Some see colleges as sowing the seeds of liberalism in young and impressionable minds. Some of my relatives think so. I am not even certain what this is supposed to mean. Does it mean as a prof you talk politics in your class taking the opportunity of having a captive audience? Perhaps the mission of different disciplines in the social sciences and humanities focus on content and values that happen to be liberal? There is some evidence that this is the case, but there is also evidence business and engineering profs are less so. We do know that the level of education is related to the probability of voting Democrat or Republican. However, are these relationships cause or effect? Does the discipline shape values or do folks with different values commit to different disciplines?
I encountered a longitudinal study following approximately 3500 college students and trying to determine how their values changed. Students were asked about their attitudes toward liberal and conservative people.
In 2015, 42% of students had “high” positive attitudes toward political conservatives. That share increased substantially to 50% in 2016. Three years later, in 2019, it returned to 42%. Meanwhile, positive attitudes toward politically liberal people generally increased during college. All told, 58% of students reported “high” positive attitudes toward this group in 2015. That number grew to 66% in 2016 and then hit 70% in 2019.
I attempted to dig a little deeper into the methodology and the exact questions that were asked. I found that the items were part of a larger study examining how attitudes toward people of different religions changed across the college years. The original study describes the results as follows:
Overall, positive feelings toward politically liberal people increased during college among students in the study. By contrast, positive feelings toward politically conservative people leveled off or declined after the first college year, varying slightly by worldview group. Notably, some of the groups with the greatest appreciation for conservatives at the end of their first year showed the sharpest declines thereafter, including Hindus and Latter-day Saints.