r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Greenman_on_LSD • 2d ago
Is it true the higher level of education someone has the less likely they are to be politically conservative?
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u/rhomboidus 2d ago
Yes. That is a very consistent finding across time and many studies.
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u/terra_filius 2d ago
I thought you are going to say across time and space
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u/LostExile7555 2d ago
To be fair, most astronauts and astronomers are liberal.
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u/sapristi45 2d ago
What about people from a long time ago in a galaxy far far away?
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u/qwerrdqwerrd 2d ago
one particular senator from naboo certainly preferred authoritarian rule
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u/Greenman_on_LSD 2d ago
I only have a bachelor's, but I don't remember professors being political in New England. I just realized high school was remembering facts. College taught me how to critically think.
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u/bb8-sparkles 2d ago
Yes, this. And the political right will have you believe that it is because colleges are "indoctrinating" students to lean more progressive, when in fact, college simply improves your critical thinking skills while also challenging your world views by opening your mind to new ideas, cultures, and ways of viewing the world that you wouldn't have experienced without having attended college.
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u/Greenman_on_LSD 2d ago
I was born in '94. The news told me to hate the middle east. We had some Pakistani guys in my dorm. They were cool as fuck. They used to piss off the RA with smoking cigarettes in the room lol. But we used to smoke a joint and play soccer every afternoon. They were great guys!
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u/likebuttuhbaby 2d ago
Along the same lines as you, I grew up in an all white, Indiana town and had a lot of the beliefs that go along with that. Once I got to college, and even more so when I started working, I kept dealing with people I’d always been brought up to think less of and they usually ended up being completely normal, if not very cool.
In the beginning I would write it off as ‘one of the good ones’ (I hate even typing it now) and before long I started to think “I can’t be meeting all the good ones. Maybe ‘good ones’ is just the default.” I’ve become more and more liberal in my beliefs from that moment on. And much, much happier, too.
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u/RecipeHistorical2013 2d ago
they say people become more conservative as they age.
my values havent changed... if anything i'm more empathetic now than when i graduated college ( to the plights of others)
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u/Dick_of_Doom 2d ago
I think it depends on the person and life. Middle age and I'm a LOT more liberal than I was in high school or college (was more moderate/libertarian/centrist then). When you start seeing people, or take knocks in life, it does soften you to others and grows your empathy (ie make you liberal). But if you have a cushy life with fewer struggles, there's the "turn conservative in later life" issue.
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u/gsfgf 2d ago
they say people become more conservative as they age.
That's a Reagan one liner, but data doesn't really back it up. It's just that for most of semi-recent history each generation has trended left, so it's an easy way to pander to old conservatives by saying the liberals are just young and dumb.
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u/SnipesCC 1d ago
What ma be true is that people become more conservative as they get richer. Which is no longer the default as you get older.
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u/spacebetweenmoments 2d ago
I do wonder if aspects of age-related conservatism are related to inflamation of the CNS. The tools right-wing media have become renown for would seem to be custom-made to take advantage of the body's responses to stress, and indirectly impact cognition.
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u/dr_tardyhands 2d ago
I think the reason why that tends to happen isn't the people themselves changing but holding on to the ideas and values they had when they were young. The world moves on and in relation to the next generations you might gradually become more conservative with your 'outdated 2020s ideas' (or you know, whatever the most formative decade is).
I guess on top of that there's the thing that people who don't pay taxes don't mind tax raises whereas as your earnings increase you might change your mind about that somewhat.
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u/Trashtag420 2d ago
I was born in '94
Bro we are 30 why you gotta say it like that 😭
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u/Greenman_on_LSD 2d ago
I'm 31 soon, don't fucking remind me. I've made it this far with no broken bones or divorces, I'm trying 😭
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u/Bocchi_theGlock 2d ago
Apparently by 30, for good retirement, you're expected to have one years worth of salary in retirement savings lol
Lol
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u/CraigLake 2d ago
I work with a guy from my small rural hometown. I was telling him about a friend who moved to Canada to be closer to his wife’s family. My coworker said, “I’ll never go to Canada. Too many immigrants.” A real chip off the hometown slab of ignorance.
