New research published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Over the past decade, evidence suggests that earning a college degree has become increasingly associated with a liberal political identity. This study suggests that while college students tend to develop a more left-leaning identity during their education, the actual change is much smaller than the general public assumes.
Public discussions often focus on the idea that higher education gives students more freedom. Commentators and politicians frequently debate whether universities are actively pushing left-leaning ideologies on young people. This perception contributes to a growing lack of trust in higher education among the American public.
“The ideological influence of higher education is a hotly debated topic in the United States,” says Michael Prinzing, a researcher at Wake Forest University. “However, the evidence for such effects is surprisingly mixed.” Prinzing and his colleagues wanted to investigate exactly how political views change during college and what factors influence those changes.
“So we wanted to look at both how college graduates and non-college graduates differ and how students change while in college,” Prinzing explained. He said the study aimed to distinguish between “how people think about political issues (social and economic) and how they think about themselves in political situations.”
To understand this issue, it is helpful to separate political ideologies into two different categories. Issue-based ideology refers to an individual’s particular views on specific topics such as taxation, abortion, and immigration. Identity-based ideology refers to the labels people use to describe themselves, such as liberal or conservative.
“I was struck by how different the results were depending on which aspects of ideology were considered,” Prinzing said. “So when we talk about ‘ideology,’ it can be very important to clarify what exactly we mean by that. Are we talking about how people think about particular issues (and economic or social issues, if you will), or are we talking about how people think about themselves?”
A person may have some liberal views about certain policies, but may not actually identify as liberal. Identity-based ideologies tend to more strongly predict political polarization and hostility toward opposing groups. When people strongly identify with one group, they tend to show favoritism to their own side and hostility to the other group.
The authors investigated whether the assumed division between college graduates and non-college graduates actually exists and whether this relationship has changed over time. They analyzed data from two large, nationally representative surveys of U.S. adults. These include 52,908 participants from the American National Election Survey from 1972 to 2020 and 69,273 participants from the General Social Survey from 1974 to 2022.
Participants were divided into three groups based on their educational background. These groups included those with no college education, those with some college but no degree, and those with a bachelor’s degree. The researchers measured issue-based ideology by creating a composite score from questions about social and economic issues.
They measured identity-based ideology on a 7-point scale. Participants positioned themselves anywhere from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. Scientists used statistical weights to ensure that the sample accurately represented the broader population.
“If you go back at least half a century, people with bachelor’s degrees held more left-leaning views on social issues, but not on economic issues,” Prinzing said. When looking at economic issues, college graduates and those with some college were actually slightly more conservative than adults without a college education. These trends have remained relatively stable over several decades.
The findings regarding political identity looked quite different. “But until the 2010s, graduates did not identify themselves differently than non-alumni,” Prinzing said. “Starting around 2012, something changed, especially in the political identity of college graduates.”
Starting around 2012, college graduates increasingly identified as liberal, while the identity of those with some college education or no college education remained largely stable. By the early 2020s, the ideological gap between graduates and non-graduates had roughly doubled. The term “diplomatic divide” seems to accurately describe this relatively recent divide in how people label their politics.
The researchers then focused on whether these changes in political identity actually occur while students are enrolled in college. They analyzed survey data from 361,704 undergraduate students attending 740 higher education institutions across the country. These students graduated between 1994 and 2019.
Participants reported their political identity on a 5-point scale during first grade and at the end of fourth grade. The survey also collected demographic information, standardized test scores, and major. The authors calculated a change score to determine whether students moved left or right during their four years of school.
Most students (approximately 58%) did not change their political identity during their college years. However, for those who did change, the average shift was slightly to the left. Students who graduated in the mid-1990s showed little change on average in either direction. In recent years, this shift to the left has become even larger.
Students who entered college as conservatives tended to lean leftward. Students who entered as liberals tended to move slightly to the right, but these shifts to the right were much smaller, resulting in an overall average shift to the left.
“Although graduates increasingly identify as liberal, there are significant differences by major (e.g., English and art move farthest to the left, while business and engineering actually move to the right), demographics (e.g., women move farther to the left than men), and other personal characteristics,” Prinzing explained. Students with higher SAT scores also tended to experience a larger leftward shift.
Institutional characteristics had little effect on students’ political identity. Students at private secular colleges moved slightly further to the left than students at private religious colleges. Beyond that, the authors found no meaningful differences between public and private schools or between more and less selective institutions.
“Overall, our findings reveal important and growing rifts in political identity that also undermine broader claims about the ideological impact of higher education,” Prinzing said. The researchers conducted a supplementary study to see how the general public perceives these changes.
They asked 494 adults to estimate the political identity of students at the time they entered and exited college. “The changes in political identity that we observe between students’ freshmen and senior years are much smaller than people tend to think,” Prinzing said.
“In fact, a supplementary study found that U.S. adults think college students’ political identities change about twice as much as they actually do,” he added. Participants of all demographics and political affiliations tended to overestimate college students’ leftward leanings.
“So people tend to overestimate the ideological impact of higher education, even though there is something interesting and important going on here,” Prinzing concluded. Readers should avoid thinking that universities are directly responsible for making people liberal. The authors note that the inability to conduct randomized experiments limits their ability to make definitive claims about cause and effect.
It is still possible that unmeasured factors influence both an individual’s educational choices and political identity. Another limitation is that the researchers did not have a comparison group of young people who did not attend college. The ideological changes observed in college students may simply reflect a normal developmental process.
Young people may simply explore new identities at this stage in their lives, whether they are attending college or not. Future research should focus on developing more specific theories of political socialization. Scientists need to investigate exactly when, to whom, and how different educational experiences influence different parts of a person’s worldview.
The study, “Articulating the Degree Gap: The Growing Importance of Higher Education for Political Identity,” was authored by Michael Prinzing and Michael Vasquez.
