The Economic Value of College

Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. The effects of inequality reach many corners of American life.

Emily Peck at Axios:

The share of Americans who say college is "very important" plummeted over the past decade, new Gallup polling finds.

Why it matters: College may not live up to the American Dream that it promised in the past, and there are other pathways for success becoming more appealing for Gen Z, but in terms of lifetime earnings, a college degree is actually still incredibly important.

The big picture: There are plenty of reasons for the decline in perceived value among Americans.School is expensive, student loan debt is often onerous and job security for those with degrees has diminished— even more so with the advent of AI. Plus, at the moment new graduates are seeing higher unemployment rates.

There's also growing interest and appeal for young adults in the skilled trades — becoming plumbers, electricians, etc. — especially as AI appears to threaten white collar work.

Between the lines: There's also been loud criticism, particularly from conservatives, over the political leanings of universities, criticized as "elitist" "woke" "leftist," etc.Yet both Democrats and Republicans express far less support for higher education than they did more than a decade ago.

By the numbers: In 2013, 68% of Republicans said a college education was very important; this year that number fell to 20%, per Gallup.There's an even split between Republicans who say it's "not too important" (39%) and those who say it's "fairly important" (39%).Democrats went from 83% who said college was "very important" to 42%. Most, however, describe college as "fairly important."

Where it stands: College grads earn more than twice what high-school graduates make.The median income in a household headed by someone with at least a bachelor's degree was $132,700 last year — that's more than double the $58,410 median income of a household led by a high-school grad, according to Census income data released last week.

And earnings for college-led households have pulled away from the pack — rising more than 6% over the past two decades, compared with a 3% increase for high school graduates.

Education and News Sources

Many posts have dealt with news media 

Mary Randolph and Michael Lipka at Pew:

For more information about the audiences of these news sources, refer to our News Media Tracker. For a full breakdown of education levels within the audience of each news source, refer to this detailed table.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis, the topline and the survey methodology.

Class Segregation

 Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. The effects of inequality reach many corners of American life.

David Brooks at NYT:

This experience has produced in me one central conviction about what ails America: segregation. Not just racial segregation — which at least in schools is actually getting worse — but also class segregation. I’m constantly traveling between places where college grads dominate and places where high school grads dominate, and it’s a bit like traveling between different planets.

Back in 2003, Theda Skocpol of Harvard published a book called “Diminished Democracy.” One of her arguments was that more Americans used to join cross-class community organizations like the Rotary or the Elks clubs. But gradually, highly educated people left them for professional organizations filled with others more like themselves. Skocpol wrote: “Once highly educated Americans would have been members and leaders of such cross-class voluntary federations. Now many barely know about them.”

That self-segregation was symptomatic. Many college-educated people were at the same time segregating themselves in neighborhoods where nearly everybody had college degrees into professions where everybody did, into social circles in which you can go weeks without meeting somebody from the working class. Last year a group of researchers published a study in the journal Nature in which they surveyed leaders in 30 fields, including law, media, politics and so on. They found that not only had nearly all of society’s power brokers gone to college, 54 percent of them went to the same 34 elite schools. That’s segregation on steroids.

Those of us in the college-educated class are good at segregating ourselves from others, but we’re astoundingly good at segregating our kids — simply by equipping them to join our ranks. Before kindergarten, the children of the affluent are much more likely to be in preschool. By sixth grade, students in the richest school districts are four grade levels above children in the poorest school districts. By high school, richer kids’ average reading skills are five years ahead of poorer kids’. By college, according to a 2017 study led by Raj Chetty, children from the richest 1 percent of earners were 77 times more likely to go to Ivy League schools than children from families making $30,000 a year or less. In his 2019 book, “The Meritocracy Trap,” Daniel Markovits writes that the academic gap between the affluent and less affluent is greater today than the achievement gap between white Americans and Black Americans in the final days of Jim Crow

Employment Class Divide

 Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. The effects of inequality reach many corners of American life.

Emily Peck at Axios:

College-educated women, particularly mothers, triumphed in the work force in recent years; for those without a degree, the story is less rosy.

Why it matters: The difference is likely about job quality — women with degrees can land positions with paid leave and flexibility that allow them to manage parenting and paid work (a responsibility that they're more likely to shoulder).