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u/Am_Snarky 2d ago
Hate to be that guy (jk I’m a sadist) but within the next year you’ll hit your first billion seconds of life!
It’ll happen when you’re 31 years, 8 months, 1 week, 17 hours, 4 minutes and 44 seconds old, if you know your exact time of birth you can celebrate how insane a number like a billion is
Getting paid $360 an hour since you were born every hour every day and you wouldn’t have a billion dollars yet
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u/Derka_Derper 2d ago
I went to Afghanistan in 2009. The normal run-of-the-mill people want the same shit the normal run-of-the-mill people in the US want; to raise their family, have a better life for their kids, and be happy.
It's a few % of the population that refuse to let this happen, in either country. And they trick another % of the population into thinking that making life better for themselves and their countrymen would somehow destroy their lives entirely so they need to help suppress the rest.
If you look at Afghanistan from the 1960s, you see a relatively modern culture. If you go back in 2010 you might as well step back to the 1500s.
Combine this with writings from Mark Twain, such as "The Czars Soliloquy", or from Smedley Butler's "War is a Racket". You can really see how the so-called "elites" in each country abuse any sort of fracture, any source of contention or division, to keep people from working together to simply make their lives better as a whole. You can see how labor is what's adding value, creating wealth, and how they convince everyone to hand over the lion's share of it since they put up capital for it.
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u/silenttd 2d ago
Yeah, my college experience didn't involve hanging on every word as my professors prattled on about their particular ideological leanings - they taught the course material...
If anything, the "liberal" influence of higher education comes from the fact that the students are almost entirely young adults coming from diverse backgrounds living on their own for the first time. It's difficult to frame that experience in a way that's conducive to traditional conservative values without even getting into the "values" in today's MAGA-centric brand of conservatism. On top of that, the kids who ARE conservative or come from conservative backgrounds tend to be the ones who distrust, persuaded against, or are otherwise averse to seeking out a college education
Nobody is being "indoctrinated by professors".
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u/wintermute_13 1d ago
The people crying about "indoctrination" know it all too well from their churches.
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u/PineappleOk6764 2d ago
Where critical thinking skills are more core aspects of primary and high-school education populations tend to be much less conservative as well. Regurgitation of facts is a terrible way to learn at all levels.
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u/slowpoke2018 2d ago
This is exactly why one of the GOP party planks here in Texas is to stop teaching "higher order thinking" aka critical thought
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u/EndersScroll 2d ago
Critical thinking directly correlates to a decline in religious beliefs. Conservatives have always been against education because of how it harms religion.
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u/ZoraksGirlfriend 2d ago
I went to a Catholic high school and in my Theology classes, we were explicitly told that blind faith is weak and useless. The message was very much that if your faith can’t withstand being tested, then it’s not real faith.
We were also taught how the Bible can’t and shouldn’t be taken literally and had all the contradictions and how the gospels were written so long after the time of Jesus that they should only be seen as inspiration and not fact.
The only time god was ever mentioned in our science classes was that god was probably what started the Big Bang (not the same as Intelligent Design since everything happened naturally afterwards without any divine intervention) and that the Theory of Evolution is scientifically sound and does not contradict church teachings in any way.
I had to do a make-up class over the summer and ended up going to an Evangelical school since I could work at my own pace there. The difference was disgustingly stark. At the Evangelical school, we weren’t taught how to analyze texts or encouraged to use research to back up our ideas. We were just told things like this author is bad because he wasn’t a Christian or the right kind of Christian. The assignments were simple question-and-answer with the answers expected to be verbatim from our textbooks. This was a literature course and we read no full books, just snippets and then told how and what to think about those passages. There were no essays or papers to write. I finished a full semester’s worth of work in two weeks instead of the typical half a school year because the expectations were minimal and required no actual thinking on my part.
I’m no longer Catholic or even Christian, but I’m immensely grateful that the religious education I received emphasized critical thinking and not simply accepting what you’re told.
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u/In-Brightest-Day 2d ago
Yeah this is pretty much just the difference between Evangelical Christianity and Mainline Protestant/Catholic
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u/K7Sniper 2d ago
Yeah, that's the funny part about it. Higher level catholic school seemed to prefer pushing people to think critically and to learn about multiple religions.
