Public Opinion on Education and Partisan Identity

• In Event: Poster Session: Polarization, Cues and Information, and Public Opinion

Abstract

In recent years, various issues on education have been covered by the media. These issues include forgiving college student loan debt, banning textbooks, the teaching of sexuality and gender identity in K-12 schools, rejecting the new Advanced Placement course on African American studies, debating on free speech on university campuses, and more. In addition, news articles, especially opinions, and letters to the editors, have shown perspectives on educational issues that are starkly different from each other.
For instance, we hear about people who are concerned about “puritanically progressive campuses that alienate conservative students” and how some universities have seemingly “backed away from their historical support for free speech.” On the other hand, we also hear about states rejecting textbooks because the books “touched on prohibited topics, including critical race theory and social-emotional learning, which have become targets of the rights.”
Furthermore, according to a Pew Research Center Survey, about 35% of Republicans and leaning Republican respondents said that colleges have a negative effect on the U.S. in 2012. In 2019, this share rose to 59% of Republican/leaning Republican respondents. In contrast, only about 18% of Democratic/leaning Democratic respondents in 2019 said that colleges have a negative effect on the U.S. College education is also associated with political attitudes and behaviors. At the aggregate level, college-educated Americans are more likely to vote and participate in political activities. While some posit that college education liberalizes people on various social issues, Chong, Citrin, and Levy (2022) found that support for free speech across generations and tolerance for controversial speech about social identities has decreased despite the rise of educational attainment levels in the United States.
How the media has been portraying debates on educational policy and university campuses recently raises several questions. Is the American public polarized in their views on education? If so, do we see differences in opinion across the partisan line? Has this gap in views on education increased over time?
To answer these questions, I look at survey data on questions looking at people’s opinions on education policy. This analysis will help us identify what types of public opinion on education policy are readily available through surveys such as ANES and GSS, which will allow us to design survey experiments in the future that we could use to collect new data on people’s perspectives on education policy and institutions. Furthermore, through the exploratory analysis of public opinion on education policy, we could identify patterns through which polarization of public opinion on a particular policy sphere changes over time. In particular, it would be interesting to see whether there has been a divergence or convergence of public opinion on this topic and whether the change in public opinion has been asymmetric or symmetric across various subgroups.

Author

• Eun Ji Sally Son, Columbia University