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Pro-Palestinian campus protests during the spring semester appear to have further undermined public trust in higher education, according to a study that the marketing firm SimpsonScarborough released today.
The protests, which sprawled across more than 100 campuses from coast to coast, captured national headlines and drew the wrath of congressional Republicans, who chastised college presidents for how they dealt with encampments and student demands to divest from Israel and companies allegedly profiting off its war against Hamas.
According to the SimpsonScarborough survey, which included responses from 641 college-bound high school students and 1,000 parents of high school–aged students, parents were more likely than their children to be aware of campus demonstrations and tended to have a more negative view of the protests.
Drilling down into political affiliation, the survey showed that trust in higher ed decreased most among Republican parents. Nearly half (49 percent) said their trust was diminished by the protests, while 47 percent said it was not affected; the remainder said the protests actually increased their trust. Democrats and Independents were less impacted by the demonstrations, though 22 percent of Democratic and 30 percent of Independent parents noted that their trust in higher education had declined. The findings come after public trust in higher education hit an all-time low last year.
Parents and students alike associated only a handful of institutions with the protests, namely Columbia University, Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles. All three saw contentious pro-Palestinian encampments, and the leaders of all three institutions have appeared before Congress in separate hearings on campus antisemitism since the start of the Israel-Hamas war Oct. 7.
Some institutions have attributed other campus troubles to the protests; for instance, Emerson College has alleged that the protests negatively affected enrollment. Earlier this month Emerson announced layoffs due to declining enrollment, which officials partially attributed to “negative press and social media” related to the protests and the arrests of more than 100 students in April.