Those without degrees are not as lucky and are more likely to wind up in low-paying, service-sector roles with inconsistent schedules.

By the numbers: The share of college-educated women age 25-44 working full time increased to 73%, from 64%, over the past two decades, per an analysis of Census data shared exclusively with Axios, by Third Way, a center-left think tank.Non-college women's participation in the workforce meanwhile has essentially stagnated, only increasing by a single percentage point to 53% over that same period.

Zoom in: Mothers with college degrees are driving these advances.The share working full-time spiked to 68% in 2024, from 57% in 2004; while not budging for moms who didn't finish college.

The big picture: The rise of remote work has been particularly pivotal for women, allowing them to stay employed and still get parenting done — take children to the doctor, drop them off at the bus, etc.

Friction point: The education divide is even worse for men.The share of men without college degrees in the workforce has been declining for years, for different reasons — and not merely stagnating as it is for their women peers.

Between the lines: Unlike other advanced economies, the U.S. doesn't have any kind of nationwide paid family leave or sick leave offerings — instead it's left up to private businesses to decide what kinds of benefits to offer employees.

Higher Education Fights Back

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Harvard President Alan Garber:

Over the course of the past week, the federal government has taken several actions following Harvard’s refusal to comply with its illegal demands. Although some members of the administration have said their April 11 letter was sent by mistake, other statements and their actions suggest otherwise. Doubling down on the letter’s sweeping and intrusive demands—which would impose unprecedented and improper control over the University—the government has, in addition to the initial freeze of $2.2 billion in funding, considered taking steps to freeze an additional $1 billion in grants, initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. These actions have stark real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world.

Moments ago, we filed a lawsuit to halt the funding freeze because it is unlawful and beyond the government’s authority. I encourage you to read our complaint.

Yale President Maurie McInnis:

Earlier today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation that proposes to raise the tax on the investment income of Yale and a number of other universities from 1.4% to 21%. Each year, this increased endowment tax would strip from Yale’s budget hundreds of millions of dollars that currently fund financial aid, research, scholarship, and teaching.

This legislation presents a greater threat to Yale than any other bill in memory. Today, I ask you to join me in defending the research that saves lives and keeps America competitive, the faculty who enrich minds and help us make sense of our complex world, and the students who keep our future bright. What is at stake is Yale’s ability to offer financial aid, to contribute to the vitality of our nation’s culture and civic life, and to introduce discoveries and innovations that transform the world.

Chris Cameron at NYT:

A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration’s wide-reaching effort to detain and deport international students, barring the federal government from arresting those students or revoking their visas while the case plays out in court.

Judge Jeffrey S. White of the Northern District of California, who was appointed to the court by President George W. Bush, granted a temporary injunction protecting international students who were among the thousands whose visas were revoked earlier this year without clear justification, writing that government officials had “uniformly wreaked havoc” and “likely exceeded their authority and acted arbitrarily and capriciously” by the mass revocation of students’ immigration status.

“The relief the court grants provides plaintiffs with a measure of stability and certainty,” Judge White wrote in the 21-page order. “That they will be able to continue their studies or their employment without the threat of re-termination hanging over their heads.”

It's not just the "woke" Ivy League.  CAITLIN OPRYSKO at POLITICO:

Hillsdale College has become an exemplar for higher education on the right, even partnering with the White House last month. But the conservative Christian school located in Michigan has turned to K Street in an effort to avoid being swept up in congressional Republicans’ efforts to crack down on “woke, elite universities,” according to a disclosure filing.

Hillsdale last month retained Williams and Jensen to lobby on “specific threats to the institutional and financial independence of the college, primarily related to the higher education endowment tax,” the filing shows. The team of lobbyists working on the account includes Dan Ziegler, who served as House Speaker Mike Johnson’s top policy aide before returning to the firm in March.

— Wealthy universities were first hit with a 1.4 percent excise tax on their endowments in the 2017 GOP tax law. But the reconciliation package approved last week by the House Ways and Means Committee calls for a tiered endowment tax that would see some schools’ rate soar as high as 21 percent.

