The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%. This is based on the question "Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in higher education - a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little". The first two options appear to be combined in the data/graphs. 68% now say higher education is "headed in the wrong direction". The primary source doesn't say how many people were asked or how they were asked.[1]
The drop seems to be a combination of concerns about ideological capture and falling economic utility.
1 - It does say "The research includes the trend results reported above from Gallup’s June telephone survey as well as new results from a contemporaneous web survey of more than 2,000 Gallup Panel members." But I don't know what this means.
This is really lowest common denominator reporting, on top of lowest common denominator sampling, and lowest common denominator question design.
A far better approach would be in trying to test for a specific hypothesis, e.g. "I believe confidence in higher ed is falling due to XYZ" reasons.
But, in the context of Gallup, I think this kind of research is really there not to answer questions, but to provide a sort of pre-signal to aide in hypothesis generation. Now that this result exists, large numbers of companies and organizations will do paid studies to figure out what this means in detail, who thinks it, and identify areas they can course correct in their strategy.
Gallup does good work, but this kind of omnibus question is not really meant to answer any questions.
Source: I work in B2B survey and interview research.
>Now that this result exists, large numbers of companies and organizations will do paid studies to figure out what this means in detail, who thinks it, and identify areas they can course correct in their strategy.
I would particularly like to see questions about "higher education" binned by field. I hypothesize that sentiment will differ most strongly between STEM and "X studies" fields, with the classic liberal arts subjects (English, history, etc) somewhere in the middle. I'd also be curious to know what the public knows about "the reproducibility crisis" or administrative bloat, if anything. And it would be fascinating to ask those with and without degrees, across 2-3 generations.
absolutely - binning and cohort analysis is critical here. There's also (at least in my mind) a very reasonable question about what "higher education" means. I think it would be extremely valuable to understand expectations for BA / BS undergrads, Technical colleges / associates degrees, Masters degrees in liberal arts vs social sciences vs STEM, and then Doctorates. I imagine people have not lost confidence in much of the apparatus of professions - e.g. engineering schools and law schools.
It would also be very interesting to me to map this against what people's perceptions were for graduation rates, scholarship availability, average student debt, and even the perceived impact that a school's endowment had on education quality.
There's a lot to know, but seeing the very basic trend exists means that there is something to look at.
Specific questions make for chaotic and detailed answers that don't speak to the bigger issues, because it fragments the pool opinions and allows the question crafter to push a narrative. This is precisely the kind of "scientific" nonsense that people are starting to realize and push back against. People with marginalized opinions have since learned the game and are starting to fall for it less and less.
Source: someone with a marginalized viewpoint and the target of "scientific" and institutionalized race-based discrimination.
This is useful as long as the sampling strategy doesn't change over time. With omnibus questions it can be a bit variable if the studies have some other motivation and the demographics are not consistent over time.
edit to add: if you looked at 40 years of this question, you would definitely want to control for the higher number of people with direct exposure to the higher ed system, since that base rate has been on a positive trend for a long time.
> "Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in higher education -- a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little?"
Confidence in higher education doing what? Leading to a good job? Making people better? Having a positive ROI? Being fun?
Gallup asks "how much confidence do you have in X", for business, government, courts, gods, etc. to measure sentiment. It's too generic to be meaningful. The trend, though, is interesting.
Related, but longitidunal studies have indicated that people's stated goal of college has changed quite a bit over time. 40 years ago it was much more common to see the answer of "to develop a philosophy of life" where now the more common answer is "to get a good job."
Yeah, until it materializes in lower rates of people actually going to college people at minimum folks seem pretty confident that it has a return on investment.
Also I'm honestly not sure I really care/put any weight into the opinions of random adults whose opinions of higher education are basically a reflection of how universities are portrayed to them in their news bubble. The fact that political affiliation not only matters but matters a great deal means it has little to do with the institutions themselves. I bet you could get the same results with "confidence in science" which is just as vague and nonsensical.
