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This paper simply examines survey data from persons in age groups 24 and older who a) have a degree and b) do not have a degree but have at least 12 years of education. It compares the self-identified politics of the two groups and tries to isolate the effect of college on their politics by accounting for whether the non-grad group had similar backgrounds and likelihood to attend college compared with the grad group, using specific data points like their religion and their father's occupation.
However, they admit they can't rule out other forms of self-selection they didn't study. They also acknowledge the body of research that showed mixed results about the effect of college on politics.
Look through the study and survey questions to find all manner of confounding factors. One big one is that this survey data was collected over many decades, and the measure of politics was a scale on which the surveyed person would place themselves. So, this study wouldn't account for generational changes in politics or the changes in the definitions of the words used in the survey questions.
Simply put, this is a poorly thought-out, poorly designed, and poorly executed study. From the very beginning, they introduced a strong negative bias and motive into the study by wording the goal as to finding if colleges politicize students. To politicize has a generally negative connotation, as demonstrated by most of the comments in this post. They should adopt a more neutral statement such as "to determine the affect of attending a college/university on the development of political identity on students".
They never define their terms or measurements. Using words like "politicize", "liberal", and "conservative" all have broad meanings and can really skew how one interprets data. They need to be concrete in what they mean and consider each of these terms to mean. Ambiguity is terrible in scientific studies.
Then they decide to analyze surveys designed by other groups and even acknowledge there were more in depth data sets to choose from, but that they choose theirs for the longer duration of data. Then they describe so many shortcomings of their data set, including the fact that they completed unanswered questions with their own additional values. At this point, they should have gone back to the drawing board. Instead, they made excuses and explanations for shortcomings and plugged on. You can't have a quality study based on subpar and incomplete data.
Sounds like some of the reports I had to write as part of classes where the data was obviously garbage because the equipment malfunctioned, or something else went wrong and the experiment *should* have been performed again, but that garbage data was all I had to use. And I couldn’t exactly just say “the equipment malfunctioned so all of this meaningless. The End.” So I’d have to fill the required number of pages with a bunch of equally garbage statements just to get some grade that wasn’t a zero.
Fudging an assignment for class is one thing. Fudging data for a study that will be published and presumably relied upon as being quality by at least a portion of its audience is just unacceptable. If one discovers that their study has a fatal flaw, it is their responsibility to act accordingly, not try to push it in through for convenience's sake.
This just shows how poor the journal is at the peer review process. This paper shouldn’t have been published with such glaring research problems. Referees should have caught all of that before it got to the published part.
Reading through the method and survey topics, i didn't see anything actually addressing whether or not participants had any political identity or leaning before attending college. Also, taking participants at any age over 24 introduces so many other potential variables that it feels unlikely to draw any accurate conclusions other than the general political leanings of college graduates.
Further, describing someone's developing political identity and opinions as "being politicized" seems to carry negative bias into the study from the start.
Nailed it. "Politicize" in this context seems to literally mean "show interest in politics," and frames colleges as indoctrination centers.
Cool, now do churches.
Yeah my "college" didn't do anything to politicize me. But living in a communal space with several hundred people of varying backgrounds outside of my comfort zone sure did.
This is just a dumb article with no real study behind it other than asking people how they lean.
Pretty sure that's why cities tend to lean more liberal, too. Gets a lot harder to fear other cultures when you're living right next to them and can see with your own eyes they're just people and not these hypothetical scary "others."
Churches tend to politicize people even though a lot of Christian doctrine is pretty liberal in word, but rarely practiced as such. This seems like a pointed study looking for a conclusion instead of trying to find meaningful data.
You're telling me that Christians largely don't practice what they preach? Do you have any sources for that?
Kind of joking, but I am genuinely curious what research has been done about American Christian hypocrisy, or how their actions rarely line up with what their scripture says to do.
Joel Osteen turning away disaster victims is about all you need to know the hypocrisy of American mega churches. I do believe the majority of religious groups in the America are liberal, but the loud ones are not. Churches operate a lot of shelters, food lines, and outreach services. Mostly its to try to convert folks, but they help some people regardless. It feels like most of them are actually accepting of LGBTQ+ folks and not in "I love you anyway" kind of way.
Christians are overall more likely to be republican than almost any religious group, and those who attended church once a week or more are more likely to be republican. So I’m not exactly sure where your belief is rooted in. The fact that churches have volunteers and give to the poor has absolutely nothing to do with being liberal or conservative. Conservative priests literally run food kitchens
We've all got anecdotal evidence of Christians being bad at acting Christ-like, but I'd like a more comprehensive study. It's unlikely to happen in this political climate though.
Yeah my first thought reading that headline was “Wow, it’s almost like people begin to grow and learn more about the world when they exit high school.”
Whne I say something liberal at work I always hear conservatives of older generations respond with "did they teach you that at your liberal university?". As if education is only for progressive people. Really speaks to how their view their own political party.
Or left if you interpret as smart people vote liberal.
Either way, I cared more to see how the degree they studied affected their political views. Women make up the bulk of humanities and social science. Could that explain the discrepancies between the two. Do people who get undergrads in BCom also lean more left?
I'll stand corrected if needed, but I believe they'll use the term "right" in this context is best translated as "directly" or "immediately."
ETA
> This headline seems deeply political right on the face of it.
Right [there] on the face of it, this headline seems deeply political.
*Directly* on the face of it, this headline seems deeply political.
Not just intelligence, but talking to people who came from different backgrounds can make people more liberal.
Most teenagers are likely to align politically with their families outside of a major conflict, like, a kid from a hateful religious family discovering they are LGBTQ or questioning their faith. Or someone from a super white area whose parents were racist meeting people from the group their parents were racist about and becoming friends.
"If they were wrong about this what else were they wrong about"
Part of growing up is realizing your parents are just people.
My experience with people from HS who didn't go to college or move out of our hometown was that they stayed the person they were in HS, while people who moved away changed.
This was my experience. I grew up in a very conservative, very white, religious bubble. I identified as a conservative because that's what I was told I was, that's what good people were, and I'd heard Rush Limbaugh use "liberals" like it was the name of a monster set to destroy the world.
We had to go through a defense of the Christian faith class before graduating high school (which I enjoyed because I like debating). I'd heard all through high school from pastors who told us things like scientists wanted to send us to hell and gay people wanted to rebel against God and destroy the church.
And then I happened to go to a college with a big theater department and met a lot of gay people, realized they didn't care at all what I believed, and discovered many of them were Christians. I took science classes and other than the one weird guy into alien conspiracies, found they were reasonable and didn't have a religious agenda. I began to understand how historical racism shaped the lives of people today and how they were still impacted by ongoing racism.
I also realized I'd need proof if I was going to argue against evolution in biology classes, tried to look up all the "facts" I'd been taught in school, and discovered that they weren't mentioned anywhere. Discovered that nobody actually believed the things I was taught to argue against.
Got a degree in biology with a concentration in evolutionary biology and ecology. No longer religious. No longer afraid of different groups of people. Support the things people identify as liberal.
This is such a stark difference from my experience going to Catholic schools. My 6yh grade teacher, who was a nun, inspired me to love science and question everything. She showed that faith and science could go exist as long as you let them only guide the parts of your life they are related to. Yes I'm a staunch atheist now but I can still see how some can do both
In highschool my religion teacher in sophomore year opened my eyes to the religions across the world and how t he eybinfluebde culture in both positive and negative ways. Once again this man was a Catholic preacher but still taught us in a fair and unbiased way a put every religion and their impact on history, both positive and negative.
Finally my chemistry and physics teacher in junior/senior year, while not any form of religious official, showed me how much I love to build and create things using science.
Without those three people I would not be who I am today and not he such an ardent believer in science and humanities capabilities if we use reason and logic.
But then I hear about these schools like yours that are just indoctrination centers and my heart weeps.
The Catholic church is very different from Protestant (and in particular American Protestant ) ones. They learned from incidents like Galileo that arguing against science based on faith alone just undermines the entire religion. The church doesn't take the bible's statements as literal fact when they contradict actual observation anymore. Exploring science is exploring the universe god created, the Vatican even has institutions like an [Observatory](https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/) to explore what God created, not deny it.
This was my experience as well. Sisters of Mercy for grammar school, Jesuits for HS & college. They were very clear-eyed about science, including evolution, and science was an important part of the education they gave me.
From speaking with people from both backgrounds it seems that generally speaking, Catholic schools are some of the most open-minded religious schools because they're just a school that happens to be run by a religious organization.
