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eLearning Industry
DA District Administration
The College Degree Is Dividing America
What does that mean for higher education?
By Eric Kelderman
October 30, 2020
With a passing phrase during a speech in the 2016 Republican
presidential primary, Donald Trump seemed to open a wide, new chasm
among the American electorate.
“I love the poorly educated,” then-candidate Trump said at a rally
celebrating a victory over his rivals in the Nevada caucuses. The
candidate was, at the time, enumerating some of the voting blocs that
were paving his path to the nomination.
That simple sound bite signaled a clear connection between education
levels and political affiliation rarely articulated so explicitly by a
presidential candidate.
Everything falls along partisan lines now.
Less-educated white voters embraced Trump’s particular brand of
populism through both the primary and general elections. The opposite
was also true; unlike in most past elections, a majority of white
voters with higher levels of education favored Democrats in 2016.
Polling this election cycle shows an even greater percentage of
college-educated voters supporting the Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
The Trump era may foreshadow a deep and enduring schism between those
who have a college credential and those who do not, especially if the
president wins re-election on Tuesday. What would that mean for the
future of higher education?
Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, says
conservative criticism of higher education is nothing new. But the
president has taken it to a new extreme, seeking to undermine
confidence not only in institutions but also to discredit individuals
because of their academic expertise.
“Conservatives across the decades always found reason to be grumpy
about the generally liberalizing effects of a college education,”
McGuire said in an email. “The Trump era has raised the stakes
considerably.” The president has spent his first term “trashing
advanced knowledge, from denying climate science to dismissing Dr.
Fauci and other learned epidemiologists as ‘idiots,’” she wrote.
Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University and the former Republican
governor of Indiana, blames some in academe who, he says, have too long
looked down their noses at those without credentials. “I’ve been
troubled for quite some time about the very manifest drifting apart of
Americans along educational lines.”
Regardless of whose fault it is, Daniels and McGuire agree, a rift
between voters based on the college degree would mean declining support
for higher education among both the electorate and lawmakers, at a time
when colleges face historic challenges from the pandemic and the coming
enrollment cliff.
Like so many other facets of civic life in the United States, views of
higher education have fractured along partisan lines. But it hasn’t
always been such a controversial issue.
As recently as 2015, a majority of people from both parties had a
positive view of colleges, according to polling from the Pew Research
Center. But the following year, only 43 percent of Republicans held
that view, compared with 72 percent of Democrats.
More recent polling has shown that a majority of respondents from both
parties have concerns about the price of a college degree.
Conservatives, however, are more concerned about professors introducing
their political and social views in the classroom.
In the early 20th century, the GOP was the party of the wealthy, who
were more likely to attend college, said David N. Smith, a professor of
sociology at the University of Kansas, while Democrats were the party
of labor and wage earners. That began to change, he said, when the baby
boomers flocked to college campuses, from mostly blue-collar
backgrounds.
The culture wars that followed began the conservative political
backlash against higher education, Smith said, but the current
political climate has put the college degree at the center of the
discourse in a new way.
“There’s no question that having a college degree has emerged as a
bright dividing line,” he said, but it’s been used to create a
stereotypical image. At the same time, the term “working class,” used
as a rallying cry by Trump and his supporters, has been narrowed to
mean only people without college degrees, rather than everyone who
works for wages.
The president has shown very little interest in higher-education
policy, broadly speaking, but he and other administration officials
have acted on and amplified some of conservatives’ most common concerns
about colleges.
Since the beginning of his term, Trump and other administration
officials have threatened to take away federal funding for colleges
over free-speech disputes, moved to limit enrollment of international
students, and investigated colleges for alleged bias in admissions
against Asian Americans, among other things.
At the same time, the administration’s rhetoric “fuels a perception
that is popular in some quarters that a college education inculcates
‘liberal’ ideas that translate into political affiliations,” McGuire
said in her email.
For example, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told a 2017
Conservative Political Action Committee conference that liberal college
faculty were trying to indoctrinate students and tell them “what to do,
what to say and, more ominously, what to think.”
But this is an oversimplification. The divide between those who have
college degrees and those who don’t may not be as deep as polling would
suggest, said several scholars, and college faculty have far less power
to change students’ political views than many believe.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries, an associate professor of history at Ohio State
University, said the split among voters of different education levels
is limited largely to Caucasians. “What we’re really talking about
there is the split in white voters,” he said. Regardless of their
education levels, Black voters, Jeffries said, vote overwhelmingly for
Democrats.
Trump’s attacks on higher education and the highly educated, Jeffries
said, create a scapegoat for white voters who feel they have been left
behind by the economy and can’t afford a college degree. “Education
becomes politicized because education becomes the enemy to the white
working class,” he said.
The perception doesn’t reflect reality, Jeffries said, “but it’s potent
and it’s flexible. Conservatives will rally behind a conservative
appointee from Yale in a heartbeat; that lets you know it’s the
politics, but it should not be a wedge.”