We reached 'peak university' (in terms of enrollment) in 2011. [1] I also would not say political affiliation matters, as confidence is plummeting for all groups. As for science, they seem to have stopped asking this question after 2021 (perhaps to avoid the temporary biases caused by COVID?) but Gallup has indeed had science as one of their 'confidence in institution' series of questions. [2] As of 2021 it had a total of 64%, leaving it as the ~3 highest rated institution. That's contrasted against 36% for higher education, leaving it somewhere between the church and medical system.
Don't think covid affected university reputations that much. Slogans like "decolonize maths" and skin colour based recruitment and award of degrees give me very little confidence even in modern STEM degrees from formerly prestigious universities.
These are niche talking point if you aren’t terminally online. Most people probably aren’t even considering politics, it’s just an issue of cost and roi. Degrees are oversaturated and insanely expensive.
Honestly, I think universities took their good reputations for granted, and so chose to pursue other goals than maintain them.
I don't think any institution can maintain the confidence of the general public without being scrupulously neutral on controversial things (or at least scrupulously respectful of all common perspectives) and staying focused on widely-shared values.
Probably has more to do with birth rates, but nevertheless its a good thing since these institutions of higher learning will be more accessible to people who are actually passionate about whay they’re learning rather than a bunch of people trying to check a box
Fertility rates are an interesting hypothesis, but looking at the data I think we can definitely say that's not the driver. In 2011 there was total enrollment of about 21 million. In modern times we're down to around 19 million. [1] Fertility rates have only recently cratered, and from 1990-2010 we were even pretty close to sustainability. That's relevant, because that's when most of all of the current student body would have been born. So there's definitely fewer children, as can be clearly seen in this population pyramid [2], but it can also be seen the difference is, at most, the low hundreds of thousands. And we're talking a difference on the order of millions fewer students.
An open question would also be the overall shift (if any) in international enrollment. If international enrollment has stayed the same (or even increased) then it means the decline in American enrollment could be even more extreme. By contrast if international enrollment has completely plummeted, it could go some way towards mitigating these numbers.
> The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%.
It’s a little hard to tease out how much of this is due to the demographics of Republicans and Democrats changing. There’s been a significant shift in education level between the two parties recently, and this may have offset some of what would otherwise be broad based decreases.
The broader decrease in faith in higher education is still quite clear signal though.
That demographic theory seems a bit feeble. According to the polling back in 2015 there was a slight bias but splitting by politics painted the same picture in a with minor adjustments. Then there was a massive realignment where suddenly the right wing "lost confidence". It isn't obvious why less-educated individuals would have no confidence in education either. That is like saying less-physically-endowed people don't respect height or muscle mass! People can respect what they do not have if it is respectable, and they can have confidence in things they personally lack if they are things inspiring confidence.
Although what the word "confidence" means here is a baffler. It is beyond vague.
Don't know why you're getting downvoted... seems very well said. There's this disturbing attitude in right wing media that almost celebrates people deciding to turn away from higher ed. It's like they actually want people poor and stupid
The one thing you don't mention though are the effects of free trade policies and immigration on their economic conditions
I think the general pattern here is a sort of self-reenforcing attitude associated with poverty. It's hard for me to look at more extreme progressives trying to eliminate high ability classes and not see some of the same thing
Ha, some of my most thoughtful and most balanced posts where I've put both sides of an argument have been downvoted the most.
Sometimes—usually with controversial topics—I've sat on my post and watched the votes oscillating up and down so in the end I've ended up with none or near zero.
From my experience, almost inevitably, downvoters don't offer a counter viewpoint or argument. Whilst irrelevant when it comes to my posts, it is important when scaled up to real politics. Voting out of gut reaction isn't helpful.
It seems to me that as gut reaction can now be manipulated so easily in today's world that it's a substantial reason why democracies and the democratic process are in such a mess.
> Sometimes—usually with controversial topics—I've sat on my post and watched the votes oscillating up and down so in the end I've ended up with none or near zero.
Probably a form of upvoting that represents "I don't really agree with you, but I don't agree with the downvotes either". That means many comments will start attracting upvotes only when they are greyed out. It isn't so rare for reasonable but downvoted comments to bubble back up to exactly +1.
