy job of preparing students to find well-paying jobs. Fewer, but still a substantial number, say schools are failing to expose students to diverse perspectives. However, cost almost always tops the list of complaints. Even Americans who are the most dissatisfied with the direction of higher education—a group that is more right-leaning—are as likely to say it has to do with cost as politics.
This is a very predictable result of the massive increase in the cost of four years of college. Public and private universities have both seen dramatic price increases over the last few decades. The average cost of a college education in the early 70s hovered around $13k. Now, it is over $30k a year. The price tag at many small liberal arts schools, like Bates, can approach $100,000 per year. Students routinely graduate with loans that reach the six-figure territory and take years, or even decades, to pay off.
Who Is Most Opposed to Higher Ed? Those Who Can Afford to Be
The ideological battles being fought on many campuses are almost exclusively waged among elites. Debates over DEI initiatives, Gaza, antisemitism, and transgender rights dominate public attention rather than conversations about what can be done to make colleges work for the working class. The students who need the most. When public support for higher education wanes, the biggest losers are those who need them to work—not as bastions of progressive thought, but as drivers of economic opportunity, civic responsibility, and social solidarity. It’s no coincidence that some of the fiercest critics of higher education are found among those who have amassed considerable wealth and influence.
The people most willing to denigrate societal institutions are typically those who need them the least. Wealthy people can probably afford to choose an alternative pathway for their children—although most do not. For many working-class families, college is the only way for their kids to get ahead. It turns out that, whatever their politics, college-educated parents generally stress the importance of attending college to their children. In our survey of American teenagers, girls were more likely than boys to say they were going to college—but the education gap was equally as large. Teens raised by college-educated parents were far more likely to say they were planning on going to college than those with noncollege parents, regardless of their parents’ politics. More than six in ten teens with college-educated parents who supported Kamala Harris are planning to attend a 4-year college after graduation. The number for teens of college-educated Trump voters is identical—61 percent say they are college-bound.
Put simply, gender and class background, not politics, predict college attendance. The people who have lost faith in higher education are working-class men. It’s why, in our own study, boys from working-class backgrounds are the least likely to expect to get a college education.
I can’t say I’m surprised by this result. Higher education, for all its flaws, still serves as an engine of economic opportunity and one of the strongest drivers of social connection. This last part is frequently overlooked in conversations about the role that higher ed plays in American society. Americans with four-year degrees have a slew of advantages over those without. Our research has shown a growing class divide in civic and social life. College graduates have more close friends, a greater network of personal support, and demonstrate more robust civic connections. They belong to more clubs and organizations, participate more regularly in church, and are more active in sports leagues. There has always been a relationship between economic success and social opportunity, but the class gap is larger today than it was in the past.
I’m sympathetic to those who worry about the politicization of higher education, but there’s not much evidence of indoctrination on campuses. When this charge is raised on social media, I’ve often seen professors respond with some incredulity about the supposed influence they have on their students. “I can’t even get them to read the syllabus!” Empirical work largely bears this out. A number of studies have found that faculty have little impact on the political beliefs of their students, including a new working paper aptly named: “Do Faculty Affect Student Partisanship?” Of course, this does not mean we should ignore efforts by administrators or faculty to promote their preferred political agenda. Students should feel that their professors are neutral in political discussions and are more focused on helping them identify when their arguments are weak, inconsistent, or incoherent rather than “right” or “wrong”.
The situation on college campuses does not have to be as dire as some critics suggest for it to prod us into taking corrective action. For many Americans, higher education is one of the primary pathways to financial stability, to creating enduring social connection, and instilling a sense of civic responsibility. When colleges become overly focused on advancing the discrete interests of certain groups, it undermines the entire effort. It’s not only a matter of ideological openness. The waning interest in college among boys might have less to do with notions of masculinity. If you’re a boy from a working-class background, how welcome will you feel on some of these college campuses? How curious will your classmates be about your background, life experiences, and perspective? The very first section of my forthcoming book, Generation Uncoupled, addresses the crisis of understanding—how do teen girls and boys understand one another when their lived experiences are often so different? The title of the chapter: “Rekindling Curiosity.”
America’s colleges need to reassert their necessary role in American society as not only sources of knowledge and learning, but experiences that encourage curiosity, reflection, and the cultivation of a broader civic purpose. In college, we find out not only who we are, but what we owe to others. It’s assuredly a minority, but there are some administrators and faculty who have forgotten what a college education is supposed to mean and why what they do is so important.
Mr. Cox, your argument might be right that affordability and job preparation are the largest reasons for the decrease in positive evaluations of college educations, but to say "there’s not much evidence of indoctrination on campuses" is absurd. Haven't you seen the analyses of syllabi, showing ample coverage of leftist perspectives but almost no coverage of conservative ones on the same topics? Haven''t you seen the many universities that require courses in DEI, gender, race, and other topics beloved of the left, but few outside military academies requiring courses in military history, economics, the Constitution, or other right-coded areas? Of course professors don't see the bias, because they share it. Yes, affordability of college and preparation for well-paying jobs are big problems, but so is political bias: Why deny one to boost the other?