How to rebuild trust in higher education as a public good

When Dr Rodney K Rogers, president of Bowling Green State University (BGSU), Ohio, began his keynote speech at the 2025 ABET Symposium in San Diego, he caused a stir by first giving a disclaimer: “Today’s comments that I make are my personal thoughts and ideas and are not representing the official position of BGSU or the state of Ohio.”

He said it might seem “kind of weird” that a president of a university would make such a caveat, but a few days earlier the Ohio Senate had passed – and the governor had signed – a bill which said that “a president of any public university in Ohio cannot endorse or oppose any ideas other than those that may impact the institution’s funding or mission of dissemination of knowledge”.

But for him, the important question it raised was, “How did we get in the position that this had to be a state law?”

“I personally think it demonstrates a decline in the public’s trust in the right to education,” he said.



He pointed to a Gallup poll of the public showing a drop from 57% having ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’ of trust in higher education in 2015 to 36% in 2023.

The decline is much stronger among Republicans. In 2015, 56% of them had a great deal or quite a lot of trust in higher education, and in 2023 this had fallen to 19%, whereas among Democrats the fall was much smaller, from 68% to 59%.

But Rogers noted that according to Gallup, higher education is not alone in seeing a decline in trust. It is happening right across societal institutions. For example, over the period 2021 to 2023, there was a decline in trust in small business, the military, the police, the medical system, the church, the supreme court – and the presidency.

“Notice the decline in every civic organisation. That is a real challenge for a civic society,” he said.

In his speech Rogers urged universities to counter this trend by ramping up their commitment to lifelong learning and to social mobility and to ensuring every student fulfils their potential.

Under his leadership, Bowling Green, located 85 miles south of Detroit, reports record enrolments, its highest applications and admission rates, and historic four-year graduation and retention rates.

According to its website, it is seeking to embrace its role as a ‘public university for the public good’ by ensuring the institution continually adapts to meet workforce and societal needs, advances social mobility and improves ways to maximise the success of every individual student.

To achieve these goals, Rogers has led the expansion of the university’s portfolio to focus on health care and STEM fields, establishing new schools of nursing, physical therapy, aviation, the built environment and engineering, resort and attraction management, forensic science and advanced manufacturing.

And he is behind the launch of Life Design, a university-wide initiative to support and empower Bowling Green’s 20,000 students to excel in college and career.

University World News talked to him about these goals and how universities can achieve them and win back trust in the current context of universities’ purpose and modes of operation being challenged.

The interview has been edited for length and to suit the written format.

UWN: So turning to the important questions you raised at the ABET symposium, why have people lost trust in higher education?

RR: There are many issues. In my role, I have a chance to talk with a lot of different folks, legislators and the executive branch (both at our state level and at the national level) and also parents and students.

Part of it is a clash of expectations. But we have fed into it a bit by aligning ourselves with an emphasis on higher education being ‘all about getting a job’, and I think that’s tricky because then when students fail to get a job, the university is deemed to have ‘failed’, which undermines trust in higher ed.

But there are other issues too: a general decline in trust in all civic organisations, not just higher ed (at least here in the States), flowing from a growing tendency of people not believing that there are good people in the world trying to do good work.

In the States, people often seem to have a perspective that ‘someone’s out to take advantage of me and take advantage of my family’ – and so, somehow, we have lost the attitude of balancing individual rights and freedoms with the common good. We’ve forgotten about how we need one another, and I think some of that is why we're seeing the distrust in higher ed – as well as in the military, in the police, and so on.

UWN: Do we know who has lost trust in higher education? Is it people who've been to college and failed? Is it people who've never been to college? Is it broader than that?

RR: Well, if you look at the Gallup poll, the people who went to college have more trust than the people who didn’t. But even among those who did go to college, trust in higher ed declined – to a lesser extent, but it declined, nonetheless.

Often, when I talk to individuals about their problems with higher ed, I’ll ask them to tell me about their college experience. And usually that's positive, because they’re in a place of success – for example, often they're a legislator, or they're a successful business leader or educational leader. And then they’ll be positive about their own college experience but still worried about overall higher ed.