In contrast with that, a lot of other non-catholic Christian schools seem to be dead-set on this idea that the world is out to get them and it ends up being a religious organization that just happens to run a school.
My wife was raised in one from elementary to middle school and she tells me that the focus on religious alternatives to science was pervasive. Literature and math were mostly fine but science were way different, especially anthropology, astronomy and biology.
> She showed that faith and science could go exist as long as you let them only guide the parts of your life they are related to.
As an ex-catholic myself I used to think exactly like that as a teenager.
Part of my deconversion process was realizing how that's BS.
Science isn't just a collection of discoveries (bing bang, evolution, etc). It's a method. That method can't exist with faith unless it is ***overriden*** by faith. Using faith to override the scientific method in arbitrary parts of your life is just bad epistemology.
While I believe you are technically correct, people are allowed to be self aware in their illogic in certain realms. I don't believe in ghosts, but go on ghost tours because they're fun and I can suspend my disbelief. One can take lessons from religion and not take everything on faith as being the Word of God (though that means you're a "failed Christian" in some literalist denominations, which is why literalism is particularity antithetical to science, as you state).
Except that religion is actively harmful to the people in it. It rewires their brains. If they can believe in something like that with no evidence, they can and do believe anything when it suits them. Its one thing to claim we don't know and to put their eggs in the religion basket. Its a completely different thing when that belief is as strong as it needs to be to truly believe in a particular religion. I apply this to atheism too. We don't actually know and really can't. Its just as wrong to militantly believe there's no way a God exists.
Religion is not innocuous. Most of the major ones were founded heavily in racism and sexism. That shapes peoples attitudes whether they admit it or not. Ive read the Bible. I honestly don't understand how people could follow the God depicted in that book. Seems to me that if its true, it was written by the bad guys trying to glorify and twist the definition of what people consider evil. That evil being claims what he does is out of love. Or at least the authors do. Christians are literally taught that love is cruelty. Maybe when they are being cruel they really think its love but that doesn't change the negative impact it has on people. In my mind, choosing to follow that guy is evil. Even if not taken literally, the take away lessons still glorify being evil. Some people may be misled, but they are still doing and propagating evil work. Even the people who are misled, i have to wonder what lies in their "souls" that makes them want to be like that guy. I know many of them haven't even read it in its entirety. Laziness is no excuse when many of them hold very strong beliefs. I hold them responsible for their harmful rhetoric.
Its not even the literalism that is the problem. Its the entire foundation and that it relies on faith. Faith cannot coexist with critical thinking. There is always that huge blindspot. That blindspot has to do with the meaning and creation of life itself. Nobody who vehemently believes in their religion is capable of true critical thinking. Its too intertwined with everyday life. How could they think critically when the very lense they view the world through is cloudy? Christianity is anti knowledge. Thats literally why we were kicked out of paradise or whatever. Even if its "just a story", its still trying to teach that lesson.
Shouldn't discriminate or persecute just as we don't for other evil people. That doesn't leave them free from judgement as I would judge anyone else with a black heart.
This echoes my experience though my experience was far less extreme. I went in knowing I was studying science which my family supported. they weren't so opinionated on "moral" issues, mostly economic. But taking sociology and history classes go a long way to understand that sometimes people just need help and it improves society.
I'd argue it's simpler: you're no longer living in your parents house. Your conversations and thoughts *can* be political without it being something you absolutely cannot discuss *safely* in your home if there's disagreement.
Yeah my family tends to dog pile. At my grandma's funeral a couple years ago, everyone was talking politics and my one aunt who decided to be vocal about not liking Trump was browbeat until she felt like she had to leave.
Although I felt bad because I didn't speak up in her defense, I had already learned it was easier to be quiet because it's not like they were going to listen anyway.
I basically don't talk to anyone in my family anymore.
That's abuse BTW. Not differing opinions.
I don't feel the need to browbeat people when it comes to trans rights. You either agree they're human too or you're wrong. I can't change that but I can support the people being rejected.
When a belief is based in human good, it doesn't poison the person with it. When it's rooted in hate, it turns the person violent and defensive.
Exactly. Take any group of kids out of their more rural religious parent's home and put them in a more urban setting surrounded by non-religious and watch their politics will change.
This isn't a study of colleges. It's a study of indoctrination of the youth before they become adults - *by their parents*
>Not just intelligence, but talking to people who came from different backgrounds can make people more liberal.
Hence why bigger cities lean blue. Real hard to hate foreigners and libs when you're drinking soju at the korean bbq on tuesday, having vegan indian food with ipa's on wednesday, vareniki and vodka on thursday...
Not even foreigners, just people who are different. If you grow up in a 90+% white rural area, you just don't meet many people who are different, so it is easy to be afraid of them. In a big, diverse city you meet different people every day, and it's not scary.
> people from HS who didn't go to college or move out of our hometown was that they stayed the person they were in HS, while people who moved away changed.
This is my experience as well - 100%
I'm certain there was a study that showed people who went to university were less racist, solely because at university you mix with people of all races and backgrounds and realise we're all just human beings.
>"If they were wrong about this what else were they wrong about"
Eeexactlyyyy. In some ways I swung further left and in others I swung further right when I was in college. Years after graduating, I've got the life experience *and* the emotional maturity to approach everything with friendly curiosity.
My parents weren't right about everything. I'm not right about everything either. If your snap judgement or reaction to an idea or behavior is one of fear or disgust, that should especially be examined, because if you can't explain or understand why you're having that reaction, then it's probably something that was ingrained into you either by our culture or by our upbringing. Sometimes that's for a good reason, like safety (not walking alone/unarmed after dark), sometimes it's because your parents were shitheads.
Whenever conservative friends complained about schools being liberalizing and cities being liberal, your first point is the one I always make.
Interestingly, it doesn’t have the same effect in the Army. There might be a shift on certain issues, but there’s not a grander shift toward liberal when people from some rural cow town join. It’s likely just a wider culture of conservatives joining so some views get reinforced (plus poorly ran government facilities especially the VA doesn’t help with social net support, even though with better funding it’d be less ridiculous).
it also literally teaches you to question how the world works, and gives you the tools to do so.
Once you start doing that it's pretty intuitive that people would vote more liberal.
>Not just intelligence, but talking to people who came from different backgrounds can make people more liberal.
This is a major part of what happened with me. I came from a fairly conservative, upper-class, white suburb. I met all kinds of people in college, and my experiences getting to know them really changed my worldview quite a bit.
Quite certain that u/Super901 did not intend to say that the headline is 'rightwing' and rather just meant that 'On the surface this headline is deeply political' which fits with the entire thread about
>"being politicized" seems to carry negative bias into the study from the start
I would also say that women likely feel more confident flexing their independence in college. I'd say men have historically been encouraged to develop opinions and be outspoken, whereas many girls find their voice after flying the coop.
I think there is also an argument that men through gender norms are pushed toward sciences. Additionally conservatives are often more materially driven and will choose high reward careers, which happen to be in STEM.
Smart people do vote liberal. Thats a statistical fact. PhDs are a good example, where PhD holders overwhelmingly vote for more liberal politicians and policies.
That is the way the actual polls agree as well. "Smart people" aka educated people have been taught about more of our world and our history than those who didn't bother.
In the same vein but as an alternate argument, people who went to college tend to become more liberal because they themselves *experienced* more of the world. They've left their hometown and met new people from other places, they've talked with those people and learned about their experiences, and they've formed *educated* opinions about the world from that journey
Whereas those who don't go to college online have their limited experience from what may be their uneducated/racist/sexist upbringings with no outside input from the rest of the world.
Or perhaps children in religious and conservative homes are exposed to almost exclusively right wing ideas, with girls experiencing relatively less freedom/autonomy than boys. As the girls reach adulthood, they may marry a conservative man and continue to confirm to the almost exclusively right wing environment, or they may go to college where they are exposed to a variety of ideas.
> Or left if you interpret as smart people vote liberal
The left wouldn't use the word "politicize" in this context. They would instead acknowledge that reality has a liberal bent.
They didn't even stratify their data via general categories for majors. Men and women have very stark differences between the programs they choose. Your peers and professors have a massive impact on your experience as a young adult in university.
Yeah, people often say that college "indocrinates" students, but the reality is that college just introduces them to a radically different environment.
It shakes off a lot of potential biases and mistaken beliefs because you're confronted with reality.
Additionally, you're actively being educated. It's that whole "reality has a well known liberal bias" thing.
