The view from this year's college business officers' meeting

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

59% : Last year, a Gallup poll found public confidence in higher education at an all-time low.
52% : Former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump has attacked higher education at times, embracing GOP rhetoric that casts universities as wildly liberal.
45% : CHICAGO -- Hundreds of college financial officers gathered in the Windy City this week -- many delayed by travel issues caused by the CrowdStrike outage -- to share insights about the state of higher education.
42% : One panelist, speaking at a Sunday morning session focused on the role of trustees in risk oversight, noted that the widely covered student protests related to the Israel-Hamas war this spring were absent from many campuses, yet they negatively affected the reputation of higher education as a whole.Catharine Bond Hill, managing director of the higher education consulting firm Ithaka S+R and a trustee at Yale University, argued that reputational damage stemming from the protests, which were unpopular off-campus, "is a major source of risk going forward" for all institutions -- even though they were concentrated at highly selective, well-resourced universities.
42% : But audience members expressed concerns about political actions that could damage higher education.
40% : What that means for higher education remains unclear.
32% : Beset by soaring costs, sprawling scandals and a barrage of criticism from elected officials -- particularly Republicans -- higher education has experienced a public crisis of confidence in recent years.
32% : To Clark, however, the idea seems unlikely even if Trump is elected.

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