Are students self-sorting by political ideology?
New survey suggests students are avoiding colleges that challenge their politics.
A new report from education consulting firm EAB documenting results from a survey of thousands of high school students and first-year college students shows a worrying trend for viewpoint diversity on college campuses: prospective college students are intentionally self-sorting into ideologically aligned universities.
The data reveal that 29% of prospective first-year college students reported removing a college from their “might apply” lists based on political reasons. More students dropped potential colleges for being “too conservative” or being in a Republican-controlled state than for being “too liberal.” The report also notes that higher-income students were more likely than others to remove colleges across all political reasons.
Although this report is likely to be read by college recruiters, its findings should be of note for open inquiry advocates, including HxA members. For a decade, Heterodox Academy has been highlighting the lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty. And while student diversity tends to be broader than faculty diversity, a trend of self-selection most prominently by liberal students indicates that student populations, particularly at large flagship and state universities, may eventually come to look quite politically lopsided.
Our years of HxA Campus Expression Survey data show that left-leaning students are 6.2% more comfortable engaging in discussions on controversial topics than right leaning students. As non-trivial numbers of liberal students self-sort into ideologically aligned institutions, those holding more conservative viewpoints are likely to feel increasingly uncomfortable contributing to class discussions on contentious issues, making an already substantial problem even worse.
It’s worth further considering the findings in the context of broader trends of college enrollment. Republican high school students are less likely to want to go to college in the first place. Young women are increasingly more left-leaning than young men and are more likely to enroll in college. As Will Bunch explains in his book on how politics has eroded higher education since the 1960s, liberals broadly are more likely to sort themselves into communities anchored by colleges (i.e., large metropolitan areas), but conservatives are more likely to remain in their hometowns and states. All of these trends continue to deepen political fracturing between rural and urban, liberal and conservative, college-educated and not.
Once on campus, ideological conformity in learning environments undermines intellectual growth. Lauren Wright highlights this in her recent work on the experiences of conservative students at the predominantly progressive Yale, and offers specific examples of the academic robustness that is cultivated when students are forced to grapple with opposing arguments. In Wright’s interviews, leftwing students struggled to articulate conservative viewpoints (other than in their most strawmanned form), while conservative students tended to know both sides fluently.
Wright’s piece makes clear that exposure to opposing viewpoints improves students’ argumentative chops, including their ability to advocate for their own positions — but it is an experience that may be harder to come by if ideological homogeneity – a consequence of students seeking out ideologically aligned institutions – actually boosts a college’s reputation among prospective students.
So, what can be done to stop this boulder before it picks up too much speed?
For starters, we can avoid centering our campuses on politics and instead center them on the core mission of the university: knowledge-seeking. As one of us (Nicole) explained in a recent Free the Inquiry post, new Lumina-Gallup polling shows that de-emphasizing politics and re-focusing on education can also have a positive impact on the public’s confidence in higher ed.
Other results from the EAB survey point in promising directions for improvement: 60% of respondents also felt that a “safe campus” is one in which they experience the “freedom to express my thoughts and values without harassment” and about half of respondents felt that a stated commitment to free speech is an important part of a “safe” campus.
HxA’s new Open Inquiry U Reform Agenda includes these related common sense reforms: Adopt institutional neutrality to end universities speaking out on unrelated political issues to encourage free expression by the campus community. Adopt and uphold a campus-wide commitment to the free exchange of ideas. And defend intellectual freedom across campus, including through vigorous defense of academic freedom.
To help students benefit from ideological pluralism on campus, political homogeneity must be understood as a serious problem. Viewpoint diversity on college campuses ought to be understood by all as a selling point, not a shortcoming. We must reform our campuses from within as academic insiders to be places where knowledge-seeking takes precedence over political activism, and students (and faculty) of all stripes feel welcome to learn.
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