What does this mean?

Our results indicate that trust is highly contextual and inequitably experienced on college campuses. Students of color, particularly African Americans, and students with a disability consistently report lower levels of trust across the five categories. More concerning, the magnitude of the observed trust gaps are not trivial or small, but of sizes rarely seen in education research. We also see that trust differentials varied among the types of trust. For example, students of color had lower institutional trust but greater media trust.

The observed trust gaps correspond with many long-term problems facing higher education. Decades of research have shown that students of color perceive a less supportive campus environment and suffer lower college completion rates. If you do not trust the people around you or do not believe your institution well serves your interests, you are undoubtedly less likely to have a positive experience that will sustain you to graduation. Consequently, attention to and elimination of these trust gaps may be a pathway to improving some of the most challenging and intractable problems facing higher education today.

Given the observed trust gaps, we investigated which campus actors first-year students trust the most. We also paid special attention to Black or African American students due to the significant gaps observed above. At least 80% of the non-Black respondents trust (somewhat or completely) the five types of campus staff we inquired about (see Figure 2). However, Black or African American students trust campus personnel less by about 10 percentage points across all categories.

Regardless of race, the most trusted campus personnel are faculty and academic advisors. For non-Black students, students trust campus leadership, student services staff, and the catch-all "other staff" category at roughly the same rate. Black or African American trust student services staff and the other staff group at equivalent rates. However, campus leadership are trusted the least by Black or African American students.

The results highlight that campus leadership (e.g., presidents, provosts, deans, board members) faces the largest legitimacy crisis among college personnel types, regardless of race. Additionally, the systematic lower levels of trust expressed by Black students are worrisome and deserve scrupulous attention.

Throughout this edition of Engagement Insights, we have focused on sense of belonging: a new set of items added to NSSE 2020. The Building a Sense of Community for All story highlights the importance of sense of belonging to engagement, learning, and persistence. Theoretically, trust underpins sense of belonging, as trust is a prerequisite to feeling comfortable and a part of the community, and feeling valued by the community.

Consequently, we examined how college trust related to sense of belonging. The Pearson correlations between these constructs were .47 and .55 for first-year and senior students, respectively. Thus, college trust accounts for about a quarter of the variance in sense of belonging. The relationship's differential strength also suggests that trust's salience to sense of belonging increases over time, likely due to increased interactions between students and institutional actors. Alternately, first-year students with low trust may have dropped out.

Figure 3 shows the average sense of belonging score by the amount of trust students had in various personnel groups at their college or university. For all of the groupings, the typical students who do not trust at all have a sense of belonging score below 30 (on a 60-point scale). In contrast, their average peers who trust the group completely score between 48 and 51.

The apparent linear relationship between college trust and sense of belonging indicates that trust is likely a needed component to foster a sense of belonging for undergraduates. This further strengthens the case for institutions to sustain and enhance trust among their constituents.

What We Found

Overall, students who responded after the pandemic disrupted regular campus operations expressed slightly higher college trust levels (.07 SDs) than their peers who responded before the disruption. However, a clearer pattern emerged when we compared students within demographic groups, suggesting that institutional responses to COVID-19 may have influenced perceptions of college trust for students from different backgrounds.

The figures below display the difference in college trust between students who responded before and after the COVID-19 disruption for selected subgroups. Differential patterns were observed by race/ethnicity, with White and Latina/o students having more trust and Black students having less trust after disruptions. Parental education was also correlated with college trust, with students with non-college-educated parents reporting lower trust and the children of graduate degree holders reporting greater trust after the pandemic. Students with a disability and those who did not specify their disability status (PnR=prefer not to respond) held more college trust after the disruption, and students from non-urban areas held higher levels of trust post-COVID.