As our nation’s colleges and universities prepare to reopen for their fall semesters and with an election season upon us, questions about the political agenda and trust in higher education will undoubtedly surface. Claims will certainly be made that colleges and universities have succumbed to the progressive and woke impulses that have become common nationwide, socializing college graduates into liberals. And while it is the case that there are zealous administrators who attempt to push discourse to the left, and many professors now see themselves as mission-driven “scholar-activists” and explicitly promote leftist change rather than teaching responsibly; it is important to note that these efforts are far less effective than they may seem. The data reveal that there remain sizable numbers of conservative students on collegiate campuses at present, and the widespread narrative that college graduates are overwhelmingly liberal is not quite correct.
It is true that social media–savvy, left-wing students make quite a bit of noise, most students on campus today identify somewhere in the political center. Harvard University’s Institute of Politics has been collecting data on students for decades, and their findings are in line with many other surveys which reveal that just a third (32 percent) of college students identify as liberal, with another 21 percent claiming to be conservative. The plurality of students—46 percent—call themselves moderates; there is no liberal monoculture among the students.
Although there are more liberals on college campuses than in the national population, the discrepancy is not large. Gallup’s 2021 national average shows that on average in 2021, 37 percent of Americans described their political views as moderate, 36 percent as conservative, and 25 percent as liberal. There are certainly fewer conservatives and more liberals on college and university campuses, but there is no overwhelming liberal monolith—not with a large, presumably persuadable group residing in the middle.
Looking at the broader picture and at college graduates over time, some nuance is required. Newly compiled data from the Survey Center on American Life show that there are some real differences between those Americans who are college graduates and those graduates who then went on to complete more education.
In 2021, among those who have a college degree and nothing more, college graduates are split with the plurality in the middle; 31 percent state that they are conservative, 30 percent are liberal, and 38 percent are moderate. These numbers show that there are more liberals and fewer conservatives among college-educated Americans when compared to the national population on the whole, but these graduates are certainly not overwhelmingly left; they are centrist.
Placing those numbers in context, there were even more conservative identifiers in the 2000s. In fact, for most of the two decades, conservative identifiers outnumbered liberals by two-to-one with almost four in 10 college graduates (39 percent) being conservative, compared to just two in 10 (21 percent) identifying as liberal. The numbers have shifted a bit over the past decade, with more liberal identifiers and fewer conservatives, to the current 2021 figure which is still anything but homogenous.
Turning to post-graduates, the story looks a bit different, but the data are not as dire as often presented. In 2021, 27 percent of post-graduates identified as conservative, compared to 36 percent of post-graduates being both moderate or liberal. Looking at the two-decade trend in ideology among post-graduates, what is noteworthy is that in the early 2000s, liberals were in the minority with about a quarter of post-graduates. That figure has steadily increased to more than a third, becoming the plurality. The number of conservatives has remained fairly steady at around a third, while the moderates have declined notably from almost half to just over a third today. Conservatives are and have been the smallest group among post-graduates for well over a decade, but there remains a sizable portion of conservatives and independents—63 percent—despite the best attempts of faculty and adminstrators to steer them in a more liberal direction; these advanced degree holders are not uniformly liberal extremists.
If progressive higher education faculty and administrators had hoped to completely alter the ideological landscape of college students, the data demonstrate that they have failed on this point. College and university students today, along with basic degree holders, hold a plethora of political views and are far from close to being a majority of liberal identifiers. There has been a real growth of liberal identifiers among those who have earned post-graduate degrees, although there are selection effects of who pursues these degrees at present along with explicit political expectations at play such as in humanities graduate programs. But even among the most liberal class of college graduates, the data are clear: There is no ideological uniformity among current college students or college graduates. Given this reality and the upcoming 2022 midterms, there is no reason for conservatives to write off working with students and cultivating community within higher education.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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