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This was a tough week for some in higher education as they struggled with LMS outages. Given that, I was tempted to construct a post only of good news and funny stories. But then I read a series of reports that in different ways touched on the issue of cost in higher education, and I couldn’t help myself.

The three reports I’m writing about this week all concern cost in one way or another, but they point to a similar tension. People often experience higher education as opaque and difficult to navigate. Part of that is because institutions do not always communicate clearly, but it is also because higher education itself is highly complex and increasingly dependent on hidden infrastructure, invisible labor, and complicated cross-subsidies to make the system function. At the same time, students, families, and the public increasingly want certainty and predictability while often being reluctant to spend significant time navigating the system or seeking information outside familiar and convenient sources. That leaves higher education with a real challenge, and one the sector will have to work much harder to solve.

Trust, broadly considered as a belief in the value of higher ed and that higher ed actors behave in a way that is fair, is one of the key issues facing higher education, here in the US and abroad. Many signs point to trust in higher education slipping and, if not addressed, the issue could potentially imperil the sector, and have a long term negative impact.

A new report from Strada looks at the issue of trust through the lens of the cost of higher education and especially transparency around those costs. Their findings provide some significant insights into the issue and should be a wake up call, especially for some specific parts of higher education.

What jumped out immediately was the disjuncture between students’ belief in the importance of higher education, and its value as an investment but their simultaneous belief that higher education institutions prioritize making money rather than educating students.

On the question of the importance of higher education, current college students (which in the US means all tertiary students, for our readers in other countries) say that higher education is either extremely important or very important at a rate higher than any other group.

On the question of whether college is an investment, the numbers of college students who think it is a great investment are lower, than, say high school students, but overall a large plurality of college students think it is either a great or a good investment, a higher rate than any other group bar high school students and the two groups are pretty close.