In that regard, DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – is a very hot issue right now in the United States, and I think we are mostly talking past each other on what DEI even is.

UWN: Do some people see DEI as discrimination against white people?

RR: They do. It’s a ‘reverse discrimination’ argument. And then others counter with the argument that they’re working to make sure everybody is a part of the process and has opportunities to be successful. Some also make a big distinction about equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes. I believe that everyone should have equal opportunity; that doesn’t, however, guarantee equal outcomes for everybody.

UWN: Isn’t the mission of universities to help people get in and get on? Shouldn’t they be striving to offer better access and wider access, but also better success and wider success once you're in?

RR: I agree. Let’s not lose sight of individual learners. What do we need to do to address their needs so they can be successful? It’s about making sure that we improve and widen access, making sure that we are being responsive to the different learning styles of our students, and knowing that their background, life experience and preparation may be different than someone else’s. All of that is true.

Here’s perhaps the crux of this argument, though; we can't guarantee the success of an individual student.

Seeking equality of outcomes could be interpreted to suggest that it doesn't matter what the student does or doesn't do. And I think that’s where the Republicans may begin to think, ‘Oh, it’s just about outcomes, and you're going to give away the degrees anyway. The student doesn't have to work. All they have to do is show up.’

I can categorically say, at least for Bowling Green, that's not what we’re doing.

UWN: Why do some people think that that’s what universities are doing? Is it a case that some universities are doing things well and others aren't?

RR: I think there is a widely shared belief that higher education is monolithic. I don’t believe we are. We have common goals, and we need to stay focused on some common goals that make us part of higher ed. But there’s a lot of variation in higher ed.

A cynic might say that what the politicians are doing is they’re looking for those one-off examples to make their point; it’s a data point of one, and they make conclusions about an entire industry. Now I would hope that if they got a degree in higher ed, they would be better critical thinkers than that – but often they're not.

One other thing I’ll say: in the US, there’s always a political dynamic in any type of organisation, whether it be the military, the government, higher ed, K through 12, NGO, whatever. And I think, in the US, the level of political discourse within every organisation is a real problem.

UWN: Isn’t part of the problem that politics has become so divisive, toxic even. And how might higher education contribute to reducing that?

RR: Well, I can talk about one initiative in this regard. In the state of Ohio two years ago, we saw the creation of five civic centres within five of the 14 public universities (excluding Bowling Green).

I think the initiative was a response to this belief that there is political indoctrination going on at universities, and the intention was to counter this. And I was told that, for the most part, the targets were the universities that were the bigger problems in this regard.

The initiative was to set up civic centres to teach the ‘American form of democracy’ and ‘the American form of capitalism’. And the justifying argument made was they needed to ‘balance’ what the university was teaching. There are a lot of strings attached to this intervention; the legislature gets to decide – they're like the board of directors for these centres.

And this is back to the comment that we're not a monolithic industry.

So, by contrast, what we did at Bowling Green – and I think I would encourage all universities in the US, at least, to begin to think about what we created – is to set up a Democracy Research Network. It’s driven out of our political science department, but it has faculty fellows across the university. We put programming on. We sponsor debates on both sides of these arguments. We try to do programming to help students, to teach students intentionally how to have civil discourse.

We just sponsored a Leadership Forum where we had a former Democrat governor, Dick Celeste, and a former Republican governor of the state of Ohio, Bob Taft, come to campus, and we had 550 students in our ballroom listening to these former governors – they were in office in the 1980s and 1990s, so not recent.

Most of these students would not have heard of these two public figures, but they spoke about what they disagreed about, what they did agree about, and how they had to compromise and find a way forward.

So, to answer your question about what higher education might do to mitigate toxic politics: I think we've got to bring people together and be role models ourselves, of how you have civil discourse.

