Last week, Gallup released its annual survey of American confidence in higher education, and the numbers are hard to read charitably. Just 38% of Americans now express a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in colleges and universities, down from 42% a year ago and from 57% when Gallup first asked the question in 2015. For the first time, the survey also asked about artificial intelligence. Nearly half of respondents, 46%, believe AI will make a college degree less valuable over the next five years. Only 20% believe the opposite.
But the same survey carries a second signal that deserves more attention. Among Americans who remain confident in higher education, the most common reason given is that college provides good training, and that response jumped from 24% to 33% in a single year, the largest increase Gallup has recorded on the question. The public has not given up on what colleges do. They are questioning whether colleges can do it at the pace the economy now moves.
This week, Virginia’s private colleges will open their campuses to prospective students and families for Virginia Private College Week to prove that we can do just that — move quickly enough to meet the moment.
Meeting that pace requires two changes, and higher education tends to talk about only one of them. The first is what we teach. Curricula have to keep up with an economy where AI is rewriting job descriptions faster than course catalogs get revised. The second change is who we teach. For centuries, colleges have organized themselves around one customer: the 17-to-22-year-old pursuing a degree. That model leaves out more than 43 million Americans who have some college experience but no credential (one in five adults in the Roanoke Valley fall into this group). It leaves out the mid-career professional whose industry just changed underneath them. A college serious about workforce relevance has to provide training to the people who need it, at the moment they need it, in the region where they need it. We must embrace that education is something you return to across a working life more now than ever. Gone are the days when a single skillset could carry you through an entire career. According to a March report from the Burning Glass Institute, technical skills now have a half-life measured in months. Such volatility makes durable skills, critical thinking, communication, ethical judgment and the capacity to keep learning more valuable, not less. Colleges must pair those enduring strengths with faster, employer-informed pathways. This creates an opportunity for higher education to partner more closely than ever before with local and regional employers to continually train a regional workforce, but we have to embrace that shift for it to be successful.
This is where Virginia’s private colleges have an advantage, and it extends the argument that Frank Shushok Jr., president of Roanoke College, has been building for a while. Last year, he observed that as Virginia’s flagship public universities have grown more selective, the state’s 30 private nonprofit colleges have become the front line for college access, enrolling higher proportions of first-generation, rural and Pell-eligible students than the publics. Writing in Cardinal News this April, he argued that the path from college to career is breaking and that fixing it demands deeper, faster partnerships between colleges and employers. The through line in both pieces is speed. And speed is a structural feature of small institutions. I say this with affection, since my own Ph.D. is from Virginia Tech. A university enrolling roughly 38,000 students and answering to a state governance apparatus takes years to turn, through no fault of the people steering it. A college of 2,000 can meet with regional employers in the fall, design a program over the winter, and launch it the following year.
I know, because I have helped build them myself. We, at Roanoke College, built RC-RV in direct collaboration with Roanoke Valley employers, offering credentials designed around what those employers actually need. Our newest program, the WorkAI Lab, went from concept to launch in less than three months. Beginning September 3, a cohort of working professionals will spend seven weeks learning to lead AI adoption inside their own organizations. This came directly from community conversations where we continually heard employers relay their struggles to upskill employees for an AI-centric world. Nobody in that cohort is 19. Most already have degrees. They are exactly the learners that higher education has historically ignored, and they are precisely the workforce Virginia needs to get right.
The commonwealth, to its credit, already recognizes what its private colleges deliver. The state budget signed into law last month continued strong funding for the Virginia Tuition Assistance Grant (TAG), which currently provides Virginia residents at private colleges up to $5,250 per year for undergraduate education. TAG supports more than 22,000 students on an investment just north of $121 million, and the institutions it supports return about two dollars in state and local tax revenue for every public dollar invested. TAG is awarded directly to eligible Virginia students, helping them choose from a broader range of institutions while allowing the commonwealth to expand degree production without assuming the full operating and capital costs of additional public enrollment.
So, for families touring campuses across Virginia during Private College Week, the Gallup numbers are real, and some of the skepticism around them is earned, but the appropriate response in a changing economy is to choose an institution capable of changing with it.
Ask every college you visit two questions. How fast can you adapt what you teach? And will you still be useful to me at 35, when my field shifts and I need to retool?
Parents might ask a third question for themselves: If my own profession changes, what opportunities would bring me back here for a certificate, new credential or focused professional training?
A college prepared for the future should be ready to serve families not only at age 18, but across a lifetime of learning.
Ryan King is the chief of staff and innovation officer at Roanoke College.
