Over the past few years, conservatives have rapidly lost trust in higher education. From 2015 to 2023, Gallup found that the share of Republicans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell by 37 points, from 56 to 19 percent. As conservatives have come to look negatively at these institutions, Republicans have engaged in political attacks on the sector, most recently in the fact-finding and pressure campaign that caused Claudine Gay to resign as president of Harvard.
This decline is something close to common knowledge. Less discussed is the fact that public confidence in colleges has fallen significantly across all ideological groups since 2015. Though Republicans’ confidence cratered the most, Gallup found that it fell by 16 points among independents (from 48 to 32 percent) and nine points among Democrats (from 68 to 59 percent, not far from where Republicans were nine years ago).