— Hillsdale dodged an endowment tax once before. During Senate debate on the 2017 tax bill, four Republicans sided with all Democrats to strip out language that would have exempted schools that don’t accept federal financial aid — a provision lawmakers said would have only applied to Hillsdale. But the size of Hillsdale’s endowment, when adjusted for the number of students, fell below the threshold included in the final bill, sparing the college.

— That’s no longer the case. Under the House bill, Hillsdale would be eligible for the lowest rate of 1.4 percent. The bill includes a provision that would exempt certain religious institutions from the endowment tax, though it’s unclear if that would apply to Hillsdale. Hillsdale did not respond to a request for comment.

— The school’s president, Larry Arnn, ripped the House proposal in an op-ed last week that called the changes “not merely bad policy,” but “a profound inversion of the American idea.”

— Arnn argued the bill, as approved by the Ways and Means Committee, “penalizes most severely those institutions that have chosen the harder path of independence,” by refusing federal funds, while leaving “untouched the vast web of colleges and universities sustained by taxpayer dollars, often bloated with bureaucracies committed to fashionable ideas, far removed from the purposes of education.”

— “Worse still,” he continued, “this tax turns the incentives backward; it rewards dependence and punishes self-reliance. It encourages institutions to seek the shelter of government aid, where subsidies can offset tax burdens.”

Religion and Education in Europe and the United States

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.

Ryan Burge:

If there’s anything I know will get a lot of engagement on social media it’s the simple relationship between education and religious attendance. I think that the assumption that most people have is that educated people tend to be less religious. Which is a viewpoint that I have thought about a lot over the last couple of years. I’m really fascinated by where that whole understanding came from. I think it may be the ghost of Karl Marx haunting us. That famous quote from the Communist Manifesto about how religion is “the opiate of the masses” has seemed to soak into the groundwater of the United States. I also think it was accelerated by the emergence of the New Atheist movement which energized a whole generation of young very online white males to refer to God as “skydaddy” and say that they “don’t need to believe in fairytales to get through life.”

Well, the understanding that American churches, synagogues, and mosques are filled with people who barely managed to finish high school is just empirically, demonstrably false. There’s no simpler way to say it than that. I have looked at almost every survey that contains a component about religion and analyzed the relationship between educational attainment and religious attendance and it’s never a negative relationship. Sometimes the slope of the line is basically flat, but more often than not - the trend line points upward.

For example, this is data from the 2022 and 2023 Cooperative Election Study, which represents a sample of almost 85,000 people.

As you can plainly see, the relationship between weekly church attendance and education is a positive one. Among those with a high school diploma, only 23% indicate they attend church regularly. For those who have an associate’s degree, it’s 26%. It’s two points higher for people who completed a four year program and among those who went beyond an undergraduate education, 30% are weekly attenders.

...

But here’s a question that I wanted to answer in this post - does that same relationship exist in Europe? I’ve never tested it, but data from the European Social Survey makes it possible to do this type of analysis pretty easily. Their sample is from 24 European countries and the total number of respondents is about 40,000. I am looking at Wave 11, which is data collected in 2023 and 2024.

Obviously, the educational system in Denmark is not the same as Croatia, but the ESS offers a ‘unified’ education variable that seems to create a fairly standardized way to put people into consistent educational attainment categories.

Okay, well, this is different. Actually it’s almost the mirrored opposite of what we saw in the first graph from the United States. In this analysis the group of folks who were the most likely to be weekly religious attenders were people who had no formal education or stopped at primary school. Then the next most likely group to attend regularly were those who went to lower secondary school at 17%. And for those who stopped with upper secondary school it was three points lower than that.

 

College Lobbying

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Daniel Barnes at Politico:

Some of the nation’s small liberal arts colleges are hiring Washington lobbyists for the first time — seeking to distinguish themselves from the Ivy League universities at the center of President Donald Trump’s attacks on higher education.

While managing government relations has always been a main responsibility for college presidents, at least five of U.S. News & World Report’s top 20 liberal arts colleges have recently hired lobbyists for the first time in their histories, according to lobbying disclosures: Williams College, Pomona College, Claremont McKenna College, Davidson College and Washington and Lee University. All five schools declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests.

“There are some institutions that have decided that because of the risk, they feel like they need to hire some outside expertise to bolster what they’ve already been doing,” said Steven Bloom, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education.

