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In my freshman seminar this semester, there was almost no disagreement. Not heated disagreement. Not quiet disagreement. Almost none at all.
We were discussing housing — zoning, rent control, supply constraints — issues that typically force students to grapple with trade-offs: growth versus preservation, affordability versus incentives, regulation versus innovation.
But instead of a debate, the conversation resolved almost immediately into consensus.
My students, not even a year out of high school, were overwhelmingly aligned behind policies now central to the contemporary “democratic socialist” movement. Rent control was assumed to be necessary. Developers were viewed with suspicion. Markets were treated not as tools but as threats.
When I raised basic economic questions, about supply elasticity, unintended consequences, or the long-run effects of price controls, the responses varied. Sometimes skeptical. Occasionally hostile. But more often, simply unfamiliar. Not because the students lacked ability, but because the framework itself — neoclassical economics, with its models and price mechanisms — doesn’t travel well through social media. It requires sustained exposure that many of these students had never had.
The conclusions had already been reached, not through engagement with competing ideas, but in their absence. They were held with striking confidence.
At one point, a student insisted that limiting rents would “force” more affordable housing into existence. When I asked how new housing would be financed if returns were capped, there was a pause — not out of disagreement, but unfamiliarity. The question itself seemed out of place.
That moment stayed with me because it revealed something important: the absence of exposure. These were not students who had wrestled with competing arguments and chosen one. These were students who had rarely encountered the competing framework at all.
And the ideas formed in classrooms like this don’t stay there.
This is not isolated. It reflects a broader pattern many faculty quietly recognize: Students are arriving on campus with political and economic views already formed — and insulated from challenge.
We tend to assume that college is where intellectual formation happens — that students arrive open, explore ideas, and refine their views over time. But much of that formation is happening earlier. Research on political socialization shows that economic and political attitudes take shape during adolescence and grow increasingly stable with age. By the time they enter our classrooms, their baseline assumptions about economics, fairness, and the role of the state are often already set.
And those assumptions are not being seriously challenged. In many classrooms, students who dissent hesitate to speak at all — something recent surveys on campus expression continue to document. In one discussion, a student began to push back, tentatively raising a question about supply, but quickly stopped, glancing around the room before trailing off. The room didn’t punish him. It simply didn’t notice. The moment disappeared.
In my seminar, I introduced standard economic arguments about housing supply. We discussed how restrictive zoning limits new construction, drives up prices, and exacerbates inequality by locking out new entrants. We examined what happens when cities relax those constraints: Minneapolis, after eliminating single-family zoning and parking minimums, expanded housing supply and kept rent growth below the national average. We talked about how well-intentioned policies such as rent control can reduce incentives to build, producing the shortages they were meant to prevent. A landmark study of San Francisco’s rent control expansion found that the policy reduced the city’s rental housing supply by roughly 15% — contributing to the very unaffordability it aimed to solve.
These are not fringe ideas. They are foundational concepts in modern economics, supported by decades of empirical research.
Yet for many students, they felt foreign.
That distinction matters. The ideas driving skepticism of markets are everywhere on social media. They are simplified, emotionally resonant, and constantly reinforced. The neoclassical counterarguments are not. They require patience, comfort with trade-offs, and a willingness to follow an argument through several steps before it pays off. That asymmetry is not the students’ fault. But it is a problem higher education should be addressing — and too often isn’t.
These attitudes are now measurable at scale. A 2019 Gallup poll found that just 47% of Americans aged 18-34 had a positive view of capitalism, down nearly 20 points from a decade earlier. A March 2025 Cato Institute-YouGov survey of 2,000 Americans found that 62% of those aged 18-29 hold a favorable view of socialism. At the same time, basic economic literacy remains uneven, with large shares of young adults unable to define inflation, explain supply constraints, or predict the effects of price controls.
The appeal of socialist ideas is not irrational. It reflects real concerns about rising housing costs, student debt, economic insecurity, and a sense that the system is not delivering. In cities such as New York and across the West Coast, these pressures are not abstract. They are lived realities.
But sympathy for the problem should not preclude scrutiny of the solution.
The problem is not that students are questioning markets. It is that they are doing so without having encountered the strongest case for them. And those of us who believe in markets share some of the blame. We have not made the case in ways that are accessible, concrete, or morally legible to students. We have too often retreated into abstractions — efficiency, equilibrium, price signals — rather than connecting those principles to what students actually care about: whether they can afford an apartment, whether their neighborhood is thriving, whether the economy will have room for them.
If the argument for markets sounds like a defense of the status quo, we should not be surprised when struggling students reject it. The burden of translation belongs partly to us.
Higher education has compounded the problem. Too often, it has mistaken intellectual homogeneity for intellectual seriousness. In conversations with colleagues across institutions, I have heard variations of the same admission: Departments often hire from a relatively narrow range of graduate programs, many of which approach markets with skepticism as a default rather than a conclusion.
If higher education is to serve its core purpose, it cannot be a place where ideas are merely affirmed. It must be a place where they are tested. That means exposing students to competing frameworks, not as straw men, but as serious intellectual traditions.
Students who favor rent control should engage with the empirical literature that questions its effectiveness, including evidence that 93% of economists surveyed by the American Economic Association agree that rent ceilings reduce the quality and quantity of housing. Students skeptical of markets should wrestle with the evidence on how market mechanisms have raised living standards globally. Students who see developers as adversaries should examine how supply constraints drive the very inequalities they seek to address.
This is not about pushing a particular ideology. It is about restoring a commitment to intellectual rigor.
The challenge extends to K-12. If economic attitudes are forming in adolescence, and the research suggests they are, then waiting until college to introduce market-oriented frameworks means arriving after the concrete has already set. Personal finance requirements are expanding in many states, but economics education that teaches how prices work, how incentives shape behavior, and how well-intentioned policies can backfire remains rare. That gap is worth closing.
In my seminar, I try to do what I can. I assign readings from across the spectrum. I push students to articulate not only what they believe, but why. I push them to consider what evidence might lead them to revise their views.
Some respond. Many engage thoughtfully when exposed to arguments they haven’t encountered before. But the baseline from which they start is more settled than we prefer to acknowledge.
Because the ideas students carry out of our classrooms will shape policy, culture, and civic life. If those ideas are formed in an environment where certain frameworks are absent or marginalized, our public debates will reflect that narrowing.
As Alexis de Tocqueville warned, democratic societies rise or fall on the habits of mind formed long before formal institutions attempt to refine them. If those habits exclude serious engagement with competing ideas, higher education inherits a narrowing it did not create but too often reinforces.
THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO LEAVE THE CHURCH. INSTEAD, GEN Z IS PACKING IT
Near the end of the semester, one student lingered after class. “I’ve never heard that argument before,” she said. That moment, small, almost incidental, is what higher education is supposed to produce. But it should not be the exception.
Students are not told what to think. They are shown a limited range of what is thinkable. And a university that narrows what can be thought has already abandoned its purpose: producing graduates who mistake consensus for truth and never realize there was a difference to begin with.