> From my experience, almost inevitably, downvoters don't offer a counter viewpoint or argument.
It'd be interesting to know how many people just don't use downvotes as a matter of course. The signal they send is wildly ambiguous. Although in this case I'd guess it was the ranty tone of the comment and the lack of charity, evidence or argument beyond assertions were the major factors.
"It'd be interesting to know how many people just don't use downvotes as a matter of course. The signal they send is wildly ambiguous."
Right. That's why I reckon HN should give the poster (and only the poster) the stats for both up and downvotes. As often, I'll not watch the voting but only get to see the final tally many days later and to find it sitting on zero or minus one. One's left not knowing whether one's view was middle-of-the-road and received lots of votes either way or if it was just one downvoter.
Also, I'd like to see HN publish anonymized stats on how people vote, it would be interesting to know how many downvoters subsequently comment or fail to do so. Same with upvoters but I'd reckon downvoter stats would be more informative.
BTW, see my reply to throwaway7ahgb, I posted it before reading your comment.
Edit: in the time I've taken to write this reply my post to which you replied has been downvoted from two votes to one. There's been no subsequent negative comment in the interim. Point proved perhaps? ;-)
IMHO you should be downvoted for comments such as "It's not because anyone in the Republican party actually cares about any of this". This dismisses 100M+ people and their beliefs.
Right, I was making a general point, sometimes it's difficult to summarize succinctly in a few words.
It's why I rarely downvote a comment despite errors or political views (from my stance I much prefer to argue the point giving my reasons). That said, some comments are just so wrong and or egregious that it's obvious additional comments won't help and if posted they'd only inflame things further.
I've learned this from experience, on more than one occasion I've seen HN delete a complete thread (full length of the chain to the top) after I made a very reasonable reply to a very egregious comment posted somewhere near its bottom. The poster then took ofence and still others came to my defense and matters cascaded to the point where it was deleted. If I'd ignored the comment or just downvoted it then it's likely the thread would have remained intact. Trouble was many other intelligent comments were deleted in the process.
It's almost impossible to make generalizations on HN. You'll say "X is typically Y" and someone will always come out of the woodwork to reply "Well here is a case where X is not Y. Your entire point is invalid. Gotcha!"
Yeah, right. I will make one generalization though. I've rarely ever had a problem on purely technical points, either I acknowledge I'm wrong or we agree we've been arguing at cross purposes and it's resolved. Even one 'sticky' discussion that involved the controversial sugar substitute aspartame and the correctness of the Wiki entry was largely resolved when we agreed we were arguing at cross purposes. (As you likely know discussions about aspartame can get very heated).
From my experience, the point you're making almost always arises from controversial topics or ones that are or can be construed as political. For example, I remember when HN deleted a thread on veganism. Discussion started out civilized but eventually went ary after an extremist made statements that no reasonable person would have considered correct. Backlash followed from multiple posters and HN ended what was no longer a discussion but a heated argument.
I'm not that person, but the Pew Research Center says that, in 1994, 57% of Democratic voters were white non-college graduates, while in 2019, it was 30%. For Republicans, 68% of their voters were white non-college graduates in 1994, and it was 57% in 2019. The Democrats seem to have been shedding this demographic much faster than Republicans have been.
They do say that there's a relatively recent shift in voters who went to college towards the Democratic party.
The Republican Party now holds a 6 percentage point advantage over the Democratic Party (51% to 45%) among voters who do not have a bachelor’s degree. Voters who do not have a four-year degree make up a 60% majority of all registered voters.
By comparison, the Democratic Party has a 13-point advantage (55% vs. 42%) among those with a bachelor’s degree or more formal education.
This pattern is relatively recent. In fact, until about two decades ago the Republican Party fared better among college graduates and worse among those without a college degree.
I don't know if it qualifies as a shift, significant or otherwise, because I don't know how it was before. But a quick internet search for "biden trump voters education level" brought forth a few reports by news sites and research outfits.
