Political Views & College Choices in a Polarized America

• In Event: Causes and Effects of Political Polarization in Higher Education

Abstract

The United States has become increasingly politically polarized over the past fifty years, which has influenced a wide range of non-political behaviors, including social relationships, migration, and economic activity. However, existing literature has not considered the influence of political views or polarization on one of the most consequential decisions individuals make: whether and where to attend college. The lack of research on this topic is surprising, as a variety of non-academic and non-financial factors can influence students’ college application and enrollment decisions, and the scope for politics to influence college choice in the American context is large. For example, tools like Niche publish lists of the “most liberal” and “most conservative” colleges, and recent surveys suggest that Republicans and Democrats have diverged in their views of higher education, with Republicans becoming less favorable over time. Moreover, sorting along political lines at the college entrance stage may have broader societal consequences, deepening demographic and regional disparities in educational attainment and limiting cross-party dialogue on college campuses.

In this paper, we examine the role of students’ political views in shaping college enrollment decisions in the United States. We conduct our analysis in two steps. First, using rich survey data from the Freshman Survey conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, we document a growing polarization of college student bodies along political lines over the past four decades and show that this trend cannot be fully explained by sorting along traditional demographic, socioeconomic, or academic lines. Second, we implement a survey-base experiment that isolates the effect of campuses’ political leanings from other institutional characteristics, allowing us to directly measure their influence on students’ choices. We do so by employing a stated-preference approach that elicits participants’ choice probabilities for hypothetical colleges characterized by a set of eight attributes: cost of attendance, student body size, institution type (private-religious, private-non-religious, public), quality (measured by average SAT/ACT scores), city size, distance from home, state political leaning, and student body political leaning. This experiment is currently underway, and we plan to present results from it – including estimates of students’ willingness to pay for political alignment – at the fall APPAM conference.

Author

• Riley Kaitlin Acton, Miami University
  Presenting Author