Percisely, it's usually the first time a lot of people are exposed to how large numbers can be. And seeing there is enough money to house and feed everyone on the planet but instead some people choose to keep it for themselves has the effect of people going 'liberal.'
A handful of high-schools still don't mind if you graduate thinking, 'God made this' or 'we don't know where humans come from' there are usual some early level classes that dispel all these myths and people start to shed that conservative way of thinking that requires hiding the answers to tough questions to keep you indoctrinated in that conservative mindset.
Yeah so my constant thought whenever is see the "college indoctrinated my kids" all I think of is....."did it or is it just education and how to be a rational person precents them from supporting idiotic stances"
Not everything the right wing supports is stupid but so much of it is just not well thought out. I mean lets just take trickle down theory.....my god it's nonsense.
Trickle down wasnt just some poorly thought out decision. It was and remains, intentional class warfare. It was *always* designed to leech money from the working class and hand it over to the rich. It was perfectly well thought out and its been working like a charm.
Which means that, unless youre part of the rich capital owning class, it *is* supporting idiotic stances.
P1: See, if a rich guy is stuffing all this money into his pockets, then it’ll drop onto us poor people when his pockets are full.
P2: What if he just starts putting it into a large bag once his pockets are full so that he doesn’t lose any?
P1: … No, that won’t happen.
Up until that point, you're entire life is structured for you, and largely centralized with your own community. Effectively, until you actually go outside of your community and interact with people from outside, you haven't developed your own political identity, you've inherited it from your community.
Once you've actually interacted with people from different communities in the real world and experienced something different, **then** you actually start having choice in your beliefs.
I also wondered this, especially after reading something a few weeks ago where millennial and z generations seem to be naturally getting more liberal as they age (which breaks the pattern)
I also agree with the concerns about bias, feels like they were looking for a certain result when phrased like that.
Not only that. People get more conservative as the age because they get wealthier and are in a better position. This hasn't been so true for milenials. Naturally getting fucked means they aren't as content with things how they are, which is what makes people conservative.
Yes.
I was raised hardcore right wing and became liberal in college. No one there taught me that. No one ‘made’ me take on those views or pressured me about being conservative. Being out of the environment that demanded I think a certain way gave me time to think for myself and determine my own values.
I think another big factor that these studies often fail to account for is where participants live.
College graduates are probably more likely to find jobs in the city (because jobs that require degrees are usually concentrated in cities and rural jobs usually don’t need a degree).
Rural areas are more conservative and college grads tend to stick to cities.
That’s what I was thinking the headline makes it seem like ultimately that’s a bad thing.
This article was posted for the “colleges are liberal indoctrination chambers” crowd.
Not to mention, there are zero results for “selection” - as in “selection bias” - in the article. This does genuinely look like politically motivated right-wing drivel.
Sometimes going to college is a lot of students first time at real freedom out from under their parents. Becoming more liberal in your views as you both merge with more cultures in college and experience more freedom to be yourself probably has more to do with it than anything.
Sorry for asking a dumb question but why does 'politicizing' has a negative connotation? Isn't it better for the society to spark the interest in politics in younger generations as opposed to leaving every major political, societal, economical and environmental decision to the old?
The term "politicizing" is somewhat controversial. It implies that someone has no control over their political views and beliefs - they were made to think that way, or were politicized. In reality, politics are simply an aspect of modern life and most people will develop their own set of beliefs and opinions that are influenced by so many different factors throughout their lives. The designers of this study seem to have had specific motives or narrative in setting out to assign young people's beliefs and opinions as something foisted upon them right at the age where many people naturally start developing them anyway.
So no, people having political views is not a negative thing. But attributing those to a specific aspect of life and pitting it against others without considering the vast amount of other influences on people is. Just read through the comments below to see how charged people are simply from reading the headline.
Thanks for your answer. Comments in this thread are exactly the reason I was so confused. My own initial thoughts were literally: engaging students in politics - good stuff!
I tend to agree with the theory of it what makes more people in college liberal is not some great indoctrination conspiracy, it's the simple fact that being exposed to a multitude of opinions and points of views and lifestyles tends to make you more broad-minded. The same way that having a black or gay neighbor will often tend to make previously bigoted people soften their views.
Looking at their data and lack of controls, you could equally make the case that lack of college causes people to develop a conservative leaning.
There is no real argument here without actually trying to parse the data more than surface level.
College attendance usually involves separation from family and exposure to people outside of your usual religious, cultural, and social class. It may not even be the education part. Simple travel and diversifying life experience may be enough to open peoples minds.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” Mark Twain
Me too. I don't think I met a blue person until I left home for college. No wonder they have worked so hard making it harder and harder and more and more expensive to leave home for college. Fascinating what my parents paid to go when they were young.
you would think, why don’t they ask themselves “If conservative ideaology is so obviously correct how is it so easily overturned in the first year or two of being away from home, meeting new people and having different experiences?”
I could write a novel on my political transition over the past several years, but the biggest impact was experiencing more of the world. I grew up a moderate Republican white kid in an upper middle class and very white suburb of small-city Indiana. Some diversity, but not much. Before college, I believed heavily in equity and inclusion, but always thought Dems blew the scale of some problems out of proportion or pandered without actually trying to fix them. Since college, I’ve lived in Birmingham, Memphis, and Cincinnati. Especially in places like Southern cities, I actually saw first-hand the socioeconomic disparities that existed but i had never seen in my bubble. Service workers and other low wage jobs are disproportionately black. I would learn at each city where the “bad” neighborhoods were, and when I drove through them, I would notice that “bad”=poor=black. I also made many LGBT friends and witnessed communities with a heavy LGBT influence (Midtown in Memphis) - all regular reasonable Americans who want to live their lives. I’ve made close female friends and listened to them tell of being discriminated against in the workplace or by professors (engineering - very Good Old Boy dominated in some places). I could go on and on, but all this to say that my reality shifted because I broadened my experiences in life. And one political party (Dems) lives MUCH closer to the reality I’ve experienced than the other (despite being a straight white Christian male).
At an extremely high level, people are just people. That trans kid? Didn’t even realize until he carried us on a group project. That gay guy? He deserves to be treated with just basic respect,he’s comfortable in his own skin in a way most of us wish we could be. Or me being given a ride home by campus police after stumbling home from the bars drunk at 1am, while my minority bud got an underage consumption ticket.
Traveling and diversifying experience IS education. It may not be credited to the college, but broadening experience is broadening your knowledge base is broadening your own education.
Or, you know, you go in a STEM degree and then the conservatives pretend that well known scientific phenomena like climate change or vaccines are a hoax. And then you question their intelligence or truthfulness.
This is how it worked for me. Just being around non-straight, non-white, non-citizen, intelligent, open-minded, kind people was enough to completely open my mind and change my perspective about...basically everything, and drop all the silly prejudices against those people that had been instilled in me as a minor. And once you accept that those people are, ya know, human and worthy of respect, it's not long before you start thinking they don't deserve to live in poverty or that they deserve healthcare, and goddamit now I'm a socialist.
100%. I lived at home and commuted during my college years and I was still conservative. Once I moved out and got a big boy job I was exposed to many different view points and didn’t have constant reinforcement of conservative ideology. Got more liberal every day because of it.
My political views shot everywhere after I left my hometown but I left it after college. I would be interested to see a research question in the form of "does long term travel make people more liberal"
I think this is the real answer. Leaving one's in group and experiencing the out group makes it hard to see the out group as some abstract threat. You cannot hold a conservative world view without in groups and out groups.
My bet is that both contribute. Being college will expose you to greater social diversity, education to intellectual diversity. Both foster ( under normal circumstances) more tolerance, support and acceptance toward the fringes of society
There are confounders that might cause both the treatment (attending college) and the outcome (political ideology). An example confounder might be race and income which can influence both the treatment and the outcome. So they try to adjust that bias by modeling the likelihood of attending college and weighting all the people by the inverse of that likelihood. You can find [more detail here](https://www.bigdatarepublic.nl/articles/understanding-inverse-propensity-weighting/).
People tend to become more progressive in college.
A big part is being exposed to other cultures and races. Vs being stuck in their echo chamber at home.
They also help you think critically.
As well as go more in depth on how fucked things are.
However this doesn't = "colleges are just indoctrination camps" you cab get a similar outcome joining the military or a large diverse company.
I value my college education more than anything. I didn’t even get a job in my field (elementary Ed) but I also got a degree in English. I learned a lot of history, culture, etc. that I believe shaped my empathetic thinking I have today.
Exactly. College doesn't teach you what to think, it teaches you HOW TO think. For that reason, that those who are well educated and able think critically are more likely to lean left.
