Does Distrust of Higher Education Begin in K-12 Schools?

Tal Fortgang
‘17

Righteous and justifiable dissatisfaction—and especially anger—must be directed at the right target to be productive. Perhaps it is a human tendency, alas, to aim our disappointment at the last actor in a long causal chain rather than looking earlier in the process for weak points. American education has been producing this kind of anger for thirty years and frequently makes the same error. There are signs, however, that we are getting better at observing the source of our educational woes. 

Due to a combination of factors that often provide the content of this column, our current outrage at young Americans’ preparedness to contribute to our economy and civic culture usually focuses on higher education. A Gallup poll from this past July found that only 38 percent of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in colleges and universities, down from 57 percent in 2015. A Pew survey from 2025 found that 70 percent believe the system is heading in the wrong direction. The critics span the ideological spectrum: conservatives decry campus ideology and administrative bloat; progressives decry crippling tuition and credential inflation; nearly everyone agrees that universities are graduating young people unprepared for the demands of adult life.

There is little question that universities are beset by pathologies that hamper many graduates with debt, resentment, and bad ideas. But another Gallup poll released just last week points to growing recognition that universities are the culmination of educational shortcomings, rather than their source.

Satisfaction with K-12 education has fallen to 32 percent, a 27-year low, Gallup found. That is down eleven points in two years. Dissatisfaction has hit a record high of 67 percent. When asked to rate schools across six areas, Americans ranked critical thinking dead last: only 20 percent gave schools a positive mark, while 47 percent rated them as doing a poor job, the only plurality “poor” rating of any category measured. Even parents, who historically grade their own children’s schools far more generously than the national system, now report satisfaction at a record low.

The deficits Americans associate with university graduates—poor critical thinking, thin literacy, unpreparedness for work—are downstream of failures that have been compounding since elementary school. Harvard education researcher Thomas Kane has documented that math scores are now down in 70 percent of American school districts, reading scores in 83 percent, and that eighth-grade reading is at its lowest level since 1990. The most recent NAEP found that 32 percent of 12th graders perform below “basic” reading—the worst result since the exam began in 1992. Forty-five percent fall below basic in math. These students do not become capable critical thinkers upon college enrollment. They arrive carrying a decade’s worth of accumulated deficit.

The rubber hits the road when students become professionals upon graduating. Those students also begin exercising political power and exercising judgment in a variety of ways while on campus. It’s therefore natural to point to the last stage before deficiencies become apparent and blame it for its shortcomings. Such displaced criticism is understandable and has considerable precedent.

For decades, the central arena of debate over racial inequality in American education was college admissions. The affirmative action debate—culminating in the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—consumed enormous political and legal energy. But it was also a kind of elaborate misdirection, a prolonged argument conducted at the wrong stage of the educational pipeline.

The gap affirmative action was designed to remedy begins not at the college application, but in childhood. By the time the SAT enters the picture, just 1 percent of Black Americans score above 1390—compared to 8 percent of white students and 25 percent of Asian Americans. Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono, who analyzed Harvard’s admissions data as an expert witness in Students for Fair Admissions, put it plainly: “With affirmative action, it was a band-aid that allowed you to cover it up, because we’re able to say ‘look, Harvard looks racially representative, everything’s okay.’ But when our school systems have fundamentally failed African Americans... you’re already at a big disadvantage.” Mary Tobin, speaking on NPR’s Code Switch after the ruling, was even more direct: “Affirmative action was simply triaging a bullet wound or a disease. From the start of our country, education has been the battleground for access — that has to be the source of where we address inequity.”

Whether the Big Bang of inequality was America’s founding or poor policy choices in the 20th century, patching up college admissions is inadequate to address the problem. It might even be worse: Coleman Hughes has persuasively described race-conscious admissions as “duct tape on a sinking ship”—a stopgap that masked the pipeline failure rather than repaired it. Others have noted that sixty years ago, the academic achievement gap between Black and white students was twice as large as the gap between rich and poor. Today those ratios have inverted, with the rich-poor gap now double the Black-white gap. 

Suffice it to say that K-12 educational excellence has become the urgent fault line in American education. Yet the debate remained fixed on the admissions office, with universities and employers still maneuvering to get around Students for Fair Admissions without any foundational reform remedying substantive disparities.

The pattern now repeats itself, except as a broad educational failure rather than a set of inequalities. We have spent years arguing about what universities teach, whom they admit, how they police speech, and what ideological valences their administrators carry. These are important, and we will continue to argue about them. But they are downstream of a K-12 system that, by its own public’s assessment, has spent a generation failing at its most basic task.

The Gallup K-12 survey, like the SFFA case before it, offers an opportunity to redirect our focus. The pathologies that drive Americans’ frustration with higher education—the flight from rigor, the substitution of platitudes for inquiry, the systematic rewarding of going through the motions—do not originate on college campuses. They are the accumulated consequences of twelve years of schooling that failed to build the intellectual habits higher education assumes students already have.

If we want universities that produce genuinely educated graduates, we need to insist on a better educational culture from the ground up. The plus side of universities treating students and families like consumers is that campuses may well respond to the demands of a more refined consumer culture. The Gallup numbers suggest Americans, at some level, already want this. Sixty-seven percent are dissatisfied. The question is whether we are prepared now to take a hard look at what has gone wrong in American primary and secondary education, or whether we will spend another decade fighting the last war, insisting on dramatic changes to institutions giving under-prepared and hyper-politicized students what they think they want.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.