A recent Pew Research study indicates that ideological divisions among Americans are growing along educational and generational lines, suggesting that both highly educated individuals and millennials tend to be more liberal, while less educated individuals and those belonging to older generations tend to be more conservative.
“More than half of those with postgraduate experience (54%) have either consistently liberal political values (31%) or mostly liberal values (23%), based on an analysis of their opinions about the role and performance of government, social issues, the environment, and other topics,” the study stated. “Fewer than half as many postgrads — roughly 12% of the public in 2015 — have either consistently conservative (10%) or mostly conservative (14%) values.”
Additionally, millennials, who are attending college at higher rates than their parents and grandparents, have continued to remain more liberal than older generations, with 45% expressing consistently liberal views. In contrast, Baby Boomers (36%) and members of the Silent Generation (40%) have mostly conservative political values.
The trends seem to suggest that the more progressive a person is politically, the smarter they are, but is a leftist ideology truly a sign of intelligence, or are college-educated Democrats simply products of their liberally-biased professors and universities?
“During the past quarter-century, academia has seen a nearly 20 percent jump in the number of professors who identify as liberal,” Natalie Johnson noted in an article for the Daily Signal. “That increase has created a lopsided ideological spread in higher education, with liberal professors now outpacing their conservative counterparts by a ratio of roughly 5 to 1.”
This raises another question: Are students getting a balanced education from teachers who are either unfamiliar with or unsupportive of conservative ideals?
Data from the Higher Education Research Institute shows that the number of students who identify as politically liberal greatly increases from freshman year to senior year. In fact, in 2014, college professors were nearly 30 percent more likely to identify themselves as liberal when compared with their freshman students, signifying how much of an influence these professors can have over young minds in just four short years.
However, while conservative college students may feel outnumbered in their classes, they should be comforted to know that their ideals don’t make them less intelligent, perhaps it is even just the opposite.
“Conservatives benefit from having liberal ideas to expand their horizons and challenge their thinking, but ideologically liberal students get their ideas reinforced,” said Matthew Woessner, an associate professor of political science and public policy at Penn State Harrisburg. “This means they’re not growing intellectually because they don’t have the exposure to other ideas to make them think.”