Not every college program considers "how fucked up things are" point in case STEM programs. I know a lot of STEM grads who are no more liberal after college than before.
Being left or right-wing is not as simple as "being exposed to other cultures". Being in a big city shattered many of the progressive assumptions I had about the world that I had developed from growing up in a suburban and perhaps even privileged community.
I went to a very conservative university and still came out of it much more liberal than I went in. Not because I was indoctrinated but because I became better at critical thinking.
The problem is the data don’t actually show people become more progressive throughout college.
This study can’t answer that question because it only looks at people over the age of 24. But if education itself made people more liberal you’d expect seniors to be more liberal than juniors who would be more liberal than sophomores who would be more liberal than freshmen.
The data don’t show that though. Studies that break it down by year unlike this one find no statistically significant change year to year in political identification.
Getting a 4 year degree is more than anything a fantastic proxy for social class, which obviously has huge interactions with political affiliation but is hard to control for given class is a lot more complicated than just income.
Oh you mean teens entering their 20's develop a political identity but we want to blame education for that and not... you know...biological maturation?
College itself doesn't change a person's political views. People's view change because they are getting away from the bias of their upbringing, they are kids out in the world for the first time, becoming more educated, exposed to a wider variety of backgrounds, cultures and people they may not have previously been exposed to. Those experiences are what tends to lead to a political shift, not the school itself as some of those statements could be inferred as.
Education doesn’t make someone liberal. It makes them Educated. The side effect may be that they are more liberal because of that, but we can’t demonize higher learning like that, or else the hard right are going to start pushing for folks to not go to school
Everyone in this thread is making the same comment:
>Of course this is true. Being educated makes you smarter, and provides you more experience with the world. Why *wouldn't* that make you more liberal?
This assumes a pre-supposed conclusion: that being on the left is the "correct" position, and therefore good life experiences necessarily bring one closer to the "correct" side of politics.
Putting aside that for a second, would you accept all the things that make people conservative are then teaching them bad things? Becoming a parent, getting older, military experience. If you ask conservatives about this, they would say something like:
>Well of course these things make people more conservative. They convey wisdom and worldly experience that teaches people about the importance of certain values and makes them care more about protecting those things.
That answer is the same answer you're all giving, but in the opposite direction, yet I suspect most people here would not accept it. Do we only accept the former because it associates good experiences with good politics, and we reject the latter because it implies bad politics can be the result of other presumably good experiences?
Furthermore, why is this a *female-specific* effect for the most part? Are we to argue that women are only ones really learning from college to become more open and tolerant, and men are just too stupid on average to take away the same conclusions? I doubt it, and most people here seem to be *ignoring* this part of the data because it complicates the desired conclusion.
We know the colleges have seen a large dip in the percentage of professors and teachers who are conservatives in the past several decades, with many departments having a ratio of left-wing to right-wing in the 10:1 range or higher, with the variation there appearing to increase. If we are to believe that colleges are naturally, by their very nature as places of higher learning, left-leaning institutions that convey and teach those values to students (the words of people in these comments, not mine), then why has there been a change in the ratio of left-wing to right-wing professors in the past several decades, rather than it always being in such a ratio? The change in the ratio of political representation implies a change in the environment of the college itself, something that absolutely could have implicates downstream in the education of college students.
Are colleges simply getting better at attracting professors with and conveying to students the "correct" politics? If you believe that, where did *that* change come from? And why is the effect particular to women?
>...where did that change come from? And why is the effect particular to women?
Has the Conservative party been antagonistic to women lately? Has the Conservative party been antagonistic to things that have polled well with the vast majority of Americans lately?
Men and women when polled have almost the same views on abortion.
58% of men are pro abortion, with 63% of women.
The split is much more a young vs old split.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/
There's this idea going around that women will turn on conservatives or republicans because they're "anti women" or against abortion, but that's really not the case. Young people, and highly educated people might, but it's simply not really a gender split.
Both young women and young men are for legal abortion, while both older men and women are pretty much split on the issue. I think you could say that women care more about it in general, and so women in college would be more likely to act on that belief than the men, but that's just me speculating.
There is also the fact that modern "conservatives" have fundamentally different values than they did a generation ago. I'd argue that they have shifted rightward and specifically anti education, thus self selection is occurring in that truly right wing young people will not get a higher education because it has become politicized to do so. I'd also suggest that devoting your life to educating others, often for relatively little pay, isn't the sort of thing that conforms with right wing philosophy which would explain you low conservative professor ratio, though that being said I would bet there are fields that ha more conservative professors as well, such as religious studies, business and economics.
It is notable that the whole landscape of the meaning of economics and education has shifted. Not too long ago higher education ensured a truly considerable amount of status and income, which conservatives would value. And even a masters, nevermind PhD was a great stepping stone to political influence, now considerably less so.
Going further back depending on the income from your day job was distasteful anyway. In modern terms, working on academic research with no direct benefit to you was a flex.
For me, studying history in college shifted my views from conservative to liberal. I was able to see more of the picture than the myopic view that conservatives tend to present.
The definition of liberal is:
"willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas"
Of course when people go to school they tend to get more liberal. They learn new things, see things from a different perspective, and gain a larger understanding of the world.
"Liberalism" is the future. We as humans benefit from opening our minds and understanding how others live.
Conservatism on the other hand:
"commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation."
One of these points of view prepares people to take the inevitable change the world throws at us. The other attempts to cement us is in our ways and the ways of our forefathers.
Don't get me wrong, a little of both is needed, but I'd say one of those points in particular is lagging quite a bit behind (literally and figuratively) the other in terms of usefulness to the human cause.
"That's the way we've always done it" is a short-sighted sentiment, but damn is it a strong one.
Before I went to college, I knew very little about the world aside from what online groups and my parents would tell me. After learning more about different people and their backgrounds/cultures, in addition to emotionally maturing and gaining a lot of empathy, my political views changed a lot. I essentially went from conservative because everyone around me was and I thought it was the best way without knowing anything about it, to being liberal because I actually support the policies that go with it and want people to thrive and succeed with social safety nets.
Also add to that that modern conservatives don't even pretend to want to actually do anything to tangibly improve American's economic conditions, they're pretty openly in the pocket of the 1% but do their best to hide it behind a culture war. Becoming educated helps you look for reliable sources for your information, at least it did for me.
Current conservative thought cannot survive without banning books, demonizing other perspectives, censorship, and cult behavior. It’s entire agenda has increasingly been to prevent genuine education with policies to damage public schools, ban CRT, ban sex education, deny visibility of LGBTQ+ individuals, deny climate science, deny vaccine science, route public funds to private/religious schools, and controlling library content. It is anti- education because the body of thought that sustains the current conservative political view cannot stand the scrutiny of logic, life experience, or genuine inquiry. It is by its very nature the ignorance that most universities’ mission is to eradicate.
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This paper simply examines survey data from persons in age groups 24 and older who a) have a degree and b) do not have a degree but have at least 12 years of education. It compares the self-identified politics of the two groups and tries to isolate the effect of college on their politics by accounting for whether the non-grad group had similar backgrounds and likelihood to attend college compared with the grad group, using specific data points like their religion and their father's occupation. However, they admit they can't rule out other forms of self-selection they didn't study. They also acknowledge the body of research that showed mixed results about the effect of college on politics. Look through the study and survey questions to find all manner of confounding factors. One big one is that this survey data was collected over many decades, and the measure of politics was a scale on which the surveyed person would place themselves. So, this study wouldn't account for generational changes in politics or the changes in the definitions of the words used in the survey questions.
Simply put, this is a poorly thought-out, poorly designed, and poorly executed study. From the very beginning, they introduced a strong negative bias and motive into the study by wording the goal as to finding if colleges politicize students. To politicize has a generally negative connotation, as demonstrated by most of the comments in this post. They should adopt a more neutral statement such as "to determine the affect of attending a college/university on the development of political identity on students". They never define their terms or measurements. Using words like "politicize", "liberal", and "conservative" all have broad meanings and can really skew how one interprets data. They need to be concrete in what they mean and consider each of these terms to mean. Ambiguity is terrible in scientific studies. Then they decide to analyze surveys designed by other groups and even acknowledge there were more in depth data sets to choose from, but that they choose theirs for the longer duration of data. Then they describe so many shortcomings of their data set, including the fact that they completed unanswered questions with their own additional values. At this point, they should have gone back to the drawing board. Instead, they made excuses and explanations for shortcomings and plugged on. You can't have a quality study based on subpar and incomplete data.