I think universities almost have to begin a kind of renewal of civil discourse. I think about our faculty senates; how do we replicate civic discourse? How do we make sure our students see that we model civil discourse – that we regularly disagree on certain topics, can admit we’re wrong, can thank the other side for pointing that out, and can adjust our practice? If universities don’t do it, I don't know where it will happen.

I think politicians often think that students come to college to have these big political discussions. But I will tell you, the students that come to a university like Bowling Green are still 35% first-generation college students.

We have students who don’t necessarily come from really wealthy families. We have students who are middle class, some upper middle class, some lower middle class, and some that are full Pell eligible – meaning they can get Pell grants for students from economically disadvantaged families, mostly those with gross family income under US$60,000 – but they're pretty pragmatic people; they’ve come to get a great education and to begin a career in life.

So, the reality is the students aren’t thinking about politics. They’re coming to study nursing, they’re coming to study engineering, and they’re coming to study accounting.

And my bigger worry is that students are getting very turned off of politics, that people don’t want to even engage in the process – and that isn’t good for a democracy either.

UWN: And especially if they are international students, in the current context they risk being deported if they get involved in politics. Is that something you've been impacted by?

RR: Well, probably only about 7% of Bowling Green’s student body are international students. But, yes, I'm still extremely concerned. There's a real pushback on globalisation right now and on immigration.

Ohio is one of those states in the US that was a very heavy manufacturing state with a lot of jobs – good jobs that did not necessarily need high levels of education. And so, there are a lot of individuals who are unhappy right now because those kinds of well-paying manufacturing jobs are gone, and people blame other countries for taking them – even though in some cases people probably didn’t want to do those jobs that these other countries are now doing.

So, it’s a conundrum.

But this current, more nationalistic approach, this push against globalisation, worries me, as an American, because in higher ed we were all about trying to bring in as many people as possible to talk about ideas, to debate, to share best practices, and to embrace alternative perspectives.

UWN: And getting back to the original question about building trust, am I right that you have record levels of enrolment at Bowling Green? And can this partly be attributed to extending out to communities where people weren’t previously enrolling at such high rates?

RR: We’re picking up more out-of-state students, and we’re also picking up the yield rate, meaning the percentage of students admitted to actually attend has ticked up, as well as the total number of applications.

Part of the reason for our increasing enrolment levels is we’re taking some market share from some other universities, and a big reason for this is an initiative we have at Bowling Green called ‘Life Design’, which resonates not only with the students but also especially with their families.

I believe students like to be held to clear standards and high standards; that is our premise. And there’s student retention literature that would suggest that having appropriately high and clear expectations leads to higher levels of student success. You don’t make it easier; you make it clear and appropriately high.

And I think that resonates with students. It resonates that, with Life Design, we are empowering them to design their college experience. We tell them, effectively, ‘We’ll give you a design coach. You’ve got to come up with your own Falcon Flight Path. We’re going to help you design that – but it’s up to you to do it.’

Ours is a pretty traditional undergrad population, with 95% full-time students – residential – and so we've leaned into that, to say that's our advantage: to be very intentional about the student experience.

In other words, a student’s ‘flight path’ is everything from thinking about what they want out of their life, why they are in college, and what major to choose to whether they are going to be involved and engaged.

Understanding how to build their professional and social network is also a big part of it, as is building their team for life: making connections at college and choosing whom they want on their team, if you will, through their career.

And it starts with our students reflecting back on how they learn. We try to raise their awareness that what we're really trying to do is teach them how to learn to learn, and if they’re really good at it, how to be better at learning to learn, which is what I would call ‘meta learning’: learning to learn to learn.

So this is part of making our university a learning organisation. Some people might think, ‘Well, aren't all universities learning organisations?’ But they’re not.

Another positive that’s come out of using design thinking, which is an action-orientated framework, and having students keep that framework in mind, is the emphasis on prototyping and we ask them to apply that framework as they go to college and begin to think about using it in their career and in their life.

Equally, we have done workshops for faculty around design thinking. And so now everybody's using some common language. And what I love is when a faculty member comes to me and says, ‘Hey, I want to prototype this idea. We’re going to test this out.’

