By Andrew Menendez | Contributing Writer
In recent elections, mentions of the voter preferences of college-educated voters seem to permeate news surrounding young people—the way most people seem to discuss it is wrong.
It has become a general rule in media such as Fox News or The New York Post to frame universities and most mainstream American academic institutions as having been overwhelmingly dominated by left-wing politics. And though it is true that college-educated voters are more likely to vote for the Democratic Party or support left-of-center organizations, some of the characterizations of higher education in its role in politics have been both mischaracterized and overstated. It seems to me that the voting patterns of college students have more to do with who goes than with the colleges themselves.
In my experience as a Political Science major at FIU, some of my professors’ biases have been very clear, while others have provided very open-ended spaces for discussion in class. The political biases are especially clear in the humanities, where there are more frequent political innuendos.
However, I think that the coursework is rigorous enough to make any apparent bias dissipate. The only main assumption is that democracy is worth defending, which I have a hard time finding an issue with, given the fact that we live in one. After all, it provides the space for disagreement in the first place.
Academia, on average, does have a tendency to lean left-of-center. This is often lambasted by more politically right-leaning media. The irony lies in the alma maters of the people who run that media, with the vast majority of them having experienced higher education.
Many people in these types of media look down on higher education and view it as being a “scam” or an overly biased space. Their mainstream conservative political representatives have gone to universities, the majority of which are considered some of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. To criticize these universities would be to criticize one of their main sources of legitimacy.
I also think that there are more universities with high employment rates and high-quality research that would be classified as conservative than people typically realize. Examples of this include the University of Notre Dame and Texas A&M University. .
When it comes to the reason why the college-educated lean left, I think too many people focus on the influence of institutions. These institutions do have Political Science departments, with some potential for bias. And while the consensus is this sort of left-liberal, or “social-democratic” consensus, I think it is more emblematic of what people naturally conclude when they embrace traditional liberalism through a historical lens. It might skew towards a certain political direction, but I think the media and the rest of society have enough political diversity to make this influence or “bias” less substantial than it appears. There are enough institutions and cultural influences that lean to the right, such as the police departments, the military, community leaders, religious institutions, and regional political cultures, to help maintain ideological diversity in the public sphere.
I would argue that there could be a reason for the increasing shift towards the left in higher education that is not the institutions themselves but the fact that the demographics that go to college tend to lean to the left.
According to the Pew Research Center, White voters with college degrees are still more likely to vote Republican than Black voters with college degrees. There is also a particular gender divide in political affiliation, with women leaning to the left and men leaning to the right.
In recent years, universities have had more women than they do men. According to Forbes, undergraduate college women outnumber their male counterparts by 2.4-3.1 million. The demographics of universities can explain some sustained left-of-center political support and may be a result of broader cultural trends rather than institutional influence.
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