Young People Don't Think Much of American Institutions Anymore

Unlike 20 years ago, few high schoolers now view the country's key institutions positively. This growing cynicism is a major crisis for the military, higher education, and religious organizations.

How do young people in America feel about the country’s major social, cultural, political, and economic institutions? Are they becoming more cynical about these actors over time or less? If today’s youth are growing more critical of key American institutions, does it matter?

In this post, I show that very few American high school students currently believe the military, higher education, the media, religious organizations, law enforcement, big business, public schools, or labor unions are serving the country well. But, as I also show, not all high schoolers are equally negative about America’s institutions. Young Democrats and young independents are significantly less likely to say that institutions are doing a “good” or “very good” job for “the country as a whole” than young Republicans.

Things were not always this way. Twenty years ago, significant majorities of high schoolers across the political spectrum thought highly of all of the country’s major institutions. The number of young Democrats with a positive view of American institutions has collapsed during the last two decades, however. Since 2002, for example, there has been a 44-point drop in positive assessments of the military, a 42-point drop in positive assessments of colleges and universities, and a 36-point drop in positive assessments of the news media among young Democrats. Smaller, but important declines, have occurred among young independents and Republicans.

It’s easy to be dismissive of the attitudes of high school students. But ignoring young people’s growing cynicism about our key institutions would be a serious mistake. Nearly every American institution that relies on the voluntary participation of young people now finds itself facing an existential crisis. Colleges and universities, for instance, are on the verge of falling off an “enrollment cliff.” Religious organizations are experiencing a “great dechurching.” The US military is fighting an unprecedented “recruitment crisis.”

Unsurprisingly, the emergence of these crises has coincided with young people’s worsening perceptions of the armed forces, higher education, and religious organizations. As I show below, students who evaluate the military and higher education poorly are far less likely to express an interest in joining these institutions after graduation. Similarly, students who say churches are not serving the “country as a whole” are far less likely to attend church services. If American institutions hope to sustain themselves, they must find ways to rehabilitate their rapidly deteriorating images with young people in general and young liberals in particular.

Kids these days…

Monitoring the Future (MTF), a long-running, nationally representative survey of thousands of American 12^th graders, is the single best data source for evaluating how young people feel about the country’s institutions. Each year, the MTF asks a subset of their sample questions about the performance of eight key “organizations” in American society: the US military, colleges and universities, the national news media, churches and religious organizations, police and law enforcement, large corporations, public schools and labor unions. Specifically, the survey presents high school seniors with the following question: “Now we'd like you to make some ratings of how good or bad a job you feel each of the following organizations is doing for the country as a whole.” Respondents are allowed to rate the institution as doing a “very poor,” “poor,” “fair,” “good” or “very good” job for the “country as a whole.” The most recent available data comes from the 2022 iteration of the MTF.

Do today’s high school seniors think the country’s most important institutions are doing a “good job” for “the country as a whole”? The short answer is: no.

Figure 1 – Positive Evaluations of Institutions among High Schoolers in 2022

As Figure 1 shows, most high schoolers do not rate the key institutions of American society positively. In fact, the US military is the only institution included in the MTF that a majority of high school students say is doing a “good” or “very good” job for the “country as a whole.” Interestingly, young people are harshest in their assessments of the media, with only 18.8% of high school seniors rating the performance of national news outlets positively.

Figure 2 – Positive Evaluations of Institutions in 2022 by Partisanship

Figure 2 reveals that negative performance assessments are not evenly (or predictably) distributed across the political spectrum. Four things in particular jump out from the data.

First, young Republicans currently provide the most positive evaluations of colleges and universities. Surveys of adults consistently show that Republicans are more negative toward colleges and universities than Democrats or independents. Among high school students, however, Republicans are the least critical of higher education. In 2022, young Republicans were approximately 20% more likely than young independents and approximately 15% more likely than young Democrats to say that colleges and universities are doing a “good” or “very good” job.