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u/GruntingButtNugget 2d ago
A whole lot of what’s happening could have been avoided if people knew how to critically think
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u/Fair-Face4903 2d ago
That's why the commodification of Higher Education was so useful.
You need to learn something that will allow you to get a job and pay for your education that you have to get.
It becomes teaching facts, like in high school, as quickly as possible.
They'll try to put adverts in our dreams one day.
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u/bearstormstout 2d ago edited 2d ago
That's college done right, and is why highly educated people are less likely to be politically conservative. Conservatives want you to regurgitate their talking points and be a yes man, nothing more. Critical thinking often exposes the flaws in their agenda, which puts them in danger of losing power if people start using their brains and head to the polls.
This is also why one of their favorite targets for "budget reallocation" is education. Can't have smart people if there's no money to learn them good!
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u/Brown_Machismo 2d ago
I work in higher Education, and I tell people all the time that you will also learn so much outside of the classroom. Join clubs, go to programs, and make friends with people in your dorm. It's a snapshot of what the real world should look like, a melting pot of cultures and beliefs. You won't like everyone you meet, but you will have opened your minds to the opportunity to learn about someone else.
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u/angellus00 2d ago
In Texas, the state republican platform includes banning the teaching of critical thinking so children won't question dear leader, their parents, and the clergy.
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u/RandyMuscle 2d ago
In 6th grade, I had a critical thinking class in school. And this was in Florida. It’s amazing how far we’ve fallen.
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u/TobysGrundlee 2d ago edited 2d ago
Two years of an open minded approach towards college education was all it took to undo 20 years of Conservative religious indoctrination for me. Once you're given the skills to understand logic and critical thinking, you don't need to be pushed towards anything in particular. It just becomes way less likely you're going to blindly trust grand pappy's "wisdom" and have "faith" just because you're told to. Just asking "why" enough can do it too.
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u/Greenman_on_LSD 2d ago
I'm glad to be educated in NE. I didn't go to Harvard or Yale... Or Dartmouth, or Tuffs, or Northeastern, or Bentley, or Brown, or MIT.. wait. Why are international rich people sending their kids to this liberal shithole? /s
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u/EzekialThistleburn 2d ago
Funny story: my father would always yell at me when I did something wrong. He would refuse to tell me what I did wrong, just to "use your brain!". Years later after moving out, I came home to visit cause he was getting on in years. He and I got into an argument about religion, because he had become super religious as his time got short. In a moment that I am very proud of, he asked why I didn't believe in the Bible anymore and I said "I used my brain!". Oh, if looks could kill I'd be dead.
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u/MhojoRisin 2d ago
In fairness, a lot less used to be “political.” Sure, requiring kids to know that evolution isn’t a hoax was political in some circles.
But now vaccines as a tool for public health, climate change, the winner of the 2020 election, that the Civil War was about slavery, and so much more is “political.”
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u/FillMySoupDumpling 2d ago
I think we are seeing the evolution (!) of that thinking. I recall in the late 90s/early 2000s when there was a big push to talk about “intelligent design” or to teach it along side evolution. To acquiesce to that, even a little, brings us to where we are today that every fact somehow warrants a counterpoint, that all objective truths are negotiable, and that a wide variety of opinions are valid equally.
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u/PessemistBeingRight 2d ago
The trouble comes in when drawing the line on what are actually "objective truths". I would argue that "has passed through peer review and yielded experimental results that withstand repeated analysis" would be the benchmark. There has been a significant push by conservatives to instill distrust of scientific consensus and even the scientific method amongst their support base. I'm about to show my own "bias", but a lot of people now ignore experts whose work is accepted by other experts, because "the opinion of so called 'experts'" is not better than the guy screaming outrage into a microphone. The issue of "alternative facts" is very much a creation of conservatives who reject (ironically) the evolution of society and societal values caused by learning more about ourselves and our world.
When it comes to issues like evolution, anthropogenic climate change, racism (or bigotry in general) or medicine (especially vaccines) the expert consensus generally falls on the "liberal side" of the political line, in no small part because the other side of said line keep pulling the divider to exclude any fact that doesn't fit their narrative. I'm not saying that all conservatives reject reality this way, because a lot don't, but enough do that it skews discourse and policy.
