Unmet Promises: Diminishing Confidence in Education Among College‐Educated Adults from 1973 to 2018

Abstract

Objective. This article asks: Does experience with education undermine confidence in the institution? If so, has this changed over time? Method. This study uses mixed effects binary logistic regression on the General Social Survey (1973-2018). Results. Confidence in the institution of education has declined over time. Those with a college degree are less confident in education and their confidence is diminishing over time. By 2018, those with a college degree indicated the lowest levels of confidence in education since 1973. These changes are distinct from general trends in institutional confidence. In fact, higher education is typically associated with more confidence in social institutions. Conclusion. These trends likely reflect the shifting rhetoric around the purpose and function of college education as well as the changing economic landscape of higher education. By focusing on long-term changes to a key symbolic impact of higher education (i.e., public confidence in education), findings add to the existing literature on the material benefits and consequences of attaining a college degree.

Caught in Limbo: Mapping Social Spaces for First-Generation Students in Graduate School

“…If a key goal of graduate education is to socialize students into a specific profession and if, as recent trends indicate, the total number of FG students pursuing graduate education continues to increase (Soria and Stebleton 2012), then it is incumbent upon social scientists to consider who is more or less equipped to navigate the often-unfamiliar territory of education. More broadly, institutions have an opportunity to change (Miner 2020).…”

“…Despite my purposeful efforts in the recruitment of students, these data do reflect a self-selected sample—and it remains unclear what separates these experiences from others in graduate school that chose not to participate or even those at other universities. Additionally, I am unable to make group-specific claims regarding FG students relative to those from college-educated families without a comparison group (Miner 2020).…”

Construction of College Aesthetic Education Quality Improvement Model under Big Data Network

“…Aesthetic education in colleges and universities clearly requires high attention to the important role of aesthetic education in talent cultivation, actively improves and comprehensively strengthens the aesthetic education in colleges and universities, adheres to cultural and aesthetic education, and commits to cultivating students' humanistic quality and aesthetic quality in aesthetic education [6,7]. It also emphasizes the importance of aesthetic education in colleges and universities, including taking aesthetic education as the main means of college education and attaching importance to its role of moral cultivation.…”

Preliminary Material

“…These political developments have not only placed immense strain on the existing structures of public education; they have also undermined public confidence in liberal conceptions of democratic education. Waning public trust in government institutions like the public school (Miner, 2020;Wilson, 2020;Stitzlein, 2020;Calderon et al, 2017;cf. Rauh, 2020;Macdonald, 2019), sustained attacks on liberal and democratic values from populist politicians and organizations (Brown, 2019), and political polarization and 'sectarianism' (Finkel et al, 2020;Iyengar et al, 2019) within the digital public sphere (Sunstein, 2017) each pose significant challenges for the theory and practice of liberal democratic education.…”