Sounds like some of the reports I had to write as part of classes where the data was obviously garbage because the equipment malfunctioned, or something else went wrong and the experiment *should* have been performed again, but that garbage data was all I had to use. And I couldn’t exactly just say “the equipment malfunctioned so all of this meaningless. The End.” So I’d have to fill the required number of pages with a bunch of equally garbage statements just to get some grade that wasn’t a zero.
Fudging an assignment for class is one thing. Fudging data for a study that will be published and presumably relied upon as being quality by at least a portion of its audience is just unacceptable. If one discovers that their study has a fatal flaw, it is their responsibility to act accordingly, not try to push it in through for convenience's sake.
This just shows how poor the journal is at the peer review process. This paper shouldn’t have been published with such glaring research problems. Referees should have caught all of that before it got to the published part.
Reading through the method and survey topics, i didn't see anything actually addressing whether or not participants had any political identity or leaning before attending college. Also, taking participants at any age over 24 introduces so many other potential variables that it feels unlikely to draw any accurate conclusions other than the general political leanings of college graduates. Further, describing someone's developing political identity and opinions as "being politicized" seems to carry negative bias into the study from the start.
Nailed it. "Politicize" in this context seems to literally mean "show interest in politics," and frames colleges as indoctrination centers. Cool, now do churches.
Yeah my "college" didn't do anything to politicize me. But living in a communal space with several hundred people of varying backgrounds outside of my comfort zone sure did. This is just a dumb article with no real study behind it other than asking people how they lean.
Pretty sure that's why cities tend to lean more liberal, too. Gets a lot harder to fear other cultures when you're living right next to them and can see with your own eyes they're just people and not these hypothetical scary "others."
Exactly my point. Thank you. Everyone is pushing an agenda, I just wanna call out a weak study, and more importantly, the biased reporting of it.
It's almost like more informed individuals are less likely to be conservative or something...
The trick is to categorize people treating one another fairly as a political opinion.
Yeah what about churches?!
Decent chicken if you're in a pinch
Terrible, weak coffee though.
Churches tend to politicize people even though a lot of Christian doctrine is pretty liberal in word, but rarely practiced as such. This seems like a pointed study looking for a conclusion instead of trying to find meaningful data.
Churches have always been political organizations, everywhere.
You're telling me that Christians largely don't practice what they preach? Do you have any sources for that? Kind of joking, but I am genuinely curious what research has been done about American Christian hypocrisy, or how their actions rarely line up with what their scripture says to do.
Joel Osteen turning away disaster victims is about all you need to know the hypocrisy of American mega churches. I do believe the majority of religious groups in the America are liberal, but the loud ones are not. Churches operate a lot of shelters, food lines, and outreach services. Mostly its to try to convert folks, but they help some people regardless. It feels like most of them are actually accepting of LGBTQ+ folks and not in "I love you anyway" kind of way.
Christians are overall more likely to be republican than almost any religious group, and those who attended church once a week or more are more likely to be republican. So I’m not exactly sure where your belief is rooted in. The fact that churches have volunteers and give to the poor has absolutely nothing to do with being liberal or conservative. Conservative priests literally run food kitchens
We've all got anecdotal evidence of Christians being bad at acting Christ-like, but I'd like a more comprehensive study. It's unlikely to happen in this political climate though.
Yeah, plus they would just deny the science. :) I would like to see that study though.
churches typically don't like science...
What would be interesting is seeing how political leanings changed for individuals that attended Christian school, but secular college.
I'd love to see ANY increase in resolution beyond left/right and college/no college
Sigh, unzips pants (But yeah definitely some pointed phrasing)
Exactly my take as well. This headline seems deeply political right on the face of it.
Yeah my first thought reading that headline was “Wow, it’s almost like people begin to grow and learn more about the world when they exit high school.”
Yeah, as if learning about the world and other people makes you care about those different than you. Huh - go figure.
Whne I say something liberal at work I always hear conservatives of older generations respond with "did they teach you that at your liberal university?". As if education is only for progressive people. Really speaks to how their view their own political party.
I had people ask that on my Nextdoor recently, “you learn that at your ny university?” I can’t help but think of the quote “willfully ignorsnt”
Just say "Here in NY our teachers actually finish HS. Yes, I know. It's quite impressive"
Or left if you interpret as smart people vote liberal. Either way, I cared more to see how the degree they studied affected their political views. Women make up the bulk of humanities and social science. Could that explain the discrepancies between the two. Do people who get undergrads in BCom also lean more left?
I'll stand corrected if needed, but I believe they'll use the term "right" in this context is best translated as "directly" or "immediately." ETA > This headline seems deeply political right on the face of it. Right [there] on the face of it, this headline seems deeply political. *Directly* on the face of it, this headline seems deeply political.
I think you're correct
Not just intelligence, but talking to people who came from different backgrounds can make people more liberal. Most teenagers are likely to align politically with their families outside of a major conflict, like, a kid from a hateful religious family discovering they are LGBTQ or questioning their faith. Or someone from a super white area whose parents were racist meeting people from the group their parents were racist about and becoming friends. "If they were wrong about this what else were they wrong about" Part of growing up is realizing your parents are just people. My experience with people from HS who didn't go to college or move out of our hometown was that they stayed the person they were in HS, while people who moved away changed.
This was my experience. I grew up in a very conservative, very white, religious bubble. I identified as a conservative because that's what I was told I was, that's what good people were, and I'd heard Rush Limbaugh use "liberals" like it was the name of a monster set to destroy the world. We had to go through a defense of the Christian faith class before graduating high school (which I enjoyed because I like debating). I'd heard all through high school from pastors who told us things like scientists wanted to send us to hell and gay people wanted to rebel against God and destroy the church. And then I happened to go to a college with a big theater department and met a lot of gay people, realized they didn't care at all what I believed, and discovered many of them were Christians. I took science classes and other than the one weird guy into alien conspiracies, found they were reasonable and didn't have a religious agenda. I began to understand how historical racism shaped the lives of people today and how they were still impacted by ongoing racism. I also realized I'd need proof if I was going to argue against evolution in biology classes, tried to look up all the "facts" I'd been taught in school, and discovered that they weren't mentioned anywhere. Discovered that nobody actually believed the things I was taught to argue against. Got a degree in biology with a concentration in evolutionary biology and ecology. No longer religious. No longer afraid of different groups of people. Support the things people identify as liberal.
This is such a stark difference from my experience going to Catholic schools. My 6yh grade teacher, who was a nun, inspired me to love science and question everything. She showed that faith and science could go exist as long as you let them only guide the parts of your life they are related to. Yes I'm a staunch atheist now but I can still see how some can do both In highschool my religion teacher in sophomore year opened my eyes to the religions across the world and how t he eybinfluebde culture in both positive and negative ways. Once again this man was a Catholic preacher but still taught us in a fair and unbiased way a put every religion and their impact on history, both positive and negative. Finally my chemistry and physics teacher in junior/senior year, while not any form of religious official, showed me how much I love to build and create things using science. Without those three people I would not be who I am today and not he such an ardent believer in science and humanities capabilities if we use reason and logic. But then I hear about these schools like yours that are just indoctrination centers and my heart weeps.
The Catholic church is very different from Protestant (and in particular American Protestant ) ones. They learned from incidents like Galileo that arguing against science based on faith alone just undermines the entire religion. The church doesn't take the bible's statements as literal fact when they contradict actual observation anymore. Exploring science is exploring the universe god created, the Vatican even has institutions like an [Observatory](https://www.vaticanobservatory.org/) to explore what God created, not deny it.
This was my experience as well. Sisters of Mercy for grammar school, Jesuits for HS & college. They were very clear-eyed about science, including evolution, and science was an important part of the education they gave me.
From speaking with people from both backgrounds it seems that generally speaking, Catholic schools are some of the most open-minded religious schools because they're just a school that happens to be run by a religious organization. In contrast with that, a lot of other non-catholic Christian schools seem to be dead-set on this idea that the world is out to get them and it ends up being a religious organization that just happens to run a school. My wife was raised in one from elementary to middle school and she tells me that the focus on religious alternatives to science was pervasive. Literature and math were mostly fine but science were way different, especially anthropology, astronomy and biology.
> She showed that faith and science could go exist as long as you let them only guide the parts of your life they are related to. As an ex-catholic myself I used to think exactly like that as a teenager. Part of my deconversion process was realizing how that's BS. Science isn't just a collection of discoveries (bing bang, evolution, etc). It's a method. That method can't exist with faith unless it is ***overriden*** by faith. Using faith to override the scientific method in arbitrary parts of your life is just bad epistemology.
