The Politicization of Higher Education

• In Event: Education, Socialization, and Political Preferences

Abstract

Higher education is deeply implicated in two major trends in U.S. politics. First, people’s political attitudes vary more depending on whether they attended college. Second, people’s opinions about higher education have become more strongly related to political attitudes and partisanship. But do people’s actual experiences with higher education reflect or contribute to this politicization? We know surprising little about this question, given limitations in how we have measured education attainment – often a simple college vs. non-college dichotomy – and surveys rarely combine detailed questions about the decision to attend college and those experiences with questions tapping central political attitudes. We leverage a large, original survey (N > 50,000) that includes over-samples of college students as well as parents of children of college age of younger to investigate several questions. One is whether the details of college attainment matter—not only whether someone attained a 4-year college degree but whether they attended college without attaining a degree, when they attended college during their lifespan, and whether they attended a selective institution or another type of institution. Another is how much their decision to attend college and their experiences in college were “politicized” or whether politics was, as the phrase goes, a sideshow in their campus life. Finally, we examine the connection between their college experiences and a wide range of attitudes about politics and higher education to explore the experience of higher education does and does not matter for politics and also how politics may shape what Americans believe about the value and meaning of higher education.

We see at least four possible contributions of this project. First, we can offer a better description of correlational relationships because of novel survey instrumentation as well as larger sub-samples. Second, via embedded experiments, we estimate the importance of “political” considerations for college attendance versus non-political considerations, such as economics, location, and athletics. Third, via both regular survey questions as well as framing experiments, we assess how support for higher education depends on the salience of contentious issues such as free speech on campus. Finally, we plan to exploit geographic discontinuities that capture both proximity to college or university campuses as well as the potential cost of attending a university (e.g., due to in-state vs. out-of-state tuition).

Authors

• John M. Sides, Vanderbilt University

• Joshua D. Clinton, Vanderbilt University