According to Ipsos and Reuters about a third of Trump voters have a college degree or better. Pew has an more detailed analysis of voters for the 2016. 2018, and 2020 elections here [1], including education, which seems to confirm this.
There's extensive information on how this poll is conducted here. [1] It's a bit different than normal because it's not a one-off survey, but rather a long-term recurring polling. This particular series has been going for 23 years now. I'd guess they added the higher education aspects in 2015 (since that's when the graphs begin). Higher education took a really unexpected turn. We hit 'peak higher education' in 2011 [2], but everybody at the time was expecting it to continue growing rapidly as it had in the decades prior.
It’s sad that as an electorate, as a people, (even the democrats), show a lowering of “confidence” in higher ed. It means experts and scientists get ridiculed. It’s disgusting and sad.
Is this a harbinger of a failing empire? I think so.
Covid was such an outlier event things were changing daily as they tried new things. I never understood why people got so upset over policies around Covid they were just figuring stuff out as new info came in. Folks expected people to have all the answers to everything but the scientific method is to try something test the results and confirm with further experiment no?
That's true, but when we find out that the "trusted scientist" was pushing his opinion as "scientific fact" when he knew otherwise, it's really hard to rebuild trust.
Like Fauci with the masks. He knew he was wrong.
I'm old enough to remember when the government confidently asserted that butter was bad, eat margarine instead. I ate margarine for decades. Then it turned out the hydrogenated oil is more or less poison. Back to butter for me. We were told eggs were bad, meat was bad, grain is good. All wrong.
It's funny because you're right about all those examples, and it's reasonable to point to them when explaining a loss of trust in science... But most of them are actually just companies or industries manipulating the public with shitty science for marketing reasons. Kind of a bad apple spoils the batch situation.
Also I'm surprised the academic integrity crisis hasn't been mentioned yet... The cheating and plagiarism rates are orders of magnitude worse now than pre pandemic and LLMs
My pet hypothesis is Fauci saw an infectious disease / epidemiologists dream thought experiment. What if every human on the planet self-isolated for XX weeks? If most illnesses (e.g. cold, flu, airbone) die out after X days without a host, presumably a large chunk of communicable transient diseases that have been around forever.. would suddenly no longer exist. My thought is there was a sort of power-drunkness, mix of anxiety, and the blissful joy of doing this naughty experiment on 350 million people. With the best of intentions of course.
Of course the problem with it all is one general of medicine. The infectious disease specialist stays in their lane and devises an infectious disease solution. I don't think psychiatrists or economists had much of a say in it. I would speculate there are particular populations such as healthy teenagers, who mostly handle COVID easily with near-zero death rate( HEALTHY teenagers).. where these COVID restrictions caused more damage, psychological and suicide, then the COVID precautions themselves... in order to save the boomer population which did benefit.
The other problem, obvious now, is it didn't work. You can't bottle up people, particularly not muricans, a very individualistic culture. The goal was to knock out COVID in a week or two and look how it went.
Most of the “fraudulent citations” stories you’ve seen were by non-US researchers. But nobody leads with that detail, because the goal is to cherry-pick bad behavior from across the goal in order to convince people that US higher education is entirely corrupt. It’s the same phenomenon that has half the country convinced that violent crime in US cities is out of control, when in fact a detailed analysis shows that it’s at historically low levels.
doesn't mean there isn't a lot of local fraud. Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind.
Let's not forget that fraudulent Alzheimer's paper that misdirected Alzheimer's research for decades.
The Pons and Fleischmann cold fusion fraud?
Does it matter if most come from foreign scientists, when prestigious journals publish them? What are we supposed to do, reject papers with foreign sounding names? Why aren't the journals doing proper vetting?
Attempts to suppress any counterclaims to the official scientific opinions during covid would make anyone skeptical.