Firms hired to lobby on education-related issues for those five schools include Lewis-Burke Associates for Williams College, theGroup DC for Pomona College and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck for Davidson College. Holland & Knight has received the largest payday of the firms hired by those five schools, netting $80,000 in the first quarter from Washington and Lee University and Claremont McKenna College, according to disclosure reports. The lobbying firms declined or did not respond to requests for comment.

A key factor driving the K Street hires, according to disclosure reports and people familiar with the matter, is worry about an expanded endowment tax — the 1.4 percent tax on university investment income that was first adopted in 2017 to help offset Trump’s broader package of tax cuts.

 

Asian Population in the US

Many posts have discussed population and immigration.

Jens Manuel Krogstad snd Carolyne Im at Pew

The U.S. Asian population has more than doubled since 2000. The number of Asian Americans grew from 11.9 million in 2000 to 24.8 million in 2023. Both the U.S.-born and immigrant populations increased significantly over this period.

The Asian share of the U.S. population overall increased from 4% to 7% during this time.

...

Immigrants are a declining share of the U.S. Asian population, though they remain a majority. In 2000, immigrants accounted for 63% of Asians overall, compared with 54% in 2023.

Most Asian origin groups have also seen declines in their shares of immigrants. Hmong had the sharpest drop, from 55% in 2000 to 31% in 2023. By contrast, the share of Thai who were immigrants had the smallest decrease, going from 78% to 74%.

 ...

California had the largest Asian population of any state in 2023, at around 7.1 million people. It was followed by New York and Texas (both 2 million), New Jersey (1 million), and Washington (990,000). More than half (54%) of the U.S. Asian population resides in these five states.

...

More than half of Asians ages 25 and older (56%) have a bachelor’s degree or more education. However, this varies widely by origin group. For example, 83% of Taiwanese have a bachelor’s degree or higher, whereas 18% of Laotians do.

Similar shares of U.S.-born and immigrant Asians ages 25 and older have at least a college degree (57% and 56%, respectively). Both figures are substantially higher than among all U.S.-born people and all U.S. immigrants with a college degree (36% and 35%, respectively).

Enhancing Viewpoint Diversity on Campus

 Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

 At AEI, Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey discuss ways of improving viewpoint diversity on college campuses:

Short-term: Involve PhDs and other professionals currently working outside academia in research and teaching. Many right-of-center PhDs find more congenial professional homes in think-tanks than on campus, as Johns Hopkins president Ronald J. Daniels points out. There are also plenty of highly-educated conservative professionals working in law, business, and politics. Universities should draw on these experts, as Rick Hess argues, to round out their course offerings.

Example: The newly launched Johns Hopkins-AEI Fellowship Exchange program, which offers grants to groups of Hopkins faculty and AEI scholars who are interested in teaching or researching together. Scholars have discussed collaborative work on subjects ranging from public health to the future of liberal education.

Medium-term: Give academics who chafe against the ideological skew of the current university a home in which to grow. Such professors are often isolated, and have little influence on the direction of their departments or disciplines. Some are interested in changes to academic structures that would allow them to do more consequential teaching, scholarship, and program-building. To enhance the influence of these professors, trustees and administrators should work with them to form new academic units with authority to hire faculty and create curricula.

Example: The new schools of Civic Thought, initially launched in red-and-purple state public universities. These schools have the opportunity to pioneer an approach to university-level civic education that could give rise to a new field of study. Giving definition and life to that field will require working with national networks of civics professors, hosting conferences and ultimately establishing an association.

Long-term: Expand the academic pipeline to support talented young people who do not perceive the current academy as a vocational home. Many disciplines today suffer from “field compression:” a narrowed range of questions considered valid to ask, and hypotheses considered reasonable to entertain. Universities that seek to remedy this problem by hiring right-of-center professors often find that there are few available to employ. Treating this problem means making a concerted effort to welcome young people who are inhabit a wider range of political and intellectual perspectives into the academic profession.

Example: The “Graduate Student Intellectual Diversity Initiative,” designed with Johns Hopkins professor Steven Teles. This mentorship program connects talented young people enrolled in study opportunities such as the AEI Summer Honors Program, the Hertog Political Studies Program, and the Hudson Political Studies Fellowship with faculty from top graduate schools who want to help broaden the academic pipeline for the sake of the future health of their discipline.

