Panel Discusses Rapid Shift in U.S. Opinion on Responsibility for Paying for College

In America, changes in public opinion typically move at a snail’s pace, a gradual accumulation of person-by-person shifts that stretch over decades until a new belief becomes dominant. However, for the question of who is responsible for paying for college—parents and students or the government—American beliefs have shifted in a comparative blink of an eye.

Natasha Quadlin, associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los AngelesDr. Natasha Quadlin, an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles and Dr. Brian Powell, a professor of sociology at Indiana University were planning to write a book about the stubbornness of American beliefs about college payment responsibility. In 2010, they found that 65% of people believed that the two most responsible groups were parents and students. Only 9% believed that the government should be mainly responsible. This was roughly consistent with American beliefs in the 1980s, despite the increased accumulation of debt.

But when they repeated the survey in 2015, their results shocked them. Just five years later, only 50% of people thought that parents and students should be most responsible, and 19% said that the government should be the primary stakeholder.

“Changes of this magnitude in this sort of time frame are extremely rare,” said Quadlin in a panel discussing the findings on Tuesday.

Quadlin and Powell repeated the survey in 2019 and 2020 and found the trend continuing, even during the pandemic. By 2020, the percentage of Americans who thought that parents and students should be most responsible was down to 36, and those who believed that the federal and state governments should bear responsibility were up to 23%.

The reasons for this shift are not fully clear.

But Quadlin and Powell found that the issue of college debt became much more salient for Americans between 2010 and 2015. They also noted that, when asked why they thought the government should pay, many respondents brought up Obamacare. If health care is a right, they seemed to think, then education is, as well.