Was this forwarded to you by a friend? Sign up, and get your own copy of the news that matters sent to your inbox every week. Sign up for the On EdTech newsletter. Interested in additional analysis? Upgrade to the On EdTech+ newsletter.
I am taking some time off from World Cup watching to write about what I read this week. And by World Cup, naturally, I mean the Women's T20 Cricket World Cup, which started yesterday. I guess I may watch some of the football as well, cricket schedules permitting.
I read a lot of survey reports this week. Most confirmed things I already suspected, but a few made me stop and think. What connected several of them was a common problem: the things we most want to measure—trust, the impact of AI, value—turn out to be far more complicated than the metrics we use to describe them. In each case, the numbers were interesting. What fascinated me was what seemed to be missing behind them.
In the local we trust, all others bring evidence
The one that lingered with me the longest was a new report on trust in higher education from Citizens and Scholars (C & S). Trust sits underneath many of the challenges facing higher education right now. It shapes debates about value, affordability, academic freedom, public support, and even enrollment. Yet it is often discussed in surprisingly simplistic ways.
This report does a better job than most of unpacking what trust actually looks like and why it is proving so difficult for higher education to sustain. I found three things about the survey especially compelling: the notion of ambivalence, the segmentation of the audience according to how and why they lack trust in higher education, and the idea of trust as part of a broader narrative.
The notion of ambivalence helps explain one of the central contradictions in higher education. People still value higher education, still want to participate in it and, as C & S point out, still trust it more than many other societal institutions.
Yet they are simultaneously worried about its direction, skeptical of its performance, and uneasy about its cost. That tension is much closer to how most people actually think than a simple trust-versus-distrust framework.
Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.
Become a paying subscriber of Premium to get access to the rest of this post.
