Liberalism, Conservatism and Education

There's a reason many on the far right call colleges and universities breeding grounds for liberalism -- the reason is it's true.  The more highly educated a person is, the more likely that person embraces liberalism.

And the inverse is also true:  The less education one has, the more likely one embraces far right ideology.

From Pew Research:

It's a well-worn (if not-entirely-agreed-upon) idea that college makes people more liberal. But a new report adds a twist to this: the most educated Americans have grown increasingly liberal over the last couple of decades.

 A report from the Pew Research Center finds a wide partisan gap between highly educated and non-highly-educated americans. Not only that, but the share of college grads and post-graduates who are "consistently liberal" (based on their answers to a series of policy questions) has grown sharply in the last 20 years.

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"We've known for a while that people with more education tend to be more ideologically consistent than people with less education," he said. "In some sense it's not surprising to see that polarization and party sorting is happening most among people who are super highly educated." 

Another possibility, Gross says, might be the growing numbers of women getting college and advanced degrees. Women also in general tend to vote for Democrats more than men. So as the population of highly educated people grew more female, that may have swung it left. 

Insularity At work here is the Big Sort: the idea (popularized in the 2008 book by Bill Bishop) that Americans are increasingly living alongside like-minded people — essentially, that the walls of our respective ideological bubbles are getting thicker. Gross proposes that this may be happening especially among the post-grad set. 

 "Americans are increasingly clustering into cities and neighborhoods with people who are like them politically," he said. "I wouldn't be surprised if part of what's going on has to be people with graduate degrees being drawn toward cities where lots of highly educated people work." In other words, as the highly educated Americans in particular seek out jobs that use their highly educated skill sets, it ends up sorting them into more homogeneous communities.




The Big Questions 
Conservatism Linked to Lack of Education 
by Nathan Hetflick Ph.D.
(I send you to college and now you support queers!)




REAL CLEAR POLITICS:

In terms of demographics, Trump’s supporters are a bit older, less educated and earn less than the average Republican. Slightly over half are women. About half are between 45 and 64 years of age, with another 34 percent over 65 years old and less than 2 percent younger than 30. One half of his voters have a high school education or less, compared to 19 percent with a college or post-graduate degree. Slightly over a third of his supporters earn less than $50,000 per year, while 11 percent earn over $100,000 per year. Definitely not country club Republicans, but not terribly unusual either.



Who Are Donald Trump's Supporters, Really?