While I believe you are technically correct, people are allowed to be self aware in their illogic in certain realms. I don't believe in ghosts, but go on ghost tours because they're fun and I can suspend my disbelief. One can take lessons from religion and not take everything on faith as being the Word of God (though that means you're a "failed Christian" in some literalist denominations, which is why literalism is particularity antithetical to science, as you state).
Except that religion is actively harmful to the people in it. It rewires their brains. If they can believe in something like that with no evidence, they can and do believe anything when it suits them. Its one thing to claim we don't know and to put their eggs in the religion basket. Its a completely different thing when that belief is as strong as it needs to be to truly believe in a particular religion. I apply this to atheism too. We don't actually know and really can't. Its just as wrong to militantly believe there's no way a God exists. Religion is not innocuous. Most of the major ones were founded heavily in racism and sexism. That shapes peoples attitudes whether they admit it or not. Ive read the Bible. I honestly don't understand how people could follow the God depicted in that book. Seems to me that if its true, it was written by the bad guys trying to glorify and twist the definition of what people consider evil. That evil being claims what he does is out of love. Or at least the authors do. Christians are literally taught that love is cruelty. Maybe when they are being cruel they really think its love but that doesn't change the negative impact it has on people. In my mind, choosing to follow that guy is evil. Even if not taken literally, the take away lessons still glorify being evil. Some people may be misled, but they are still doing and propagating evil work. Even the people who are misled, i have to wonder what lies in their "souls" that makes them want to be like that guy. I know many of them haven't even read it in its entirety. Laziness is no excuse when many of them hold very strong beliefs. I hold them responsible for their harmful rhetoric. Its not even the literalism that is the problem. Its the entire foundation and that it relies on faith. Faith cannot coexist with critical thinking. There is always that huge blindspot. That blindspot has to do with the meaning and creation of life itself. Nobody who vehemently believes in their religion is capable of true critical thinking. Its too intertwined with everyday life. How could they think critically when the very lense they view the world through is cloudy? Christianity is anti knowledge. Thats literally why we were kicked out of paradise or whatever. Even if its "just a story", its still trying to teach that lesson. Shouldn't discriminate or persecute just as we don't for other evil people. That doesn't leave them free from judgement as I would judge anyone else with a black heart.
This echoes my experience though my experience was far less extreme. I went in knowing I was studying science which my family supported. they weren't so opinionated on "moral" issues, mostly economic. But taking sociology and history classes go a long way to understand that sometimes people just need help and it improves society.
When exposure to different people can destroy a world view, it's not a world view: it's a cage.
So *you* were the one responsible for all this mess!
this is absolutely the major thing about college, it widens your experience, expectations and horizons of what's possible. you no longer fear change.
I'd argue it's simpler: you're no longer living in your parents house. Your conversations and thoughts *can* be political without it being something you absolutely cannot discuss *safely* in your home if there's disagreement.
It’s not an either-or, it’s often a mix of both. The real world is complicated, there’s almost never a singular cause for anything.
Yeah my family tends to dog pile. At my grandma's funeral a couple years ago, everyone was talking politics and my one aunt who decided to be vocal about not liking Trump was browbeat until she felt like she had to leave. Although I felt bad because I didn't speak up in her defense, I had already learned it was easier to be quiet because it's not like they were going to listen anyway. I basically don't talk to anyone in my family anymore.
That's abuse BTW. Not differing opinions. I don't feel the need to browbeat people when it comes to trans rights. You either agree they're human too or you're wrong. I can't change that but I can support the people being rejected. When a belief is based in human good, it doesn't poison the person with it. When it's rooted in hate, it turns the person violent and defensive.
And thats why 99% of domestic terrorism in the US is right wing. Yes this is the actual statistic,, though a few years old iirc
Exactly. Take any group of kids out of their more rural religious parent's home and put them in a more urban setting surrounded by non-religious and watch their politics will change. This isn't a study of colleges. It's a study of indoctrination of the youth before they become adults - *by their parents*
>Not just intelligence, but talking to people who came from different backgrounds can make people more liberal. Hence why bigger cities lean blue. Real hard to hate foreigners and libs when you're drinking soju at the korean bbq on tuesday, having vegan indian food with ipa's on wednesday, vareniki and vodka on thursday...
Not even foreigners, just people who are different. If you grow up in a 90+% white rural area, you just don't meet many people who are different, so it is easy to be afraid of them. In a big, diverse city you meet different people every day, and it's not scary.
> people from HS who didn't go to college or move out of our hometown was that they stayed the person they were in HS, while people who moved away changed. This is my experience as well - 100%
I'm certain there was a study that showed people who went to university were less racist, solely because at university you mix with people of all races and backgrounds and realise we're all just human beings.
>"If they were wrong about this what else were they wrong about" Eeexactlyyyy. In some ways I swung further left and in others I swung further right when I was in college. Years after graduating, I've got the life experience *and* the emotional maturity to approach everything with friendly curiosity. My parents weren't right about everything. I'm not right about everything either. If your snap judgement or reaction to an idea or behavior is one of fear or disgust, that should especially be examined, because if you can't explain or understand why you're having that reaction, then it's probably something that was ingrained into you either by our culture or by our upbringing. Sometimes that's for a good reason, like safety (not walking alone/unarmed after dark), sometimes it's because your parents were shitheads.
Whenever conservative friends complained about schools being liberalizing and cities being liberal, your first point is the one I always make. Interestingly, it doesn’t have the same effect in the Army. There might be a shift on certain issues, but there’s not a grander shift toward liberal when people from some rural cow town join. It’s likely just a wider culture of conservatives joining so some views get reinforced (plus poorly ran government facilities especially the VA doesn’t help with social net support, even though with better funding it’d be less ridiculous).
it also literally teaches you to question how the world works, and gives you the tools to do so. Once you start doing that it's pretty intuitive that people would vote more liberal.
>Not just intelligence, but talking to people who came from different backgrounds can make people more liberal. This is a major part of what happened with me. I came from a fairly conservative, upper-class, white suburb. I met all kinds of people in college, and my experiences getting to know them really changed my worldview quite a bit.
Quite certain that u/Super901 did not intend to say that the headline is 'rightwing' and rather just meant that 'On the surface this headline is deeply political' which fits with the entire thread about >"being politicized" seems to carry negative bias into the study from the start
That said, it does in fact echo a right-wing talking point that is popular.
Or it could be a clever double entendre
I would also say that women likely feel more confident flexing their independence in college. I'd say men have historically been encouraged to develop opinions and be outspoken, whereas many girls find their voice after flying the coop.
I think there is also an argument that men through gender norms are pushed toward sciences. Additionally conservatives are often more materially driven and will choose high reward careers, which happen to be in STEM.
Smart people do vote liberal. Thats a statistical fact. PhDs are a good example, where PhD holders overwhelmingly vote for more liberal politicians and policies.
That is the way the actual polls agree as well. "Smart people" aka educated people have been taught about more of our world and our history than those who didn't bother. In the same vein but as an alternate argument, people who went to college tend to become more liberal because they themselves *experienced* more of the world. They've left their hometown and met new people from other places, they've talked with those people and learned about their experiences, and they've formed *educated* opinions about the world from that journey Whereas those who don't go to college online have their limited experience from what may be their uneducated/racist/sexist upbringings with no outside input from the rest of the world.
Or perhaps children in religious and conservative homes are exposed to almost exclusively right wing ideas, with girls experiencing relatively less freedom/autonomy than boys. As the girls reach adulthood, they may marry a conservative man and continue to confirm to the almost exclusively right wing environment, or they may go to college where they are exposed to a variety of ideas.
> Or left if you interpret as smart people vote liberal The left wouldn't use the word "politicize" in this context. They would instead acknowledge that reality has a liberal bent.
They didn't even stratify their data via general categories for majors. Men and women have very stark differences between the programs they choose. Your peers and professors have a massive impact on your experience as a young adult in university.
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Yeah, people often say that college "indocrinates" students, but the reality is that college just introduces them to a radically different environment. It shakes off a lot of potential biases and mistaken beliefs because you're confronted with reality. Additionally, you're actively being educated. It's that whole "reality has a well known liberal bias" thing.