Sometimes, universities’ faculty don't want to take those kinds of risks to try things – they fear their course evaluations could be bad. ‘Well, yeah, they could,’ is our response, ‘But you’re trying it, so do it. We understand.’

And so I think that central to a learning organisation is this idea of a growth mindset.

UWN: So do universities in general have a growth mindset? Are they flexible enough to adapt to lifelong learning and a world of change?

RR: Right now, there are a lot of universities – in the States, at least – that have a mindset of ‘cut, cut, cut, we've got to reduce faculty, we’ve got to reduce options’. And of course part of the reality is that if your enrolment continues to decline, there are fewer resources. I get it. But it’s got to be more about: how do we get better? How do we differentiate ourselves? How do we get back on a growth trajectory?

With regard to lifelong learning, everybody talks about an enrolment cliff. I think it's an enrolment shift. What we've got to think about is the learner’s journey, and for the most part, especially at a place like Bowling Green, we’re only focused on those aged 18 to 22, and then we have, you know, PhD students, although even our PhD students tend to be pretty young.

But, increasingly, I think, with regard to lifelong learning, are we helping our students, once they’re adults, to find that path to come back to university if they need to? And I don’t think we are. We’re basically saying, ‘It would have been better if you had just stayed with us all the way through.’ But, if we're serious about an enrolment shift – about helping educate people that are rethinking and changing their career – it can’t be training. It's got to be education, first of all.

And, even then, are we confident that we understand, from a user perspective, the barriers that we need to remove to help those students come back? And I suspect we haven’t paid that much attention. We're trying to be better at that, but we’re not yet where we need to be.

I think some of the for-profits are much more flexible on that, because they’ve had to be, right, to try to make the thing work? But I think for many of the traditional universities, it's just not how we're built. So we're in a kind of legacy model, and we’re trying to adjust to a changing world.

UWN: And isn’t the problem that that model was created in the 19th century for the growth of industrialisation, a completely different world? Whereas now, that's all changed with the digital revolution, with the advent of AI?

RR: Yes, and what's common between the two? It’s a massive change in how work is done. I would argue that, with AI and the technology we have today, it’s an even bigger change than the Industrial Revolution, and so it's more important than ever that universities be at the table, preparing students for that kind of career.

But we still need people for other things as well.

UWN: How do you, as a university leader, prepare students for this changing world? What changes do you bring in to enable it?

RR: We’ve undertaken a number of initiatives at the university. We had a donor that was willing to create an innovation fund, and we have funded, thus far, about 20 projects based on faculty suggestions for implementing AI. In some cases it’s about making grading more efficient or an evaluation of reading papers, and, in some, staff are experimenting with bots for advising and mentoring.

UWN: Is that done in connection with industry – with the people on the cutting edge of work?

RR: It is. We have some alums that work in the innovation space who have been very helpful in coming back and engaging faculty in this. And then, in specific academic programmes, like our engineering programmes and our business programme, and in our business college and a couple of other places, there is much more engagement with specific companies.

UWN: We’ve talked about preparing graduates for the future. But are universities involved enough in lifelong learning? You mentioned that in that regard the university is not where it needs to be. Are universities rushing to catch up? Or are they leading the way in shaping how lifelong learning is?

RR: So I think we are laggers in that regard: that universities, in general, are behind the learning curve. I don't know about globally, but here in the States, I think this is the case. You know, there again, we're not monolithic; the legacy universities, those that have been around 100-plus years, I don't think they've been as aggressive in this space as they could be – or as thoughtful as they could be about this idea of serving the needs of lifelong learners.

But necessity really is the mother of invention. And so now, because of the demographic decline and the enrolment cliff in the traditional market, we all have to be engaging with our options.

Certainly, we could simply shrink and accept that that's who we are. But we have a chance now to remake ourselves, and that’s exciting.