Second, young Republicans are not more negative than young Democrats or young independents about the media. Survey after survey has found that adult Republicans are now far less trusting of news organizations than anyone else. Yet, in the 2022 MTF, young Republicans (16.4%) were just as likely as young Democrats (15.1%) and much more likely than young independents (8.8%) to say that the national news media is doing a “good” or “very good” job.

Third, labor unions now receive their most positive evaluations from young Republicans. Historically, organized labor has been a large and loyal part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition. Indeed, the recent speech by Teamsters President Sean O’Brien at the Republican National Convention was noteworthy because Republicans have, historically, been antagonistic toward labor unions. The long-standing and deep ties between organized labor and the Democratic Party might lead us to believe that young Democrats would evaluate unions more positively than young Republicans. In the MTF, however, the opposite is true; young Republicans rate labor unions far more positively than young Democrats (47.4% “good” or “very good” job ratings to only 28.1%).

Finally, there is a massive partisan gap among young people in evaluations of law enforcement. While we might expect that young Republicans would be more positive in their assessments of the police than young Democrats, the distance between the parties here is striking. As Figure 2 shows, young Republicans were nearly eight times more likely than young Democrats (54.6% to 7.2%) to say that the police are doing a “good” or “very good” job.

Overall, the data in Figure 2 make it clear that young Democrats and young independents are far more critical of American institutions than young Republicans. On average, across the eight institutions included in the MTF, only 22.4% of Democrats gave “good” or “very good” ratings. In fact, there is not a single institution that received positive performance evaluations from even 40% of young Democrats.

Things are only marginally better among young independents. On average, 27.1% of young independents evaluated the eight institutions positively. With the lone exception of the US military (60.5% “good” or “very good” ratings), a large majority of young independents rated all of the institutions asked about in the MTF negatively.

Young Republicans stand out for their relatively rosy assessments of the eight institutions. Majorities of young Republicans rate the performance of the military (78.5%), churches and religious organizations (62.7%), police and law enforcement (54.6%) and, shockingly, colleges and universities (50.1%) as “good” or “very good.”

Was it always this way?

Were young people (particularly young Democrats) always so negative about the country’s most important institutions? The MTF’s archive of survey data makes it easy to answer this question because it has asked the same series of questions about institutional performance over the last 20 years.

Figures 3, 4, and 5 show the yearly percentage within each party providing a positive evaluation of each institution’s performance. Figure 6 summarizes the overall changes during the last two decades by showing the difference between assessments in 2002 and 2022.

Figure 3 – Positive Evaluations of the Military, Colleges, and Churches

Figure 4 – Positive Evaluations of Media, Police, and Public Schools

Figure 5 – Positive Evaluations of Large Corporations and Labor Unions

Figure 6 – Change in Positive Evaluations of Institutions by Partisanship (2002-2022)

The trends illustrated in Figures 3, 4, 5, and 6 are staggering. Young people (independent of partisanship) have become dramatically more critical of the country’s major institutions since 2002. As Figure 6 shows, there is not a single institution that today’s independent and Democratic-identifying high school students evaluate more positively than their counterparts in 2002 did. Today’s Republican high schoolers, for their part, are also now providing significantly worse ratings of most institutions than Republican high schoolers from twenty years ago. In other words, things were not always this way and there is nothing about being an American teenager that inevitably makes one skeptical about the country’s major social institutions.

Although all young people have become more negative about the country’s institutions, this generational “crisis of confidence” is concentrated disproportionately among high schoolers on the political left. As Figure 6 shows, young Democrats have become far more negative over the last 20 years than young independents or young Republicans. There have been more than 30-point declines in positive evaluations among young Democrats for six of the eight institutions queried about in the MTF, including a 44-point drop in assessments of the military and a 42-point drop in assessments of colleges and universities. By contrast, there have been 30-point declines among young independents for only three institutions and no 30-point declines among young Republicans. Any attempt to address young people’s growing cynicism about institutions will have to start by recognizing this partisan asymmetry.

Who Cares?

