A recent piece published by Inside Higher Ed made the case that “the recent midterm elections highlighted the growing educational divide between voters” such that college-educated citizens are generally voting for Democrats, while those without a degree cast more ballots for Republican candidates. As evidence of this divide and increasing political polarization in the country, the piece cited analysis from the Washington Post claiming that “52 percent of voters with a bachelor’s degree cast their ballots for Democrats; 42 percent of those with a high school degree or less voted for Democrats.”
Analyses of this sort are misleading and generally unhelpful since they lack nuance and fail to capture the real political diversity present in the electorate and on most campuses today. That being said, my own analysis of 2022 election exit polls of close to 20,000 voters looking at House of Representative voting in aggregate confirms that there is a seeming educational divide in terms of formal degree attainment: 54 percent of college graduates reported to have voted for Democratic candidates compared to 43 percent of no-degree holders who cast their ballots for Democrats.
But first impressions may be incomplete and it is critical to go a bit deeper here. If we look at the results broken down by gender and educational attainment, for instance, the data demonstrate that having a college degree does not mean one voted for a Democratic candidate at all. Men in 2022, for instance, voted quite differently than women and generally supported Republican candidates over Democratic office seekers. Fifty percent of men who hold college degrees voted for the GOP compared to 48 percent who cast ballots for Democrats. Sixty-one percent of men without a degree voted for Republicans and only a small minority—37 percent—voted for Democratic candidates. Formal education matters, but having a college degree is not perfectly correlated with Democratic Party and candidate support whatsoever.
Women voters look a bit different. While 60 percent of college graduate women supported Democratic candidates in 2022, 50 percent of women without a college degree supported the Republican candidates and 49 percent voted for the Democratic candidates.
Given these numbers, Inside Higher Ed’s proclamation about educational levels is overblown and simply incorrect.
Moreover, many statements about the role of education do not hold up when race and ethnicity are considered. Fifty-two percent of college-educated white men and 72 percent of white men without a college degree cast ballots for the GOP. This education gap does not show itself for college-educated men of color; 59 percent of those with a college degree and 62 percent of men without a degree cast a ballot for the Democratic candidate.
Non-college-educated white women overwhelmingly supported the GOP—61 percent for Republicans compared to 37 percent for Democrats. College-educated white women are a reliable Democratic voting bloc with 56 percent voting for Democrats compared to 42 percent voting for Republicans.
Women of color were appreciably more likely to support Democratic candidates than their male counterparts; 76 percent of degree-holding and 74 percent of non-degree-holding women of color supported the Democratic House candidate in 2022.
The article also failed to note that today’s college and university students are centrists and are not monolithically Democrats at all. Gen Z is shaping up to be a practical, swing generation that engages politically and socially and is not aligned to the left or right. As opposed to the Silent Generation—President Biden’s and Nancy Pelosi’s generation—which has seen a decline in independent identification and a rise in Republican partisan support in 2022, UT-Austin’s Future of Politics Survey has found real centrism among Gen Z students today. Thirty-one percent of sampled students report that they are Republican and another 33 percent are Democrats—essentially an even split. The remainder—37 percent—are either unaffiliated or independent and research has shown that as opposed to being dogmatic and ideological, students today thrive in a world of differences, seem to genuinely welcome a diversity of ideas, seek empathetic leadership, and are interested in serving their communities. Thus, the purported education gap is simply not present on campus today and students may not be likely to be heading down a polarized path.
Americans with higher formal educational levels generally take more left-of-center views and vote for Democratic candidates in aggregate. But this tells only a partial story; when race is introduced along with gender, education ceases to line up so neatly. It is critical to understand that students on campus may have polarized choices and vote more to the left than to the right, but that does that mean that they are overwhelmingly left-of-center. Gen Z college and university students are balanced as a whole and not the predictable voter block we thought they were.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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