But contrary to conservative rhetoric, studies show that going to college does not make students substantially more liberal. The political scientist Mack Mariani and the higher education researcher Gordon Hewitt analyzed changes in student political attitudes between their freshman and senior years at 38 colleges and universities from 1999 to 2003. They found that on average, students shifted somewhat to the left — but that these changes were in line with shifts experienced by most Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 during the same period of time. In addition, they found that students were no more likely to move left at schools with more liberal faculties.
Similarly, the political scientists M. Kent Jennings and Laura Stoker analyzed data from a survey that tracked the political attitudes of about 1,000 high school students through their college years and into middle age. Their research found that the tendency of college graduates to be more liberal reflects to a large extent the fact that more liberal students are more likely to go to college in the first place.
I'm skeptical of this analysis for two reasons. The author claims that college students become more liberal, but by only the same amount that most 18-24 year old adults do. However, he also states that college bound high school students are more liberal on average than students who don't go to college. This means that college students are moving away from the mean while non-college student young adults are moving towards it. If you assume that political views form some kind of unimodal distribution, then moving away from the mean is in some sense more significant. This doesn't necessarily invalidate the analysis, but it does add a wrinkle.
The other reason I'm skeptical is less sophisticated: The author of the article is clearly biased. Here's the last paragraph:
The main reason for this development is that attacking liberal professors as elitists serves a vital purpose. It helps position the conservative movement as a populist enterprise by identifying a predatory elite to which conservatism stands opposed — an otherwise difficult task for a movement strongly backed by holders of economic power.If you include a paragraph like that in your article, don't expect to be taken as a serious researcher.
The researcher sounds like part of the predatory elite to which conservatism stands opposed. Thank you for identifying him!
ReplyDeleteHey Max, I liked this post. I'll add another reason to be skeptical of the "academia doesn't make students more liberal" line: these studies all rely on self-reported political attitudes, and the political spectrum itself can be pretty malleable. As an example, the Mariani-Hewitt study measured students as being "far left", "liberal," "middle of the road," etc.
ReplyDeleteWhat does it mean to be "far left?" At my ultra-liberal school, that descriptor would probably be described to only Marxists who would prefer to see all free enterprise abolished. At Bob Jones University, anyone supporting Obamacare might be labelled "far left." So I would expect that even if students claim that their opinions did not change, being in a liberal political environment would make their policy choices seem more conservative by comparison.
One thing that puzzled me was this statement:
"If you assume that political views form some kind of unimodal distribution, then moving away from the mean is in some sense more significant."
From a game-theoretic standpoint, shouldn't it be exactly the opposite? If the median voter determines an election outcome, then a bunch of 55th percentile Liberal students moving to the 65th percentile would be less important than some 45th percentile students moving to the 55th percentile. Maybe I'm overanalyzing here though...