Imagine I told you the US was overrun by violent crime and murder, and when asked for examples I listed:
* A single horrible murder took place decades ago
* A second (possibly less terrible) manslaughter case that took place in the 1980s
* A variety of violent acts in dangerous areas in developing countries, today
I’m not even going to dispute that there is academic fraud. Just that your examples tend to illustrate how relatively rare it is when one filters for reputable researchers, journals and institutions, and also takes into account the denominator (which is enormous) rather than highlighting some spectacular examples and making broad claims about the world falling apart.
Do we have good data to the contrary, though? Is there evidence that most science is good? The replicability crisis has certainly given some evidence that much of published research could be classified as 'not good' in some domains. (And maybe there is an important distinction to make between 'bad' science and 'fraudulent' science).
If there isn't good evidence to show that most science is good, the best we can probably claim is that we don't know.
I don’t think “there is an important distinction between ‘bad’ science and ‘fraudulent’ science” should have the word “maybe” attached to it. Of course there is a difference, just as there is a huge distinction between premeditated murder and accidental deaths. The correct level of both should be zero, but one is vastly more damaging and also more rare than the other. As an aside: the problem I have with the OP is that it isn’t arguing about scientific quality, it’s arguing that science is rife with actual fraud. Typically in the midst of such conversations the conversation switches from actual accusations of fraud to the replication crisis in small-effect-size social science experimental work, which seems to be more an issue of people being careless than malicious —- and importantly, is an issue that the scientific community is addressing through improved standards.
With respect to your question: “is there evidence that most science is good”, I’m not even sure how you would answer that question. All I know is that if you compare the world of my grandmother to the world of today, the two are so different as to be unrecognizable, and scientific advances are responsible for most of the difference. That progress continues every single day, and we’re both alive because of science was at least good enough to make our continued existence possible.
It reads like most of your issue is with my phrasing, which was deliberate to soften the comment so it doesn’t come across as accusatory.
>I’m not even sure how you would answer the question.
It should probably be answered in the same way we’d answer the converse. Something like “here is the data and the tests that show the data quality is high and the results are replicable.” My point was, if you can’t show that, then the claims that the work is good may not be scientifically valid.
To put a finer point on it, we know there is replicability crisis in many corners of science. But we don’t likely know how much of that is due to bad science or outright fraud unless we do the science-y work to check. And unfortunately many of the incentives are aligned against that very thing.
I have not claimed that all scientific work is good or valid.
The post I responded to said: “given the shameless plague of fraudulent papers, and the gaming of citations, my faith in experts and scientists has been damaged.” I picked a bone with that given the total lack of evidence for the claim. More generally I have a problem with a broader class of people who make claims like this, since I find these claims unlikely and unjustified.
You came back to me with a different question: “how do we know that all science is good?” I genuinely don’t know how to answer that question. And bluntly, I think it would be incredibly hard to answer it: the question is up there with “how many grains of sand are there on the world’s beaches.” I do think that clearly science, in whatever state it is in, has historically worked amazingly well. The world we live in is a testament to that. Maybe the answer is that it doesn’t matter, that ecience has always been mediocre and yet we go to space and cure diseases with even low-quality science.
A more general answer is that everyone doing science is working incredibly hard to find the answers to hard questions. We are always doing so imperfectly, with imperfect methods and imperfect tools and imperfect brains and yet we soldier on. If you want to join this effort, either to further it or bring evidence to criticize and improve it, we are all excited to have you. But simply posing impossible-to-answer questions is not necessarily doing either thing.
>more general answer is that everyone doing science is working incredibly hard to find the answers to hard questions.
I think this is too romantic of a view. Yes, some (or even many) are working hard to answer hard questions. Others are seeking money, status and/or prestige as their top priority, just like practically any other field. It’s no different than saying financiers are working incredibly hard to create a rising tide that lifts all boats. It makes for a lofty narrative, but it’s also ignoring much of human nature.
And if you think that question is impossible to answer, it should at the very least give you pause to think about the confidence you have in your conclusion. Otherwise it reads as “I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true.” That’s dogma, not science.
