Dive Brief:
- Only 12% of surveyed adults said they believe four-year colleges are doing a “good” or “excellent” job of “providing an affordable education,” according to a poll released Wednesday by Lumina Foundation and Gallup.
- Community colleges fared much better on the question, with 54% of adults rating them highly on their affordability.
- However, even amid these financial concerns, 74% of surveyed parents said they want their children to pursue postsecondary education directly after high school. Thirty-eight percent of parents selected a four-year college as their top choice for their child, 19% selected a two-year institution, and 17% selected a job-training or certification program.
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Dive Insight:
When asked who should bear responsibility for higher education affordability, surveyed adults most frequently pointed to colleges themselves.
A little over three-quarters of respondents, 76%, selected individual colleges as being among the top three parties bearing responsibility for college affordability. State and federal governments were placed into that group by 73% and 67% of surveyed adults, respectively.
However, college margins are often paper thin, giving some institutions little flexibility to address affordability concerns. Despite enrollment growth in fiscal 2025, operating margins weakened across many colleges, according to a recent report from S&P Global Ratings.
The median operating margin across 286 private colleges rated by S&P was -0.4% in fiscal 2025. The credit ratings agency’s 145 rated public institutions had slightly better financial health by this metric, with a median operating margin of 0.7%.
State governments may likewise have limited flexibility in the coming years to address college affordability.
The massive tax and spending bill passed by Republicans last year — dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act —cuts $1 trillion in healthcare spending and $186 billion for nutrition assistance from the federal budget over the next decade, according to an April report from the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.That will likely shift many of these costs onto state governments, which in turn could cut their spending on public higher education to balance their budgets, the report said.
At the federal level, House appropriators recently advanced a bill that would raise the Pell Grant by $50 for a maximum of $7,445 and provide $16 billion to address the program’s budget shortfall. However, the proposal would also eliminate subsidized federal loans for undergraduate students — a measure student advocacy groups say could lead to higher college costs for borrowers.
Meanwhile, several congressional Democrats proposed bicameral legislation in June that would double the maximum Pell Grant over five years and index it to inflation. The proposal has been introduced several times in prior years but has failed to gain traction.
Despite widespread concerns about higher education affordability, the majority of surveyed U.S. adults, 53%, gave four-year colleges high marks on their ability to advance knowledge, according to the Lumina Foundation and Galluppoll. Half rated them highly for providing a quality education, and 45% said they’re doing well at providing educational access to students from all backgrounds.
Lower shares of adults rated colleges highly at preparing students for technological advances like artificial intelligence or promoting free speech and respect for viewpoint diversity. And just 32% said colleges did at least a good job preparing students for the workforce.
Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to rate four-year colleges positively on categories related to free speech,job market preparation, quality and advancing knowledge. But members of both parties rated those colleges poorly on affordability, with just 14% of Democrats and 5% of Republicans giving them high marks in this category.
Overall, U.S. adults rated two-year colleges higher than four-year institutions across all but one category — advancing knowledge.Two-year colleges got its best rating on its ability to provide educational access to all, with 68% of surveyed adults giving it high marks in that category.
Although political divides were present in adults’ views of two-year colleges as well, they were smaller than those for four-year colleges.
Lumina Foundation and Gallup’s results came from telephone interviews of 1,001 adults and self-administered web surveys of 2,043 adults from June 1-15.