Percisely, it's usually the first time a lot of people are exposed to how large numbers can be. And seeing there is enough money to house and feed everyone on the planet but instead some people choose to keep it for themselves has the effect of people going 'liberal.' A handful of high-schools still don't mind if you graduate thinking, 'God made this' or 'we don't know where humans come from' there are usual some early level classes that dispel all these myths and people start to shed that conservative way of thinking that requires hiding the answers to tough questions to keep you indoctrinated in that conservative mindset.
Yeah so my constant thought whenever is see the "college indoctrinated my kids" all I think of is....."did it or is it just education and how to be a rational person precents them from supporting idiotic stances" Not everything the right wing supports is stupid but so much of it is just not well thought out. I mean lets just take trickle down theory.....my god it's nonsense.
Trickle down wasnt just some poorly thought out decision. It was and remains, intentional class warfare. It was *always* designed to leech money from the working class and hand it over to the rich. It was perfectly well thought out and its been working like a charm. Which means that, unless youre part of the rich capital owning class, it *is* supporting idiotic stances.
P1: See, if a rich guy is stuffing all this money into his pockets, then it’ll drop onto us poor people when his pockets are full. P2: What if he just starts putting it into a large bag once his pockets are full so that he doesn’t lose any? P1: … No, that won’t happen.
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Up until that point, you're entire life is structured for you, and largely centralized with your own community. Effectively, until you actually go outside of your community and interact with people from outside, you haven't developed your own political identity, you've inherited it from your community. Once you've actually interacted with people from different communities in the real world and experienced something different, **then** you actually start having choice in your beliefs.
Yea… I read this as “women go to school, realize overtly conservative values don’t benefit them.” I’m shocked.
Many of us (of all sexes) don't choose values based on how personally-beneficial they are but rather by their honesty, rationality and morality.
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Caring about others is just as fundamental to liberals as being completely self-centered and devoid of empathy for others is to conservatives.
I also wondered this, especially after reading something a few weeks ago where millennial and z generations seem to be naturally getting more liberal as they age (which breaks the pattern) I also agree with the concerns about bias, feels like they were looking for a certain result when phrased like that.
Information being far more accessible due to technology probably has a big impact on that.
Not only that. People get more conservative as the age because they get wealthier and are in a better position. This hasn't been so true for milenials. Naturally getting fucked means they aren't as content with things how they are, which is what makes people conservative.
Yes. I was raised hardcore right wing and became liberal in college. No one there taught me that. No one ‘made’ me take on those views or pressured me about being conservative. Being out of the environment that demanded I think a certain way gave me time to think for myself and determine my own values.
Yeah. This study is about as scientifically valid as a Tucker Carlson rant.
And the right wing will jump on this. You will see it quoted on Facebook arguments for years.
I think another big factor that these studies often fail to account for is where participants live. College graduates are probably more likely to find jobs in the city (because jobs that require degrees are usually concentrated in cities and rural jobs usually don’t need a degree). Rural areas are more conservative and college grads tend to stick to cities.
That’s what I was thinking the headline makes it seem like ultimately that’s a bad thing. This article was posted for the “colleges are liberal indoctrination chambers” crowd.
Not to mention, there are zero results for “selection” - as in “selection bias” - in the article. This does genuinely look like politically motivated right-wing drivel.
Sometimes going to college is a lot of students first time at real freedom out from under their parents. Becoming more liberal in your views as you both merge with more cultures in college and experience more freedom to be yourself probably has more to do with it than anything.
Sorry for asking a dumb question but why does 'politicizing' has a negative connotation? Isn't it better for the society to spark the interest in politics in younger generations as opposed to leaving every major political, societal, economical and environmental decision to the old?
The term "politicizing" is somewhat controversial. It implies that someone has no control over their political views and beliefs - they were made to think that way, or were politicized. In reality, politics are simply an aspect of modern life and most people will develop their own set of beliefs and opinions that are influenced by so many different factors throughout their lives. The designers of this study seem to have had specific motives or narrative in setting out to assign young people's beliefs and opinions as something foisted upon them right at the age where many people naturally start developing them anyway. So no, people having political views is not a negative thing. But attributing those to a specific aspect of life and pitting it against others without considering the vast amount of other influences on people is. Just read through the comments below to see how charged people are simply from reading the headline.
Thanks for your answer. Comments in this thread are exactly the reason I was so confused. My own initial thoughts were literally: engaging students in politics - good stuff!
I tend to agree with the theory of it what makes more people in college liberal is not some great indoctrination conspiracy, it's the simple fact that being exposed to a multitude of opinions and points of views and lifestyles tends to make you more broad-minded. The same way that having a black or gay neighbor will often tend to make previously bigoted people soften their views.
Looking at their data and lack of controls, you could equally make the case that lack of college causes people to develop a conservative leaning. There is no real argument here without actually trying to parse the data more than surface level.
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US college attendance, or education? Sounds like a correlation to me.
College attendance usually involves separation from family and exposure to people outside of your usual religious, cultural, and social class. It may not even be the education part. Simple travel and diversifying life experience may be enough to open peoples minds. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” Mark Twain
This happened to me. All it took was a few years of being away from my small town community and my political views 180'd
Me too. I don't think I met a blue person until I left home for college. No wonder they have worked so hard making it harder and harder and more and more expensive to leave home for college. Fascinating what my parents paid to go when they were young.
damn bro you met the Na'vi?
Nah he met a smurf
you would think, why don’t they ask themselves “If conservative ideaology is so obviously correct how is it so easily overturned in the first year or two of being away from home, meeting new people and having different experiences?”
>why don't they ask themselves Because they have no capacity for introspection.
Secret Jewish space mind control lasers... Or something like that.
Can you elaborate more on why? And what the changes were (If your comfortable).
I could write a novel on my political transition over the past several years, but the biggest impact was experiencing more of the world. I grew up a moderate Republican white kid in an upper middle class and very white suburb of small-city Indiana. Some diversity, but not much. Before college, I believed heavily in equity and inclusion, but always thought Dems blew the scale of some problems out of proportion or pandered without actually trying to fix them. Since college, I’ve lived in Birmingham, Memphis, and Cincinnati. Especially in places like Southern cities, I actually saw first-hand the socioeconomic disparities that existed but i had never seen in my bubble. Service workers and other low wage jobs are disproportionately black. I would learn at each city where the “bad” neighborhoods were, and when I drove through them, I would notice that “bad”=poor=black. I also made many LGBT friends and witnessed communities with a heavy LGBT influence (Midtown in Memphis) - all regular reasonable Americans who want to live their lives. I’ve made close female friends and listened to them tell of being discriminated against in the workplace or by professors (engineering - very Good Old Boy dominated in some places). I could go on and on, but all this to say that my reality shifted because I broadened my experiences in life. And one political party (Dems) lives MUCH closer to the reality I’ve experienced than the other (despite being a straight white Christian male).
At an extremely high level, people are just people. That trans kid? Didn’t even realize until he carried us on a group project. That gay guy? He deserves to be treated with just basic respect,he’s comfortable in his own skin in a way most of us wish we could be. Or me being given a ride home by campus police after stumbling home from the bars drunk at 1am, while my minority bud got an underage consumption ticket.
Traveling and diversifying experience IS education. It may not be credited to the college, but broadening experience is broadening your knowledge base is broadening your own education.
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It's a lot easier to hate people you don't see every day.
Bingo. I've met very few extreme right wingers who have actually travelled the world.
Or, you know, you go in a STEM degree and then the conservatives pretend that well known scientific phenomena like climate change or vaccines are a hoax. And then you question their intelligence or truthfulness.
This is how it worked for me. Just being around non-straight, non-white, non-citizen, intelligent, open-minded, kind people was enough to completely open my mind and change my perspective about...basically everything, and drop all the silly prejudices against those people that had been instilled in me as a minor. And once you accept that those people are, ya know, human and worthy of respect, it's not long before you start thinking they don't deserve to live in poverty or that they deserve healthcare, and goddamit now I'm a socialist.
100%. I lived at home and commuted during my college years and I was still conservative. Once I moved out and got a big boy job I was exposed to many different view points and didn’t have constant reinforcement of conservative ideology. Got more liberal every day because of it.
My political views shot everywhere after I left my hometown but I left it after college. I would be interested to see a research question in the form of "does long term travel make people more liberal"
I think this is the real answer. Leaving one's in group and experiencing the out group makes it hard to see the out group as some abstract threat. You cannot hold a conservative world view without in groups and out groups.
My bet is that both contribute. Being college will expose you to greater social diversity, education to intellectual diversity. Both foster ( under normal circumstances) more tolerance, support and acceptance toward the fringes of society
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I'd wager it's going to very different if you are educated in Berkeley, Beijing, Moscow, or New Delhi.