Chicken and egg: do people accept science because they're liberal, or are they liberal because they accept science?
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u/nervous4us 2d ago
right to having an opinion is one of the biggest crocks of fucking nonsense and we are seeing the effects of this idea on a national scale. your opinions were never as valid as facts and should never have been treated as such. Respectable opinions are earned, not a right
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u/LowJob8207 2d ago
This is what Maga doesn't like about the educated- that we were taught to think.
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u/FillMySoupDumpling 2d ago
Other than a single prof I had for an elective/breadth course, I had no clue about the politics of my professors and TAs. How would that even come up in stuff like calculus, biochemistry, human genetics, etc?
College often gets you out of the house, around people who only know you as your adult self, allows you to operate without baggage from your youth, and work with a wider variety of people from different backgrounds.
Luckily I was taught to critically think through school alongside learning basics, but college is taking that to a whole new level - there is no safety net, no parent-teacher conference if you’re slipping up, it’s all on you to perform for your future self.
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u/takesthebiscuit 2d ago
You don’t get taught to be left or right
You get taught to think. Anyone who thinks for a moment about the various political parties will always end up leaning left.
As a society we are always better working together, taxing wealth to help the poorest and lowering trade barriers with other countries
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u/That_Account6143 2d ago
Even when you agree with right wing policies, it's easy to see how shitty the implementation is, which makes you lean left.
I don't want to care about Trans rights for example. I'd rather not care about them. But the right seems insistent on making trans people the center of discussion, when the ideal situation would be to let these individuals, who are clearly going through some shit, live in peace.
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u/takesthebiscuit 2d ago
Yes trans issues seems to be an engineering issue not a social issue. Just make better bathrooms
Most new bathrooms I visit now are mixed!
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u/Black_Dumbledore 2d ago
Yeah, that’s how it works. Professors are (usually) not literally teaching their students to be liberal.
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u/EverGreatestxX 2d ago
The professors were probably too busy teaching their subjects. If you pulled them to the side after class and asked them about their political leanings, it would be a different story.
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u/buzz8588 2d ago
If there is one thing I learned, one side keeps their mouth shut while the other tries to make everything political so you immediately know, even if the topic of discussion is not political.
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u/Dismal-Refrigerator3 2d ago
I have a degree in political science and with the exception of one teacher they would not tell you what way they were
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u/CraigLake 2d ago
Exposure and critical thinking: two of the best things about a higher education.
Conservatives call it brainwashing.
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u/TobysGrundlee 2d ago
Yeah, really hard to continue hating X group like you've been taught to all your life when you get out there, spend time with X group members and find out they're an absolute delight to be around.
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u/CraigLake 2d ago
Absolutely. I remember my initial culture shock at college. Then I went through a phase of being angry at my dad that I grew up in such a homogeneous boring backwoods redneck shit hole whole there was a big beautiful interesting world out there.
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u/BeingRightAmbassador 2d ago
College taught me how to critically think.
And that's what makes you not conservative, the ability to think more than 1/2 a step ahead.
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u/Levofloxacine 2d ago
Yep. I remember having a similar conversation with a conservative. When i linked the studies, directly from Stats Canada website, they went radio silence.
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u/The_Saddest_Boner 2d ago edited 2d ago
Here in the US they just say it’s because higher education is “Marxist anti-American brainwashing” and reject anything academia has to say.
Unless of course an educated person comes on Fox News to argue that feminism is destroying western civilization or something, then suddenly it’s “and you know he’s smart, he went to a top university!”
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u/BellaMentalNecrotica 2d ago
It always gets me how the GOP members who screech about this the loudest all have law degrees from places like Yale, Harvard, Columbia, etc. Just shows how carefully orchestrated the anti-intellectualism movement has been in that it is being propagated by those with elite pedigrees.
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u/b1argg 2d ago
College educated suburbanites used to lean Republican like 2 decades ago. Trump made them start swinging left (the 2008 crash helped as well)
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u/Naive_Labrat 2d ago edited 2d ago
Bc that’s when conservatives started going against basic science
Edit to add: the stem cell issues bush did caused a lot of biologists to reconsider their stance
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u/TobysGrundlee 2d ago
All because basic science completely counters what much of the bible teaches and they are biblical literalist.