Opinion of Student Protest

A number of posts have discussed the politics of protest.  The anti-Israel protests flopped with the general public in part because they were an elite activity.

Johanna Alonso at Inside Higher Ed:

Ten months after pro-Palestinian encampments sprang up across U.S. college campuses, sparking backlash from politicians, university leaders and pro-Israel students and faculty, the public is still extremely critical of student protests, according to new research conducted by the Center for Applied Research in Education at the University of Southern California.

Conducted from October to December 2024, the survey asked 1,857 adults whether they thought certain student “free speech actions,” including criticizing their universities online, protesting world events by walking out of class or occupying campus buildings, were always, sometimes or never appropriate. More than half of respondents said several of the examples were never appropriate: leaving protest messages on property, shouting down speakers, occupying buildings in protest and disrupting graduation, which was the least popular protest action, with about eight in 10 people saying it was never appropriate.

 Even actions like criticizing their university on social media were relatively unpopular, with only 13 percent of respondents saying it’s always appropriate to do so and 38 percent saying it’s never appropriate.

Respondents were far more likely to approve of universities’ steps to stop protests, with 86 percent saying it was sometimes or always OK for police to arrest students who were breaking the law. Only slightly fewer, 79 percent, said it would be OK for police to break up a student protest—and the question didn’t even specify whether or not laws were broken.

Over all, every example of an institution’s response to protests received a higher approval rating than any example of a protest action.

Politics and Dating

Many posts have discussed partisan polarization and aversive or negative partisanship

 Daniel A. Cox, Kelsey Eyre Hammond at the Survey Center on American Life:

Among single Americans, men and women have pronounced preferences regarding their partner’s politics, specifically whether they support Trump. More than half (52 percent) of single women say they would be somewhat less likely or a lot less likely to date a Trump supporter. Only 36 percent of single men say they would be less inclined to date someone who supports Trump, while nearly half (47 percent) report that it would make no difference to them.

Education further accentuates the gender divide in dating preferences. Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of college-educated single women would be less likely to date a Trump supporter, including 52 percent who say they would be a lot less likely to. Less than half of single women without a college degree report that they would be hesitant to date a Trump supporter. Almost half (46 percent) of college-educated single men express reservations about dating a Trump supporter. Almost one in three (31 percent) single men without a college degree say they would be less likely to date someone who supports Trump.

Harris voters are especially reluctant to date a Trump supporter. Nine in 10 single women who voted for Harris say they would be less likely to date someone who favors Trump. Nearly three in four (74 percent) single women who voted for Harris say they would be a lot less inclined to date a Trump supporter.

Single women give a variety of reasons for why they would be reluctant or would refuse to date a Trump supporter. One single woman said: “It is no longer a political difference; it is a difference in morals. If you are a Trump supporter I can only assume you support the rights of only straight white people and traditional values. That does not align with my beliefs.”

For many single women, Trump’s derogatory statements about women and accusations of sexual assault against him are prime reasons for wanting to avoid dating one of his supporters. As one woman said: “Trump has set a new low standard in his treatment of women, and many of the men I talk with admire him for that and would follow his example.” Another single woman echoed this sentiment: “Men who support Trump actively support someone who disregards women’s rights, views women as objects, and views violence against women as acceptable. Anyone who votes for or supports Trump believes that these issues are not important.”


Polls have shown that fewer young men are identifying as feminist, but most men would not rule out dating someone who was a feminist.[iv] More than half (51 percent) of single men say it would not matter to them whether a prospective romantic interest identified as a feminist. Still, for a significant number of single men, feminism is a red flag. Nearly four in 10 (39 percent) single men say they would be less likely to consider dating a feminist.

Diploma Divide and Marriage

 Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. The effects of inequality reach many corners of American life.

New @axios: Drop in marriage concentrated among women w/o college degrees in part because men in their world have worse economic prospects.