Katherine S. Conway-Turner, president of the State University of New
York College at Buffalo, said higher education challenges students’
beliefs, but campuses are far less political than is typically
portrayed.
“Something very special happens in college communities” that’s
different from the partisan disputes so common in politics, she said.
“If you’re outside of higher education, you might not see this,”
Conway-Turner said.
Even some conservative thinkers within higher education are skeptical
that the campus turns otherwise-conservative students into liberals.
Jonathan Marks, a professor of politics and chairman of the department
of politics and international relations at Ursinus College, is the
author of the forthcoming book Let’s Be Reasonable, which “presents the
case for why, now more than ever, conservatives must not give up on
higher education.”
While faculty are overwhelmingly left-leaning, the political climate
still varies widely by campus, Marks said in an email, and students are
very capable of finding one that fits their views. Polling by College
Pulse found that Trump’s approval rating is above 50 percent at
Clemson, Marks wrote, while the president gets just a 7-percent
approval at Brown University.
In addition, Marks said, the shift in college-educated voters from
Republicans to Democrats has largely occurred during Trump’s time as a
candidate and president.
“It’s true that polls suggest a big shift in the white,
college-educated vote in 2020,” Marks said, “but if Betsy DeVos wants
to blame liberal professors for this, she’ll need to explain why the
shift is so recent. Romney won this group easily in 2012.”
“Liberal classroom indoctrination — much less successful liberal
classroom indoctrination that could explain a shift between support for
Romney in 2012 and support for Trump in 2016 and 2020 — is an
overblown, undersourced explanation for the views of college graduates.”
Perception, even when it doesn’t reflect reality, still matters —
especially in a political climate fueled by the president’s frequent
falsehoods, hyperbolic and dangerous allegations, and refusal to
disavow conspiracy theories and white supremacists.
If politicians and large portions of the public believe that colleges
are simply factories that produce liberal voters, then higher education
could see an even greater erosion of support from elected Republicans
and their supporters.
“Everything falls along partisan lines now,” said Adam Gismondi,
director of impact at the Institute for Democracy & Higher
Education at Tufts University. “We are cutting out half of the
applicants for college if Republicans decide college doesn’t have
value.”
Without the support of Republicans in statehouses, higher education is
unlikely to see any greater budget support. Conservative
philanthropists may look for other places to donate their money.
“The perception among Republicans is that higher education has lost its
trust,” said Phillip W. Magness, a senior research fellow at the
American Institute for Economic Research, a think tank that leans
right. “It’s going to make the typical Republican voters ask questions
about whether they should fund higher education,” he said.
Aligning solely with Democrats doesn’t necessarily ensure that higher
education gets an easy pass from that party either, said McGuire, of
Trinity Washington University. Politicians in both parties blame higher
education for being inefficient and unproductive, she said.
“Does the fact that the Trump years have ostensibly pushed higher
education even farther to the left mean that our ‘liberal’ enterprise
will have better friends and greater support in a Biden administration?
Possibly not. Those who forget the regulatory frenzy of the Obama years
will be shocked to realize that we could be heading for a repeat
scenario.”
Daniels, of Purdue, said that without support from both sides of the
political divide, higher education can expect Republicans to enact more
of the kinds of actions that have been taken by the Trump
administration.
“The cost of it all has gotten out of the reach of people of more
modest means,” Daniels said, and there is a “profound sense” that
academics are looking down on the less educated. “If you look down your
nose long enough at people, eventually they will punch you in it,” he
said.
“My point is, the things this administration has done or tried to do, to me these are consequences, not causes,” he said.
Still, whatever political traction the president gets by railing
against higher education, it is unlikely that most conservatives would
abandon colleges altogether. Surveys from New America have found that,
while many say they are unhappy with “higher education,” they support
their local college and acknowledge that a college credential is
important for finding a good job.
Employers still rely heavily on the college credential as a signal, at
least, of job preparation, with surveys showing that they prize the
kinds of thinking emphasized in the liberal arts. In addition to the
individual economic benefits of a degree, many colleges in rural areas
are major employers for the region — one reason politicians of both
stripes find it impossible to close public colleges in such areas.
If Republicans reject higher education on a larger scale, the party and
its supporters could find themselves more isolated culturally,
economically, and politically, especially if the party membership
continues to trend more white and male.
The Democratic electorate, as well as the demographics in higher
education, looks more like the emerging demographics of the country,
which will include a majority of nonwhite residents, said Walter M.
Kimbrough, president of Dillard University, a historically Black
college. “The backlash is, ‘I don’t see myself in those kids, I don’t
connect with that part of America, that’s not me,’” said Kimbrough.
Jeffries, the history professor at Ohio State, says that demonizing
higher education and college-educated voters may work for the GOP in
the short term but cause real and lasting damage to the nation from
“the assault on knowledge and truth.”
“The burden of the calculation is on the Republican Party,” he said.
“Is this a winning formula? Is denouncing higher education a winning
formula?”
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