We can learn from some of the failures that those at the head of the curve have experienced. For instance, I think some of the for-profit, sometimes online, universities have had some challenges. I think part of the challenge is probably that they were much more about training than they were about education. So how do we at Bowling Green take our approach to truly educating learners but apply that to this ‘post-traditional’ market? That’s our opportunity.

UWN: Is there even agreement on what lifelong learning means? Because publicly it tends to be talked about in terms of retraining, re-skilling and upskilling for new jobs, which is a very particular view, and politicians love to talk about higher education just being about jobs, whereas education is much broader than that. How are universities applying their thinking to deciding what lifelong learning should be about?

RR: I’m reflecting back on our work with an organisation that works in a healthcare-related field. It's a space where you don't necessarily need a bachelor's degree, yet they were working with us to develop a pathway for their employees to achieve a bachelor degree because they felt it was important. And so I asked them why.

Their reasoning was very interesting. They said individuals with a bachelor degree tend to have more empathy because they have a broader education, and empathy is really important for their patients. So when that patient is there, they will receive better quality care.

People with a bachelor's degree, they reasoned, have probably interacted with a lot of different people from different backgrounds; it’s linked into that. The organisation cited a list of five or six things that their data would suggest lead to better patient care.

So, to answer your question, I think we’ve got to do a better job of partnering with employers, especially those with the kind of data that would demonstrate why employees having a bachelor or a masters degree is leading to better outcomes for their organisation.

We’ve got to have companies and other organisations telling the story, arguing for why education is leading to better outcomes for them.

That’s one path, and then the other path is what I tell our students, which is why you should have a college degree. You don't need to. You can have a great career, and you can get a good job and make money without a college degree, no doubt. But the college degree gives students more options and opportunities; it empowers them to control their destiny.

So I think the other part of this issue of lifelong learning is making sure students also take ownership of their degree. They’re going to work hard to earn that degree, but I want them to also realise that it's not guaranteed – and that the chances are that, by having it, they are going to be better prepared to pivot, to adjust, and to have a lifetime of careers rather than just that first job.

UWN: So, do you foresee a future in which universities reduce this emphasis on everyone coming in and doing three years in one go, where there may be many more opportunities for people to achieve the type of education that they do for degrees but in segments over time?

It seems the discussion tends to assume either you do a university degree or you are going to need some upskilling in the form of lifelong learning – whereas doing what universities do, but ‘in a lifelong learning way’, would be much more flexible.

RR: Yes, another thing we’re testing is this idea of integrated work to learning. And we’re doing this with two or three companies right now, one of them called Six Flags.

There are some other companies where students – as full-time employees of the organisation – can pivot in and out of certain seven-week courses. They’re not full semester courses, but they offer more flexibility and then projects, with the students possibly busy on some work-related projects.

But the question arises: how do we use some of that experience or that work to count towards some academic credit? We've got to make sure the accrediting bodies are comfortable with that idea. But I think this kind of integration of work and academics will be crucial as we proceed.

UWN: Could it be an option for the future that companies build into employees’ careers, ‘study sabbaticals’ where they go off and do, for instance, these seven-week units every year or a three-month unit every four years or something like that, in the process building up their educational portfolio?

RR: Yes. And even the other way around; think about faculty going and doing a stint in a company or organisation, not necessarily just on their research but perhaps more in the applied fields.

For how do faculty gain a better sense of what employers need and want? How do we have almost co-faculty or joint faculty appointments – such as, for instance, between an engineer working for Boeing and a professor at X university? I guess it's an extension of the idea of a teaching hospital and how that's a big part of medical education.

So, do we need more of those kinds of options applied to more of our disciplines? We have it to some extent. We’re a big education school, and those students spend their senior year full-time student teaching, but during their sophomore junior year, they also spend time in the classroom. And, you know, we have high school teachers that come back and forth between the employer and the university.

But we don’t do that much in business, in our business college. And we don’t do that a lot in engineering, although it happens a bit with clinical faculty.

UWN: You spoke in the opening keynote at the ABET symposium about the need to constantly raise standards. The role of quality assurance and accreditation bodies is also being challenged at the moment. Tell us why they matter.