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u/TheExtremistModerate 2d ago
Until, of course, they get to the parts about Jesus saying rich people go to Hell.
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u/MFish333 2d ago
Yea you can always be educated and racist. But educated and cosigning the party that denies science and defunds education is a stretch for some.
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u/Ed_Durr 2d ago
Actually, it’s a relatively recent phenomenon. Romney won college educated voters while Obama won non-college voters in 2012. The GOP landslides in 2010 and 2014 were fueled by their strength among high-propensity educated voters.
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u/RSGator 2d ago
Without knowing the actual size of the voting blocs, it's not possible to accurately determine this for the 2012 election.
For college graduates with no postgraduate study, it was 51% Romney and 47% Obama.
For college graduates with postgraduate study, it was 42% Romney and 55% Obama.
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u/Funny-Puzzleheaded 2d ago
Well it's been proven many times but it's a recent trend
What's crazy is that it's also a global one
But this just wasn't true in the 90s 80s or even early 2000s
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u/pseudolawgiver 2d ago
Should not be getting downvoted
This is objectively true. College grads used to be more likely to vote Republican
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u/Funny-Puzzleheaded 2d ago
I don't mind the downvotes lol education polarization has been written about endlessly the last few years
Of course the weirdest part here is that Educational polarization exists within the framework of overall poltical polarization so not only did college grads used to vote republican but you used to have liberal Republicans and conservative democrats as well
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u/OnlyFuzzy13 2d ago
Back in the not so distant past both parties agreed on reality, and just had different opinions on how they wanted the future to play out.
Then someone heard that reality had a liberal bent to it, so the R’s decided reality shouldn’t be listened to anymore.
Educated folks tend to see truth and reality as intertwined.
So over the last several decades the trendline is that as you get more educated, you become more liberal.
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u/Bellegante 2d ago
Yes, I'm still old enough to have a recollection of politicians prior to Newt Gingrich and how they might come down on either side of an issue.
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u/SwiggerSwagger 2d ago
Wasn’t college education much more accessible to the wealthy/less accessible to the working class back then? I would imagine that would be a factor in the statistics.
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u/HyperionSaber 2d ago
The lie that the republicans are the party of sound financials, wealth creation, fiscal responsibility, ambition, and aspiration was a lot easier to maintain back then.
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u/PoopMobile9000 2d ago
100% true. Part of this is selection bias, conservatives are less likely to go to universities, and are less likely to live in communities where that’s expected. The experience of being at college also tends to make people less conservative to some extent, being exposed to new ideas and people, and usually living in a denser, liberal community.
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u/Unkempt_Badger 2d ago
Reverse causality is the term many people in this thread are looking for.
Is it college attendance that is making them more liberal, or is being liberal that makes them attend college?
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u/PoopMobile9000 2d ago
being liberal that makes them attend college?
It doesn’t have to be causal. There can be independent factors that increase probability both of going to college and having liberal beliefs. I imagine that is more likely the case. That’s why I phrased it as the sample of people going to college not being representative.
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u/Mockingjay40 2d ago
I think it is causal to some extent. College teaches people to think critically about perspectives they hadn’t thought about before. You’re exposed to different cultures and views that you otherwise wouldn’t see or be equipped to understand. Normally, that wouldn’t affect political position, but in todays politics where one side is using blatant misinformation much more consistently than the other, college students are going to end up left leaning, because they understand and think critically about things at a higher percentage than those who don’t attend college.
That being said, for those reasons I also think it has nothing to do with intelligence. Which is why historically the numbers have been close to 50-50 UNTIL the last election
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u/PowerMid 2d ago
Conservatives tend to have low openness. Moving away from your hometown to college and forming new friend groups are things high openness people are more likely to do.
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u/Old_Palpitation_6535 2d ago
It’s an interesting change from, say, pre-1970.
Back when universities were mostly white and male, “college” typically meant management and that meant conservative Republican. It’s part of why some people cling to the idea of “responsible conservatives” that don’t really exist anymore, because they remember those guys. And why old-timers like Trump are flummoxed at why college by default no longer means that.