In this conversation we’ve traveled trom “scientific fraud is rampant” to “you must somehow prove to me that all science is good” to “maybe scientists are human beings”. I think the first claim is made without evidence and I called the poster on it; the second is a bizarre goalpost-shift that I don’t think we have the resources to ever answer. But the third question is easy for me to answer: sure, scientists are human beings, with all their flaws.
But so what? What’s most interesting about the conversation we’re having is that even as folks make and fall back from specific arguments, the directional nature of the discussion doesn’t shift. All this tells me is that you don’t like scientists and are eager to land a punch against them, even if the punch is as weak as “they’re human.” This kind of conversation doesn’t have much value to me, since I can’t learn anything from it except that you have some strong emotions. But maybe it could be valuable to you?
>All this tells me is that you don’t like scientists
I think you’re extrapolating too much. Again, you’re making a strong claim based on limited evidence which is the hallmark of bad reasoning. I work in research and publish/referee articles regularly. I have no qualms with scientists, but I’m also acutely aware of how the system is flawed.
>I think the first claim is made without evidence
I get the impression you’re too riled to actually see my point so I’ll be explicit. We have lots of evidence that bad science is pretty widespread, especially in certain disciplines. We also have anecdotal examples of fraud. The latter is a subset of the former, with the remainder being good work. How big of a subset is it? Your claim is that it's small; my claim is we don't know.
There’s no goalpost shifting. All of the points made are related to the issue of fraud. Asking for evidence of your claim is not goalpost shifting, nor is understanding that fraud is a consequence of human incentives for status that exist in practically every domain. I simply made the point that we know there’s a problem, but likely don’t know the extent of it. Meanwhile, you made the claim that academic fraud is rare. And yet you also claim it’s impossible to prove that it’s not rare. It’s pretty clear that you’re not making a reasoned argument, which is the irony of someone defending the current state of science.
> Again, you’re making a strong claim based on limited evidence which is the hallmark of bad reasoning
I read back through my posts to find the claim I made that you’re talking about and I can’t find it. Please let me know what you’re talking about, maybe quote it. I’m gathering this has mostly become a troll at this point, and I’m sorry I kept responding.
>examples tend to illustrate how relatively rare it is
Given the fraud and replicability issues that have been shown to exist even within the most reputable institutions and journals, I think this claim needs some substance to back it up.
>this has mostly become a troll at this point
Please review the HN guidelines. They specifically reference assuming good faith and avoiding shallow dismissals. I’ve tried giving that to you by asking questions and giving you multiple opportunities to give evidence to your position.
1. The initial post made a strong claim about high levels of fraud.
2. I asked for evidence to support this. The evidence given was arguably very sparse.
The quote you shared is from my response to point (2). Arguably in a world of infinite pedantry it could have been phrased differently. For example: “given how relatively rate cases of fraud supported by actual evidence are” might have been clearer. However given the context I assumed that claims of scientific fraud would involve evidence.
This seemed a good place to end the conversation. Yet:
3. You came in and “judo flipped” the conversation to “aha; but what about the fraud that could theoretically exist but that somehow had produced no evidence of its existence. Perhaps these levels are very high!”
4. I said that evidence of absence would be enormously difficult to prove, given that it would require resources beyond those we currently spend on science to identify this.
5. And moreover I pointed out that we have never had the means to detect this evidence-non-producing fraud and yet science has managed to produce massive and visible benefits that we experience on a daily basis.
And thus this leaves us at an impasse. All science may be full of fraud and bad results that we cannot detect. Perhaps it always had been! And yet this has not prevented science from producing results that are enormously valuable. I am left with some questions:
1. What strategy would you pursue to answer your extremely difficult question, given that real-world resources are extremely finite. Please do not say “well, we just need to replicate every result” becayse this simply misunderstands the point about resources.
2. If we cannot devise a feasible policy to test your “perhaps science is full of fraud” question, what should we do instead? Is there an actionable policy you’d pursue?
My view is that strong answers to both questions are not so much interesting to me, but interesting in terms of whether your world-view has value. Surprise me!
>given the context I assumed that claims of scientific fraud would involve evidence.
