{shortcode-234b388b883dc449f1ca04921cd907f392cf1a6d}

Does America hate Harvard? From the state of public discourse, you’d assume as much.

Harvard’s left-leaning campus climate, observers say, has estranged the public. Former Harvard President Derek C. Bok exhorts the University to “rebuild the trust and confidence of the public.” Even current Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 concedes that Harvard’s congressional hearings generated an “impression that higher education has lost its way.” This, supposedly, tracks a national trend: Americans, fed up with “political intolerance” on campus, have soured on higher education.

It’s a neat narrative, though it doesn’t fit the facts. Yes, Americans are less confident in institutions like Harvard than they used to be. But the drop isn’t as steep as declinists say — and it’s not primarily driven by culture-war controversies.

When applications to the College fell about five percent last year, commentators considered it evidence of Harvard’s eroding public standing — driven in part by its insufficiently draconian stance against pro-Palestinian student activism. But there’s little evidence of a direct relationship between the two: Columbia, which responded to campus unrest in a largely similar manner (at least before the January 1 application deadline) saw applications rise by about five percent. And for all the talk of reputational decline, roughly 84 percent of admitted students accepted Harvard’s offer in 2024 — a slight uptick from the preceding year.

As for the broader erosion of trust in higher education, it, too, is overblown.

In 2015, Gallup found that 57 percent of Americans said they were confident in higher education. By 2025, just 42 percent reported “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence. But this decline isn’t unique to universities: average public confidence across the nine institutions consistently tracked by Gallup is at a “near-record low,” and only three of the institutions included in this year’s survey command majority support.

Still, higher education commands “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence from more Americans than most other institutions. It currently ranks fifth of 18, trailing only small business, the military, science, and the police. If universities require urgent reform to regain public trust, then so too — perhaps more urgently — do the medical system, organized religion, banks, and the Supreme Court, all of which poll lower.

Ironically, Trump’s assault upon elite institutions seems to have boosted their standing. Between 2024 and 2025, the share of Americans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education jumped six percentage points, the first recorded increase in Gallup’s tracking of such sentiment since 2015.

Nor are Americans’ gripes with higher education primarily driven by progressive campus culture. Of the 23 percent of respondents who expressed “very little” confidence in higher education, only 38 percent — or roughly 9 percent of the public overall — cited “political agendas” as their primary concern.

When Gallup asked what would restore respondents’ confidence in higher education, the top answers had little to do with campus politics. 30 percent said colleges should “focus on practical teaching,” and 27 percent cited the need to “lower costs/make more affordable.” Only 22 percent said institutions should “be less politically biased,” while just 3 percent recommended that schools “get rid of ‘woke.’” (An equal share of respondents said that colleges should expand diversity and inclusion.)

If Harvard and universities like it want to win back the public, their focus should be upon affordability and access. And while renewing “practical teaching” ranked highest, I suspect it’s a proxy for the same concern.

One might say that such calls for “practical teaching” are just a polite way of objecting to the ideological content of the curriculum. But Americans’ weakening interest in the humanities seems to track the rise in tuition and student debt. And it’s unsurprising that families flinch at exorbitant prices for degrees in disciplines whose professional value can seem unclear. The solution isn’t to abandon the humanities — whose career outcomes, not to mention civic value, remain high — but to confront the issue of cost.

While Harvard’s financial aid is among the most generous in the United States, it, like many other institutions, places an undue burden upon the middle class. A Massachusetts family earning $285,000 with one child in college can expect to spend almost 25 percent of their post-tax income on tuition, according to Harvard’s net price calculator.

The University should continue striving to reduce that sum. It should also institute a class-based affirmative action policy which, as Richard Kahlenberg has persuasively argued, would be both broadly popular and effective in filling the diversity deficit left by the end of race-based affirmative action.

There’s only so much any individual college can do. If Democrats are serious about protecting higher education from political backlash, cutting the cost of college is a good place to begin. Canceling student debt would be a logical first step. But as economist Marshall Steinbaum and student debt researcher Laura Beamer have argued, the Department of Education — as the ultimate underwriter of student loans — should also take an active role in curbing tuition inflation.

There’s another lesson for Harvard. As its clash with Trump drags on, the University’s public standing is stronger than its critics say. Harvard should heed the advice President Donald Trump once gave Liberty University’s graduating class: “Never, ever, give up.”

Alex Bronzini-Vender ’28, a Crimson Editorial comper, is a double concentrator in History and Government in Cabot House.