Yet another sign that male marriageability is falling among poor & w-class men.👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/DmO5nymDBU

— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) January 31, 2025

Chambers, Clara and Goldman, Benjamin and Winkelmann, Joseph, Bachelors Without Bachelor's: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates (January 01, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5086363 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5086363. Abstract:

Over the past half-century, the share of men enrolled in college has steadily declined relative to women. Today, 1.6 million more women than men attend four-year colleges in the U.S. This trend has not lowered marriage rates for college women, a substantial share of whom have historically married economically stable men without college degrees. Both historical evidence and cross-area comparisons suggest that worsening male outcomes primarily undermine the marriage prospects of non-college women. The gap in marriage rates between college-and non-college women is more than 50% smaller in areas where men have the lowest rates of joblessness and incarceration.

Racial Inequality, Educational Inequality, and Prison

 Many posts have discussed economic and educational inequality. The effects of inequality reach many corners of American life.

 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),

Falling racial inequality and rising educational inequality in US prison admissions for drug, violent, and property crimes
Christopher Muller https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3855-3375 muller@fas.harvard.edu and Alexander F. Roehrkasse https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4996-9317Authors Info & Affiliations
Edited by Paul DiMaggio, New York University, New York, NY; received September 4, 2024; accepted December 15, 2024
January 21, 2025
122 (4) e2418077122
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2418077122


Abstract
Using administrative and survey data, we show that there has been a sea change in the contours of American imprisonment. At the end of the twentieth century, inequality in the prison admission rates of Black and White Americans was comparable to inequality in the prison admission rates of people with and without a college education. However, educational inequality is now much greater than racial inequality in prison admissions for all major crime types. Violent offenses have replaced drug offenses as the primary driver of Black prison admissions and Black–White inequality in the prison admission rate. The prison admission rate of Black Americans has fallen, but the prison admission rate of White Americans with no college education has dramatically increased for all offense categories. These findings, which are robust to adjustments for changing selection into college attendance, contribute to a growing body of evidence documenting narrowing racial inequality and widening educational inequality in Americans’ life chances.

Protests Fizzle Out

A number of posts have discussed the politics of protest.  The anti-Israel protests flopped with the general public in part because they were an elite activity.

Johanna Alonso at Inside Higher Ed:

After an unprecedented spring of pro-Palestinian protests on campuses across the United States, the fall semester has been comparatively quiet. The total number of protest actions declined by more than 64 percent, from 3,220 to 1,151, according to data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, a project by Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the University of Connecticut that collects data on protests.

The number of students arrested for protesting dropped even more precipitously. Last spring, 3,572 students were arrested in connection with their involvement in protests as pro-Palestinian encampments proliferated on campus quads, starting with the one launched at Columbia University on April 17. But in the fall, only 88 student protesters were arrested. (For the purposes of this article, numbers for the spring were calculated using data from Jan. 1 to July 1 and from July 1 to Dec. 17 for the fall.)

The decline can certainly be attributed in part to a natural loss of momentum following the fever pitch the movement reached in the spring. But some free speech advocates believe that the restrictive expressive-activity policies some institutions introduced over the summer and early fall may have discouraged students from protesting.

Policy Schools Have Few Conservative Faculty Members

 Frederick M. Hess and Riley Fletcher at the Manhattan Institute:

Setting aside concerns about the broader shape of the American professoriate, we examined faculty at leading public affairs programs, where faculty focus explicitly on government, civic leadership, and public policy. Among the 10 programs and 443 teaching faculty members who had identifiable affiliations, those with left-leaning affiliations outnumbered their right-leaning counterparts 7-to-1.

The leftward tilt was more pronounced among tenure-track faculty than among limited-term faculty, but the progressive lean was still 6-to-1 even among the latter group. This is especially important because these positions could—and should—help promote a healthy ideological balance. These patterns were broadly consistent across all 10 schools, with right-leaning faculty dramatically outnumbered by left-leaning (and centrist) faculty in every case.

The takeaways here are straightforward. Schools of public policy and government must do a better job of cultivating a faculty that captures the breadth of views, values, and perspectives that constitute the larger world of American political thought. It is more than a little surprising that this even needs to be said. After all, it’s not as though these schools are unaware of the importance of diversity and inclusion.