The other commenter did provide some evidence (albeit anectodal) of obvious fraud. In the context of non-replicable studies, it can be as high as 2/3rds are shown to be non-reproducable in some domains. This includes some of the highest quality journals and institutions. There's quite a bit of evidence of this. Now I'm not claiming that is all fraud, but I am claiming we don't know how much of the problem is fraud.
>evidence of absence would be enormously difficult to prove
I disagree. I'm taking the point that it's not hard to prove, but rather the incentives are aligned against it. If data and methods are truly open-sourced, much of this can be proven. But there is little status or money to be gained from reproducing work, leading to a situation where we have a system where it is rarely done.
>yet science has managed to produce massive and visible benefits
I don't disagree, but I think you're are misinterpreting my position. I said the system is flawed, not that it's worthless. Put differently, it still produces good science but it's hard to separate the good science from the bad. The signal-to-noise ratio is potentially low, and the rate of publication exacerbates this. I would argue that boosting the signal-to-noise ratio by weeding out bad science could produce much more benefit because less time is wasted chasing trails of bad science.
>What strategy would you pursue
You keep framing this as some impossible scenario. I'm saying it only appears that way within the context of the current incentive struture. So my goal would be to create a change to that incentive structure. This is off the top of my head, so don't take it too seriously but here's what I would try:
1) We need to change the way academics are measured. Currently, it's a "publish or perish" paradigm that puts a premium on novelty and essentially disregards most everything else. There is also a glut of PhDs; far too many given the number of tenured academic position. This puts an enormous amount of pressure on a PhD to produce publications and this can manifest itself in pushing bad science. There's two things we could do to help this:
1.(a) Provide an incentive where reproducing research is valuable. Currently, researchers don't want to spend time reproducing studies because there's very little upside. They won't generally get published so it doesn't help their career. I would say we need to start giving more status to reproduction studies. Probably not as much as more "novel" studies, but there should be an avenue to publish them. Maybe a two-tiered journal structure where we have *Nature* and *Nature:reproductions*, where the latter is used to publish works that re-create the studies in the first. Metrics like citeScore could be weighted so that the novel studies give you a higher metric than the reproductions, but you still get some credit for either.
1.(b) Provide a pathway to also publish "non surprising" studies. In the current structure, research is more prioritized if it produces surprising results. Thus, if a researcher produces work that is unsurprising, they tend to just throw it out and try something else. This can lead to wasted effort when another researcher ends up doing the same thing. We should create an avenue to also publish "unsurprising" results. This has already started to get applied in some domains, like economics.
2. Right now, publications can hide their data. I think there should be a cultural shift where the highest quality journals make sharing the data and code a mandatory requirement. This ties directly in to facilitating the replicability as well as allowing others to look at your methods and see if there's any wonkiness going on (whether fraud or otherwise). Some of the issues of fraud that we've seen are because researchers couldn't hide their data because it came from a third party (eg, Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino were outted because their data was owned by an insurance company that was willing provide insight into the raw data).
3. Journals should set aside a portion of fees to fund replication. As it stands, journals get free labor from referees. I would argue this should be balanced by having some money set aside to fund a process aimed at replicating some of the studies in journal. It's wild to me that we have a system where a referee is expected to work for free and also to pay for a subscription to the journal they are helping.
There's other ideas about improving the referee'ing of the articles but this is already long enough for a forum post.
The primary take-away seems to be that, since 2015, Republican confidence in higher ed has dropped 36%, and Democrat confidence has dropped 12%. This is based on the question "Please tell me how much confidence you, yourself, have in higher education - a great deal, quite a lot, some or very little". The first two options appear to be combined in the data/graphs. 68% now say higher education is "headed in the wrong direction". The primary source doesn't say how many people were asked or how they were asked.[1]
The drop seems to be a combination of concerns about ideological capture and falling economic utility.
1 - It does say "The research includes the trend results reported above from Gallup’s June telephone survey as well as new results from a contemporaneous web survey of more than 2,000 Gallup Panel members." But I don't know what this means.