Elite schools lean disproportionately to the left, but Republicans would be making a mistake to abandon America’s colleges and universities altogether.
Elite schools lean disproportionately to the left, but Republicans would be making a mistake to abandon America’s colleges and universities altogether.
F rom the enormous debt relief recently enacted by the Biden administration to dangerous changes with respect to transparency and due process in Title IX cases, partisan differences surrounding higher education are significant as the nation heads into the 2022 midterms. But even before the Biden White House began making sweeping changes to how college students and alumni engage with their respective schools, party differences were already potent, with Republicans having far less trust than Democrats in America’s colleges and universities, not to mention the K–12 education system and its teachers. The Pew Research Center found that from 2015 through 2019 the percentage of Republicans who believe that colleges have a negative effect on the country went from 37 percent to 59 percent while the views of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic have remained stable and overwhelmingly positive.
Given the well-known progressive impulses and woke ideas that continuously seem to emerge from our colleges and universities, the Republican mistrust of higher education is certainly reasonable. However, given the impending growth of Gen Z college students as a proportion of the electorate, it would be a mistake for the GOP to write them off and think of higher education as a lost cause.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) just released new data from its 2022 study of free speech on campus that show that higher education is anything but monolithic. Although some schools are far more ideologically liberal, most are relatively balanced. Rather than abandoning campus, then, Republicans should try to engage with college students, especially considering that they are more likely to be politically engaged than their peers.
Of the 45,000 currently enrolled students at over 200 colleges that participated in the 2022 FIRE survey, only 19 percent self-identified as very liberal. While 50 percent did declare themselves at least slightly or somewhat liberal, 21 percent claimed to be conservatives, and the remaining 29 percent said they were moderate or simply refusing to identify along such a scale. Though these stats certainly suggest that most students around the country lean left, this characterization is simply incomplete thanks to the incredible heterogeneity across our nation’s over 5,000 colleges and universities.
Despite the fact that they only represent a small number of students, many of the top-ranked colleges and universities in the nation generate a disproportionate amount of attention, and they happen to be quite liberal. Almost two-thirds of students (65 percent) in the top 25 schools per U.S. News and World Report identify as liberal, while just 13 percent say that they are conservative. However, with schools ranked below 101, the numbers look quite different. Not only does the number for liberal students drop to 43 percent, but the number for conservative students almost doubles to 24 percent. This shows that, despite college students being more liberal than the national population, liberals are not dominant everywhere by any stretch of the imagination, and among the non-elite institutions, there is far more ideological balance.
Going further, in terms of woke efforts to silence dissent and disagreement, students at elite schools are far more likely to approve of measures that squelch speech. Seventy percent of students in elite schools believe that there are cases where it is acceptable to shout down a guest speaker on campus. At schools ranked lower than 101, that figure is notably lower, hovering at 58 percent. Similarly, almost half of the student body (46 percent) at elite schools holds that it can be acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech if they disapprove of the content. This figure drops to 32 percent in lower-ranked schools. And in the case of violence to stop a speaker, there is again a significant difference: A quarter of elite students (26 percent) agree that violence is acceptable in some cases, but only 18 percent of their peers in lower-ranked schools concur. While the numbers are collectively too high, extreme positions are not universally held by students at all schools whatsoever.
Finally, the FIRE data reveal that concerns about cancel culture are more salient in elite schools than in less prestigious institutions. When asked how worried they were about damaging their reputations because of a misunderstanding, students at elite schools reported that they walk around in fear. Seventy-one percent of students in the top 25 schools worry about damaging their reputation based on speech or expression compared to 58 percent of students at lower-ranked schools. Again, while these numbers remain far too high across the board, there is a real difference here that should not be taken lightly. Speech is under greater threat at more elite institutions.
College students are more politicized today than at any time since the late 1960s. Eighty-four percent report that they are currently registered to vote — more than the 69 percent who voted in 2016 and the 80 percent who went to the polls in 2020. These students are politically engaged, may vote in record numbers again, and could become habitual voters very shortly as they become a more powerful voice in the electorate. All of this means that it would be a big mistake for the Republican Party to disengage from campus politics. Despite the GOP’s understandable frustration with higher education, many colleges and universities are more ideologically balanced and less inclined toward cancel culture than the elite schools that dominate the conversation. Moving forward, the GOP must lean into higher education. Otherwise, it could miss a chance to connect with this emerging and electorally powerful demographic.