As mentioned above, major American institutions that rely on the participation of young people find themselves in a state of “crisis.” Are these “crises” a result of the fact that so few young people now think highly of American institutions?

The MTF allows us to take an initial stab at answering this question. In addition to the items measuring performance evaluations, the MTF asks high schoolers questions about some of their behaviors and career aspirations. Three of these questions are particularly relevant for exploring whether deteriorating perceptions of institutional performance have consequences for the continued success of American institutions.

The United States Military

First, the MTF asks high school seniors whether they would want to “serve in the armed forces” if they could do just what “they liked” and “nothing stood in their way.” In a previous post (“The Military’s White Democrat Problem”), I used this data to reveal a growing partisan divide in the desire for military service over the last decade, with white Democrats becoming far less interested in joining the armed forces since 2015. Figure 7 expands and extends that analysis by including all young Democrats between 2002 and 2022.

Figure 7 - Desire to Serve in the Armed Forces between 2002 and 2022 by Partisanship

Eyeballing Figure 7 alongside the left-hand panel of Figure 3 suggests that declining performance evaluations among young Democrats may be driving their declining willingness to serve in the military, with both trendlines taking a nosedive after 2013. Additionally, Republican high schoolers have become simultaneously less positive toward the military and less interested in serving since 2019.

The best way to examine the relationship between performance assessments and behavioral intentions at the moment, however, is to model it with the appropriate statistical controls at the individual level using the most recent data. Drawing on the 2022 MTF, I ran a logistic regression analysis predicting the probability of wanting to serve in the military based on performance assessments of the military (controlling for race, gender, partisanship, parental education, and religiosity). Figure 8 shows the predicted probability of wanting to serve in the armed forces across military performance scores.

Figure 8 – Predicted Probability of Wanting to Serve in the Military by Military Performance Assessments

As Figure 8 shows, performance evaluations exert a powerful influence on a high schooler’s interest in serving in the military (net of race, gender, partisanship, parental education, and religiosity). A student who evaluated the military’s performance as “very poor” is predicted to have less than a 1% chance of wanting to serve in the military. By contrast, a student who evaluated the military’s performance as “very good” is predicted to have 17% chance of wanting to serve in the military. Importantly, the values in Figure 8 show the effect of performance evaluations after controlling for partisanship (i.e. the relationship is not simply a consequence of the fact that Democrats are less interested in serving and less likely to rate the military positively). In other words, the increasingly negative perceptions of the military are a significant drag on military recruitment.

Colleges and Universities

The MTF also asks high school seniors whether they would want to “graduate from college” if they could do just what “they liked” and “nothing stood in their way.” In my last post (“The Political Causes of the College Enrollment Crisis”), I used responses to this question over the last twenty years to show an emerging partisan gap in the desire for a college education. Figure 9 shows the differences in educational aspirations between high school Republicans and Democrats since 2002:

Figure 9 - Desire to Graduate from College between 2002 and 2022 by Partisanship

Comparing Figure 9 to the middle panel of Figure 3 suggests that performance evaluations of colleges and universities and desire to attend college have had a complicated relationship to each other over the last 20 years. The percentage of high schoolers (regardless of partisan affiliation) saying colleges and universities do a “good” or “very good” job has declined in a relatively linear fashion since 2002. It is not until 2012, however, that young Republican disinterest begins to take off. What’s more, interest in college has not budged among young Democrats over the last two decades despite their massive increase in cynicism about higher education.

Where are things now? Following the same approach used for my analysis of the military, I ran a logistic regression model predicting the probability of wanting to attend college based on performance assessments of colleges and universities (controlling for all other theoretically important variables) in the 2022 MTF.

Figure 10 - Predicted Probability of Wanting to Graduate from College by College and University Performance Assessments

Figure 10 shows that performance evaluations of higher education exert an independent influence on a high schooler’s interest in graduating from college. A student’s chances of wanting to attend college are, ceteris paribus, predicted to increase by more than 20% if they have a “very good” view of institutions of higher education rather than a “very poor” view of institutions of higher education. If colleges and universities are interested in bolstering their flagging enrollments, they must take steps to reverse the trends shown in Figure 3.