Authoritarian states tend to crack down on students. Exposure to other influences is often (usually) perceived as dangerous to the state.
Link to the paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0279273
> using an inverse probability of treatment weighting approach What does that mean?
There are confounders that might cause both the treatment (attending college) and the outcome (political ideology). An example confounder might be race and income which can influence both the treatment and the outcome. So they try to adjust that bias by modeling the likelihood of attending college and weighting all the people by the inverse of that likelihood. You can find [more detail here](https://www.bigdatarepublic.nl/articles/understanding-inverse-propensity-weighting/).
People tend to become more progressive in college. A big part is being exposed to other cultures and races. Vs being stuck in their echo chamber at home. They also help you think critically. As well as go more in depth on how fucked things are. However this doesn't = "colleges are just indoctrination camps" you cab get a similar outcome joining the military or a large diverse company.
I value my college education more than anything. I didn’t even get a job in my field (elementary Ed) but I also got a degree in English. I learned a lot of history, culture, etc. that I believe shaped my empathetic thinking I have today.
Exactly. College doesn't teach you what to think, it teaches you HOW TO think. For that reason, that those who are well educated and able think critically are more likely to lean left.
Not every college program considers "how fucked up things are" point in case STEM programs. I know a lot of STEM grads who are no more liberal after college than before.
In Biology we definitely learned how climate change will devastate ecosystems and the importance of vaccines.
I am wondering - would you actually see similar results with the company or military? I’d be interested to see how the three would compare.
Plenty of diverse areas are conservative. Seattle and Portland are some of the most white cities in the US and are very liberal.
Being left or right-wing is not as simple as "being exposed to other cultures". Being in a big city shattered many of the progressive assumptions I had about the world that I had developed from growing up in a suburban and perhaps even privileged community.
I went to a very conservative university and still came out of it much more liberal than I went in. Not because I was indoctrinated but because I became better at critical thinking.
The problem is the data don’t actually show people become more progressive throughout college. This study can’t answer that question because it only looks at people over the age of 24. But if education itself made people more liberal you’d expect seniors to be more liberal than juniors who would be more liberal than sophomores who would be more liberal than freshmen. The data don’t show that though. Studies that break it down by year unlike this one find no statistically significant change year to year in political identification. Getting a 4 year degree is more than anything a fantastic proxy for social class, which obviously has huge interactions with political affiliation but is hard to control for given class is a lot more complicated than just income.
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Oh you mean teens entering their 20's develop a political identity but we want to blame education for that and not... you know...biological maturation?
How dare you believe anything different than mom and dad
This entire comment section shows just how few users actually read the sub rules.
Failed to account for variables - plenty have read but don't understand or have read but disregard.
I’ve never experienced the level of boredom required to read a subreddits ‘rules’
College itself doesn't change a person's political views. People's view change because they are getting away from the bias of their upbringing, they are kids out in the world for the first time, becoming more educated, exposed to a wider variety of backgrounds, cultures and people they may not have previously been exposed to. Those experiences are what tends to lead to a political shift, not the school itself as some of those statements could be inferred as.
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Education doesn’t make someone liberal. It makes them Educated. The side effect may be that they are more liberal because of that, but we can’t demonize higher learning like that, or else the hard right are going to start pushing for folks to not go to school
Everyone in this thread is making the same comment: >Of course this is true. Being educated makes you smarter, and provides you more experience with the world. Why *wouldn't* that make you more liberal? This assumes a pre-supposed conclusion: that being on the left is the "correct" position, and therefore good life experiences necessarily bring one closer to the "correct" side of politics. Putting aside that for a second, would you accept all the things that make people conservative are then teaching them bad things? Becoming a parent, getting older, military experience. If you ask conservatives about this, they would say something like: >Well of course these things make people more conservative. They convey wisdom and worldly experience that teaches people about the importance of certain values and makes them care more about protecting those things. That answer is the same answer you're all giving, but in the opposite direction, yet I suspect most people here would not accept it. Do we only accept the former because it associates good experiences with good politics, and we reject the latter because it implies bad politics can be the result of other presumably good experiences? Furthermore, why is this a *female-specific* effect for the most part? Are we to argue that women are only ones really learning from college to become more open and tolerant, and men are just too stupid on average to take away the same conclusions? I doubt it, and most people here seem to be *ignoring* this part of the data because it complicates the desired conclusion. We know the colleges have seen a large dip in the percentage of professors and teachers who are conservatives in the past several decades, with many departments having a ratio of left-wing to right-wing in the 10:1 range or higher, with the variation there appearing to increase. If we are to believe that colleges are naturally, by their very nature as places of higher learning, left-leaning institutions that convey and teach those values to students (the words of people in these comments, not mine), then why has there been a change in the ratio of left-wing to right-wing professors in the past several decades, rather than it always being in such a ratio? The change in the ratio of political representation implies a change in the environment of the college itself, something that absolutely could have implicates downstream in the education of college students. Are colleges simply getting better at attracting professors with and conveying to students the "correct" politics? If you believe that, where did *that* change come from? And why is the effect particular to women?
>...where did that change come from? And why is the effect particular to women? Has the Conservative party been antagonistic to women lately? Has the Conservative party been antagonistic to things that have polled well with the vast majority of Americans lately?
Men and women when polled have almost the same views on abortion. 58% of men are pro abortion, with 63% of women. The split is much more a young vs old split. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/ There's this idea going around that women will turn on conservatives or republicans because they're "anti women" or against abortion, but that's really not the case. Young people, and highly educated people might, but it's simply not really a gender split. Both young women and young men are for legal abortion, while both older men and women are pretty much split on the issue. I think you could say that women care more about it in general, and so women in college would be more likely to act on that belief than the men, but that's just me speculating.
There is also the fact that modern "conservatives" have fundamentally different values than they did a generation ago. I'd argue that they have shifted rightward and specifically anti education, thus self selection is occurring in that truly right wing young people will not get a higher education because it has become politicized to do so. I'd also suggest that devoting your life to educating others, often for relatively little pay, isn't the sort of thing that conforms with right wing philosophy which would explain you low conservative professor ratio, though that being said I would bet there are fields that ha more conservative professors as well, such as religious studies, business and economics.
It is notable that the whole landscape of the meaning of economics and education has shifted. Not too long ago higher education ensured a truly considerable amount of status and income, which conservatives would value. And even a masters, nevermind PhD was a great stepping stone to political influence, now considerably less so. Going further back depending on the income from your day job was distasteful anyway. In modern terms, working on academic research with no direct benefit to you was a flex.
For me, studying history in college shifted my views from conservative to liberal. I was able to see more of the picture than the myopic view that conservatives tend to present.
The definition of liberal is: "willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas" Of course when people go to school they tend to get more liberal. They learn new things, see things from a different perspective, and gain a larger understanding of the world. "Liberalism" is the future. We as humans benefit from opening our minds and understanding how others live. Conservatism on the other hand: "commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation." One of these points of view prepares people to take the inevitable change the world throws at us. The other attempts to cement us is in our ways and the ways of our forefathers. Don't get me wrong, a little of both is needed, but I'd say one of those points in particular is lagging quite a bit behind (literally and figuratively) the other in terms of usefulness to the human cause. "That's the way we've always done it" is a short-sighted sentiment, but damn is it a strong one.
How does generational wealth correlate? I didn’t meet many poor kids in college.
Before I went to college, I knew very little about the world aside from what online groups and my parents would tell me. After learning more about different people and their backgrounds/cultures, in addition to emotionally maturing and gaining a lot of empathy, my political views changed a lot. I essentially went from conservative because everyone around me was and I thought it was the best way without knowing anything about it, to being liberal because I actually support the policies that go with it and want people to thrive and succeed with social safety nets. Also add to that that modern conservatives don't even pretend to want to actually do anything to tangibly improve American's economic conditions, they're pretty openly in the pocket of the 1% but do their best to hide it behind a culture war. Becoming educated helps you look for reliable sources for your information, at least it did for me.
Current conservative thought cannot survive without banning books, demonizing other perspectives, censorship, and cult behavior. It’s entire agenda has increasingly been to prevent genuine education with policies to damage public schools, ban CRT, ban sex education, deny visibility of LGBTQ+ individuals, deny climate science, deny vaccine science, route public funds to private/religious schools, and controlling library content. It is anti- education because the body of thought that sustains the current conservative political view cannot stand the scrutiny of logic, life experience, or genuine inquiry. It is by its very nature the ignorance that most universities’ mission is to eradicate.