INSIDE HIGHER ED — Public confidence in higher education ebbed badly in the latter half of the last decade, to judge by the steady stream of opinion polls from 2017 through 2019 that showed Americans (especially Republicans) increasingly convinced that colleges and universities were heading in the wrong direction, failing to prepare graduates for work and favoring liberal views over conservative ones. Those attitudes, combined with growing scrutiny from Republican politicians in numerous states on campus curricular and governance matters, spurred nearly eight in 10 respondents to Inside Higher Ed’s recent Survey of College and University Presidents to agree that they were “worried about Republicans’ increasing skepticism about higher education” and that “the perception of colleges as places that are intolerant of conserving views is having a major negative impact on attitudes about higher education.” Public opinion polling about higher education appeared to drop off during the COVID-19 pandemic, so there’s been little way of gauging whether Americans’ impressions of colleges and universities have continued to erode or begun to turn around. A new survey of 1,000 registered voters by the Winston Group, conducted for the American Council on Education and shared with attendees at its annual meeting last week, provides an initial answer to that question.