In its mission statement, for instance, Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs promises that its faculty and students approach “the challenges of public and international affairs, with particular emphasis on diverse scholarly perspectives and evidence-based analysis.”[14] Well, when it comes to the study of government and public policy, ideological and political perspectives are a crucial dimension of diversity. To state the obvious, right-leaning and left-leaning Americans have fundamental disagreements about how best to approach public and international affairs.

Schools seeking to equip their students for the rigors of leadership and public affairs need to help them grapple with competing views on the role of government, desirable public policy, and the role of the U.S. in the world. That’s why it is so problematic that, of the 58 faculty members with identifiable political affiliations at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, there are eight left-leaning faculty members for every one right-leaning member.

If there is any field where exposure to a robust range of competing viewpoints is essential, it’s the study of public policy and government. While one can dream up rationales (no matter how tortuous) as to why ideological groupthink is acceptable elsewhere in the academy, such claims collapse when it comes to schools of public policy. Today’s academic discourse about health care, gender identity, race, immigration, abortion, DEI, or Israel does little to support the claim that progressive scholars are able and willing to forcefully articulate right-leaning views on such questions. Indeed, recent developments on campus pose a particular burden for those who would claim that left-leaning faculty are creating room for robust discourse or exposing students to good-faith accounts of conservative thought.

Faculty Politics 2024

 Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.,

Ryan Quinn at Inside Higher Ed:

Of the more than 1,100 faculty members across the U.S. who responded to a new Inside Higher Ed/Hanover Research survey, almost none said they’re sitting this presidential election out. Ninety-six percent said they plan to vote. And they overwhelmingly intend to vote for Democrats.

Seventy-eight percent support Kamala Harris and running mate Tim Walz, while only 8 percent of the respondents back Donald Trump and JD Vance, according to the survey, which has a 2.9 percent margin of error. But while their personal support for Democrats was overwhelming, almost no respondents said they plan to tell students which party or candidate to vote for.

...

The new findings broadly echo past research showing that faculty lean left. Nearly 60 percent of respondents said they were Democrats, and the next biggest category wasn’t Republicans but rather Independents, at 22 percent. Republicans clocked in at 7 percent, not far ahead of the “other” and “prefer not to respond” categories, each at 5 percent.

In 2020, the conservative National Association of Scholars published a study of tenured and tenure-track professors at top-ranked institutions in their states, finding that about 48 percent were registered Democrats and 6 percent were Republicans. The new Inside Higher Ed/Hanover Research poll was sent to a broader range of faculty members—including non-tenure-track professors—at a wider variety of institutions.

While nearly eight in 10 who responded to the new survey plan to support Harris, only 57 percent of college students expressed support for the Democratic ticket in an Inside Higher Ed/Generation Lab survey from the last week of September. And while fewer than one in 10 faculty respondents said they plan to vote for Trump, two in 10 students said they would.

The Value of College

 Public Religion Research Institute:

Americans are slightly more likely to say that a college education is a risky gamble that might not pay off (51%) than to say a college education is a smart investment in the future (47%). The view that a college education is a smart investment has dropped since 2016, reaching a low of 42% in 2022 but slightly increasing to 47% in 2024. Both Republicans and Democrats are now less likely to say college is a smart investment, but Republicans are significantly more likely to do so, down from 52% in 2016 to 39% in 2024. Among Democrats, agreement decreased slightly from 66% in 2016 to 62% in 2024. Notably, the partisan gap on the value of a college education has grown from 14 percentage points in 2016 to 23 percentage points in 2024.

Americans who most trust mainstream TV news sources (60%) are significantly more likely than those who most trust Fox News (43%) and those who do not watch TV news (37%) to say that college is a smart investment. Americans who most trust conservative news sources (25%) are the group least likely to say that college is a smart investment.

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Two-thirds of Americans say that the college education system broadens the worldview of young people (67%) rather than radicalizes them (30%), yet party differences are stark: Democrats (90%) are significantly more likely than independents (67%) and Republicans (46%) to say that college broadens the worldview of young people. Black Americans (80%) are more likely than Hispanic (72%), multiracial (64%), and white Americans (62%) to say the college education system broadens the worldview of young people but are not significantly different from the AAPI community (74%). Gen Zers (73%) are more likely than Gen Xers (65%), baby boomers (63%), and the Silent Generation (63%) to say that the college education system broadens the views of young people but are not significantly different from millennials (68%).