Churches and Religious Organizations

Finally, the MTF asks high schoolers how often they attend church (“never,” “rarely,” “once or twice a month,” “once a week or more”). On his consistently excellent Substack, Ryan Burge has used the MTF to examine the evolving correlation between church attendance and political ideology. In “How Has Religion Changed Among High School Seniors?,” Burge shows the following change in religious participation between 1995 and 2022:

Figure 11 - Religious Attendance between 1995 and 2022

The fact that Democrats have become more critical of churches (left-hand panel of Figure 3) while also becoming less likely to attend church (Figure 11) suggests a strong connection between the two. To explore the relationship at an individual level in 2022, I ran an OLS regression predicting frequency of church attendance based on performance assessments of “churches and religious organizations.” Figure 12 shows the predicted level of church attendance across church performance scores after controlling for race, gender, partisanship, and parental education levels.

Figure 12 – Predicted Frequency of Church Attendance by Church Performance Assessments

As Figure 12 shows, there is a predictably strong relationship between evaluations of churches and church attendance, with those rating the performance of churches “very poor” predicted to attend church significantly less than those rating the performance of churches “very good.”

It would obviously be a mistake to conclude from this analysis that poor performance assessments cause less church attendance given the potential for more frequent church attendance to produce more positive performance assessments of churches. It is probably safe to say, however, that these two variables self-reinforcing. Absent any other good options, churches may want to try addressing their attendance problems by persuading young people that they are doing a “good job” for the “country as a whole” (even if, empirically speaking, the causal evidence to recommend this approach is weak).

What is to be done?

Youth dissatisfaction is a river fed by many tributaries. The onset of COVID, for instance, had a profoundly negative impact on how high schoolers think about all of the country’s institutions (whether they were involved in managing the pandemic or not). Between 2020 and 2021, positive evaluations for every one of the eight institutions included in the MTF declined among every demographic group of American high schoolers.

It is also clear that major political events have driven down performance evaluations for some institutions. Consider assessments of the police among young Democrats. In 2014, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamil Rice were killed by police, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement. Between 2014 and 2015, Democratic positive assessments of law enforcement in the MTF were cut in half, with the percentage of young Democrats saying the police were doing a “good” or “very good” job falling from 41.3% to 21.8%. Positive evaluation evaluations of the police among young Democrats were halved once again between 2020 and 2021 in response to the death of George Floyd, dropping from 15.7% to only 5.5%.

Not all of the declines are easily attributable to such events, however. For example, Democratic perceptions of the military worsened considerably after 2014 without any obvious changes to the military’s performance. Similarly, perceptions of higher education and media have been in steady decline since 2002 among high schoolers of all political stripes.

These trends point to larger, structural causes feeding young people’s increasing disaffection with major institutions. Today’s youth are growing up in an information environment that incentivizes news that is “one-sided, critical, partisan, and reaction-generating.” When coupled with rising levels of political polarization, this media ecosystem encourages “Americans to adopt as second nature a more critical, if not cynical, view of systems and structures.”

All of this is to say that there is no one cause for the trends described above. Unfortunately, this also means that there is no panacea for the “crisis of confidence” among today’s young people. To make matters worse, it’s not obvious how institutions can effectively address the rapidly worsening perceptions of performance among young Democrats without also losing the support of young Republicans. Attempts to appeal to progressive values through controversial and ineffective “woke” DEI policies have almost always backfired in recent years, leading to widespread conservative frustration with the organizations that pursue them. There’s also not much evidence that further moves in a progressive direction will do much to reverse the trends among young liberals. High school Democrats, for example, have evaluated colleges and universities worse as colleges and universities have become more “woke.” The US military’s embrace of DEI has been similarly unsuccessful in winning over young Democrats.

Young people are unwilling to participate in institutions they view as performing poorly. Unless our key institutions can find a way to persuade young people from across the political spectrum that they are doing a “good job” for “the country as a whole,” the future looks grim.