RR: I think quality assurance and accrediting bodies are very important; they give accountability and ensure quality.

With ABET – and I also did a lot of work with the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, or AACSB, on the business side – there is this idea of having peers that are experts reviewing programmes as a feedback loop.

This is incredibly important, because I think often governmental agencies may not have the people with the required expertise that organisations like ABET and other quality assurance agencies have.

My worry about some accrediting bodies is that sometimes they hamper innovation and creativity; they hamper the ability to try a new approach because it doesn't fit in the standards.

And so we always need this balance between ensuring quality but having flexibility, where institutions that wish to push the envelope on some things have that opportunity – as long as they’re willing to be held accountable and to provide feedback on what’s working or not working, of course.

UWN: ABET tell me they actually structure their criteria to promote creativity and have innovation awards.

Yes, and in general, what I appreciate about ABET is they are trying to think about what we’re doing to navigate this world in which we have a bunch of post-traditional students out there needing to be educated.

In Ohio, there are, I don’t know, maybe a million people who have some college but no degree. Wow! What a market. That’s huge, right?

But then we also have an obligation to think about those people that do have a degree but are not in a position to be successful in their current situation and are looking to adjust their career in some way.

UWN: Can I ask you about DEI and the research cuts the Trump administration is imposing? Because there are so many research cuts that are affecting universities and so many research projects that are having their funding cut off, and it's affecting international teams they collaborate with as well. Has that affected you?

It's been challenging. We don't have a medical school, so although we have some National Institutes of Health, or NIH, funding, it's not as significant as at some of our sister institutions.

NSF, or National Science Foundation, funding worries us a lot, and especially with regard to the F&A (indirect cost) rate change. But some funding has been pulled based on the language that was used. I think a lot of the projects targeted have been identified by AI, and quite honestly I think this shows the weakness of AI, because it focused on a particular word that was used rather than seeing the whole context, leading to arbitrary decisions to pull the funding.

UWN: This language problem applies both to research and to the DEI work in universities. You know, is there a way to continue working towards those values but using a different language? And, if so, what is the language? Have you thought that through?

RR: ‘Student success’: that’s the language I use. Because even those individuals that I've engaged with that are the most extreme in their displeasure with DEI, if you press them and ask, ‘Are you supportive of students, regardless of their background – whether it be their sex, colour, national origin, race, gender, gender identity – are you opposed to us having programming to help those students to be successful?

If they chose to come to Bowling Green, regardless of their background, I can help them be successful. Are you supportive of that?’ And they respond, ‘Absolutely, of course. We’re supportive of that.’ Well, okay, because that's what we’re doing; we’re going to help them be successful.

And I would say the other thing that we have really leaned into is that any programming we do is truly open to all. It’s always been open to all, but sometimes we didn’t talk about it that way. We talked about it as being an initiative for this race and this gender.

I think we have to be clear we’re not excluding anyone. But you also can’t erase history, either, and people have to be aware. And sometimes I feel like we believe you need to be proud of your history. Well, there’s some history we’re not proud of, but it is our history, and I think what we should be proud of is what we’ve learnt about ourselves and the kind of communities and civilisation we want to be a part of.

So I agree with your point that the language and how we talk about student success is important. But I also believe in the old saying that those who forget their history are doomed to repeat it. We have to know our history, because it’s who we are; it’s who the culture is today.

In this regard, one last comment I’ll make, which I’ve been saying a lot to our faculty: let’s focus on what we aspire to create right now in the US. I’m not sure there are aspirations. I’m being critical not just of the current administration but of multiple administrations here. I can’t change any of that, but what I can hope to influence at my own university is this: let’s aspire to something. And that's why our mantra is ‘A public university for the public good’.

So we are aspiring to create the public good. We do it through our students, through our research, and through our outreach, and I hope every faculty member can talk about the good that they are creating.

And that doesn’t mean that we don't care about the individual rights and freedoms of the students. We absolutely do. We want to empower them to pursue great careers and great lives, but when they do that, public good is created.