Do (Mis)Perceptions of Campus Political Climates Affect College Choices?

• In Event: College Choice in Broader Social, Political, and Legal Context

Abstract

Recent research documents that ideological sorting across U.S. college campuses has grown substantially over the past four decades (Acton, Cook, & Ugalde, 2025). Yet what drives this sorting remains an open question. Students may seek out ideologically compatible campuses, but the political composition of a college’s student body is often not directly observable. Thus, students can only act on their beliefs about what campus political climates look like. If those beliefs are systematically wrong, observed sorting may reflect misperception as much as genuine preference, and students may be avoiding colleges they would have otherwise wanted to attend.

This paper will provide the first direct evidence on high school students' beliefs about the political environments at different colleges, how accurate those beliefs are, and how they shape college-going expectations. This spring, we will administer an original survey to a nationally representative panel of U.S. teenagers aged 16–18 that elicits beliefs about the ideological composition of student bodies at colleges commonly attended by students in their state, alongside perceived probabilities of admission and expected enrollment. A randomly selected subset of students will then receive information about campus political composition from Niche.com, after which we will re-elicit beliefs and admissions and enrollment expectations. This experimental design will let us measure the extent and direction of misperceptions and identify how correcting them affects college-going expectations. We will further probe whether students believe political identity influences admissions itself, eliciting their assessments of how likely students with different academic and extracurricular profiles, including involvement in partisan political clubs, would be to gain admission at each college.

Our findings will provide insights into whether ideological sorting across campuses reflects where students genuinely want to go or where they mistakenly believe they belong. If misperceptions are widespread, information provision may be a low-cost lever for broadening students' college consideration sets — which could have spillover effects on campus diversity, cross-ideological exposure, and future political polarization.

Author

• Riley Kaitlin Acton, Bowdoin College
  Presenting Author