Causes and Effects of Political Polarization in Higher Education

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Political life on US college campuses has become highly polarized. Universities have faced accusations of a liberal bias since the early 1900s (Schrecker, 1986). However, these tensions have grown recently, as the Trump administration has accelerated attacks on academic institutions. 

This panel presents new research on the causes and effects of political polarization in higher education. Our first two papers describe political sorting of university faculty and students. Chin et al. document that professors in one state's entire public university system are overall more likely to be registered Democrats than Republican/unaffiliated, but over the past decade, more and more faculty are unaffiliated with either party and that party registration rates vary substantially by departmental affiliation. Acton et al. study the effect of partisanship on where students attend college. Combining evidence from a large-scale survey of 7 million college students over a 40-year period with hypothetical choice experiments, they find that colleges have become more ideologically polarized over time due in part to changing student preferences. 

The panel’s other two papers study whether the college experience has a causal effect on student political beliefs. Goldstein & Kolerman present evidence that college majors may have a causal effect on student political beliefs, with humanities and social science degrees making students more liberal. Their findings suggest that classroom peers are not an important mechanism, in contrast to other recent work (Strother et al., 2021). Lastly, Baum et al. study whether Democratic faculty make their students more liberal. They combine administrative voter records with university transcript data to estimate these effects and use natural language processing tools to study whether liberal faculty assign different course materials than their conservative colleagues. They estimate a precise null effect of professor ideology on students’ political beliefs. 

Our work relates to a broad and growing literature on the causal effects of college on political beliefs (Apfeld et al., 2024; Firoozi, 2022). We combine evidence from administrative data sources, student surveys, lab experiments, and machine-learning text analysis to provide new insights on this topic. We present a nuanced picture of the political state of higher education: most faculty are liberal, and majors may make students more liberal, but student sorting dominates most other channels. At a time when universities are facing politically motivated federal funding cuts, our work can help inform practical solutions to the growing educational ideology divide. 

Apfeld, B., Coman, E., Gerring, J., & Jessee, S. (2024). The impact of university attendance on partisanship. Political Science Research and Methods, 12 (1), 45–58. 

Firoozi, D. (2022). The effect of selective colleges on student partisanship (tech. rep.). Working Paper.

Strother, L., Piston, S., Golberstein, E., Gollust, S. E., & Eisenberg, D. (2021). College roommates have a modest but significant influence on each other’s political ideology. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(2), e2015514117.

Schrecker, E. W. (1986). No ivory tower: McCarthyism and the universities. Oxford University Press, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

Policy Area

• Politics, Media, and the Policy Process

Secondary Policy Area

• Education

Chair

• Vladimir Kogan, The Ohio State University

Discussants

• Daniel Brandon Firoozi, Claremont Graduate University

• Samantha Batel Kane, Brown University

Organizer

• Micah Y Baum, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• Politics of the Professoriate: Longitudinal Evidence From All Faculty of a State Public University System - Presenting Author: Mark Junxuan Chin, Vanderbilt University

• Political Views & College Choices in a Polarized America - Presenting Author: Riley Kaitlin Acton, Miami University

• Changing Minds: How Academic Fields Shape Political Attitudes - Presenting Author: Matan Kolerman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Do Faculty Affect Their Students’ Political Beliefs? - Presenting Author: Micah Y Baum, University of Michigan