Research found little evidence that college education itself makes people more liberal
OF ALL THE demographic divisions among America’s Democrats and Republicans, few are as wide or as deep as the educational divide. Consider how white voters cast their ballots in the 2016 presidential election. Some 64% of non-college-educated whites plumped for Donald Trump. Among those with a university degree, the figure was just 38%.
Is university education itself behind these left-wing political views? Or are individuals with liberal values more inclined to attend university in the first place? In ain 2017 at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual shindig for conservative activists, Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, accused American professors of telling their students “what to do, what to say and, more ominously, what to think.” This view is surprisingly common.
An unpublished analysis by Shom Mazumder, a PhD student in government at Harvard University, which was shared with, suggests that academia’s indoctrination of America’s youth has not been as successful as Ms DeVos claims. Mr Mazumder’s study is based on data from the Co-operative Congressional Election Study , a poll of more than 50,000 people led by researchers from Harvard and Tufts universities.
Mr Mazumder found little evidence that college education itself makes people more liberal. Between 2010 and 2014, survey respondents were asked every year which political party they identified with. The share identifying as Democrats did not shift significantly between freshman year and graduation. Similarly, when asked about their political viewpoints, the share of students identifying as conservative changed little during their time at university.
Although the survey responses oscillated from year to year, the effects were not big enough to be statistically significant. Such a lack of evidence should discourage people from believing that academic elites push their left-wing agenda onto their impressionable young pupils. But given how often conservative-leaning media rail against leftist indoctrination in universities, it almost certainly will not.
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