I read a recent Pew research post with dread. According to this survey, the percent of Republicans who believe colleges and universities have a positive influence on the way things are going for this country declined from 58% to 33% between 2013 and 2019. For Democrats, the percent increased from 65 to 72% between 2013 and 2017, and has declined to 67% since.
The survey only includes a few major institutions, but higher education has the most extreme polarization of views. The D-R gap in positive views towards higher education is 34 percentage points. That’s more than labor unions (23 point gap). More than organized religion (30 point gap). More than large corporations (28 point gap).
This isn’t a result of Republicans having greater social distance from higher education. I downloaded the 2019 Pew data and looked at whether the gap was primarily among those without college degrees (perhaps if you’re not receiving the benefits of a degree, the externalized nonsense of college feels more important). I also restricted the sample to white individuals because, well, racial and ethnic differences in partisanship, attitudes, and relationship to higher education is super, super important and complex.
Uh oh. More education, better views towards college among Democrats. If anything, more educated Republicans have slightly more negative views towards higher education.
What do these patterns imply? I’d argue that if you’re Harvard or Yale or Oberlin or Grinnell, probably not too much. Private institutions have a relationship to the federal government via grants and aid and loans and whatnot, but typically rely on smaller enrollment numbers and much funding through a recruited student body and alumni network (we do too, but also rely on state support). A souring by Republicans probably doesn’t do too much for the private world’s ability to fulfill their mission. I suspect the Harvards of the world will be fine, as they can just find a few hundred very affluent DSA advocates out there who’ll still cut the tuition check.
Yet we in the publics are in a very, very dangerous situation, I submit. Many still rely on state-level funding. And I’d be surprised if any public university has removed from its mission statement language about serving the public, or the people of <statename> or whatever. It’s worth remembering that public universities are very much the load bearers of higher education, as 2/3 of Bachelor’s degrees are attained in public institutions.
Of course, lots of other factors have distorted higher educaiton’s relationship to the public. State funding for public universities has declined substantially, especially following the Great Recession. This has forced publics to be pretty aggressive in finding private monies, and it has also reallocated the cost of higher education onto individual students. So, yes, the mission of the public university has become more fragmented, individualized, and privatized. Perhaps that provides sufficient justification for higher education in all its glory to get consolidated into broader issues of partisan polarization.
And look, I’m about as milquetoast and typical a sociologist you’ll find in terms of my political behaviors, values, and visions of a good society. But for better or worse, higher education is very left leaning. This isn’t some falsehood that Republicans spuriously believe. And as far as I can tell, a pretty central feature of contemporary politics is the hatred and fear that partisans have towards one another. It’s really tough to have an institution live up to its mission to serve the public, broadly, while also caught in this modern political polarization system.
With all this in mind, I keep circling around to the following question without being able to reach a good answer: if higher education becomes functionally monopolized by a particular partisan group, what responsibility does society as a whole have to maintain higher education? I’m a total sucker for the broader mission of higher education. I believe in it. I think that it’s fundamentally a good thing. And at minimum, I’m all about bending young people’s values towards that of the written word, of critical thinking, of engaging with ideas, of expanding one’s worldview and historical focus, etc. But I think all this now co-resides with a very explicit and energetic attempt to use higher education to engage in policy debates, to shift political and social and economic decisions. To have a broader social impact. Personally, I think that’s all overall good. Yet when the energy and direction of this latter movement is pretty obviously consolidating into a single partisan group that makes up slightly less than half the country, does the other half hold a responsibility to continue providing support in terms of finances, bodies, status, esteem, etc? It’s not obvious to me that it does. Which means…well…the public mission of the university doesn’t have a sufficiently broad coalition to be maintained. Which is a very, very devastating blow to the mission of higher education. Ugh.