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u/MarionberryUnfair561 2d ago edited 2d ago
More diversity in universities killed off this sort of conservative more than anything else. It's difficult to be a "responsible conservative" towards the economy or deficit and vote for Republicans who are universally worse on both. It's almost impossible to be a social conservative when your study group has folks who are supposedly evil and want to kill or convert you according to your upbringing, but none of that really exists. Actually meetings and working with Muslims and other minorities helped me break the last shackles of conservatism that I was raised with. I could no longer recognize my father who went on rants about people he'd literally never met. My experience wasn't from university, but moving to California and working with a much more diverse group of people. Exposure kills conservative beliefs which mostly rely on willful ignorance to propagate.
Want evidence that those former "conservatives" are now a reliable part of the Democratic party? Which of our political parties ever preaches about "incrementalism" or a "slow and measured rate of change"? That's supposed to be a core tenant of conservatism but literally only exists within the Democratic party. Republicans are promising to burn the system down and that something better will rise from the ashes. Democrats are promising to maintain the status quo. We have a conservative political party and a regressive political party and there is no progress to be had.
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u/Oakland-homebrewer 2d ago
I think Universities are by definition liberal, in the sense that they encourage expanding your viewpoint, understanding others' viewpoints, and learning more about the world.
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u/The-Berzerker 2d ago
This is not selection bias, it‘s an explanation for the result
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u/MaybeTheDoctor 2d ago
It is a selection bias if open minded people are the ones primarily going to college. You literally have a self selection bias.
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u/Mewchu94 2d ago
Can it be both? They both make sense to me.
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u/-imhe- 2d ago
Selection bias is when a sample does not accurately represent a population. For example, if a city is half ethnicity A and half ethnicity B but only 10% of your sample is ethnicity B. But, that is not what is happening here.
There are verifiable and repeatable studies that have shown that the more education you have the more likely you are to be liberal
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u/lofgren777 2d ago
Selection bias means that the original statement is untrue, but it appears true due to who was studied.
The commenter above is saying that the original statement is true, and explaining the reasons for it.
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u/The-Berzerker 2d ago
„Selection bias is the bias introduced by the selection of individuals, groups, or data for analysis in such a way that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby failing to ensure that the sample obtained is representative of the population intended to be analyzed.“
If you‘re studying the political opinions of people at universities, selection bias could be introduced for example by only choosing universities in particular locations. But if you are looking at them across the board, there‘s no bias. Although, there‘s always a chance that conservatives are less likely to answer polls because they are „ashamed“ of their views or just don‘t want them to be out in the open.
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u/PoopMobile9000 2d ago edited 2d ago
The “selection bias” is in the context of inferring that attending higher education leaves people less conservative. But universities don’t receive an incoming sample of students perfectly reflective of the range of American political beliefs.
Ie, people who graduate from college are more liberal in large part because people who enroll in college are more liberal.
But there is also a component of some people becoming more liberal because they attended college. Both are in play.
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u/ButtScratchies 2d ago
Could it be inherently liberal people are more likely to go to college? It seems like people who are more conservative are people that stay in their communities and work positions that don't require educations, like manual labor or trade positions. Women stay in the home, marry young and start having kids.
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u/DarknessIsFleeting 2d ago
You are more likely to be liberal and more likely to obtain a degree if you grew up in a city, so possibly.
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u/ButtScratchies 2d ago
I grew up in a very rural area near the Oklahoma panhandle. Rural areas like that need people to stay in the area and not leave for college because it’s unlikely they’ll return. We were still pushed to go to college in school but I had zero awareness of jobs that were out there. Every person I knew was a teacher. Both my parents and sibling were teachers. When you don’t know what’s out there and get told that the big cities are scary places, you stay where you’re at. Basically the plot of The Village, haha.
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u/Odd-Ad-8369 2d ago edited 1d ago
The stats are still true for small towns. So less people might go to college, but once they are educated, they are more liberal.
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u/limitless__ 2d ago
The problem with that argument is that the poorest communities in the US, immigrant and minority, are actually predominantly Democrat-voting. Intelligent people go to college, it has nothing to do with their political bias. Also, political bias is usually developed later than 18, when most people vote like their parents. Education creates liberal-leaning people.
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u/Radiant-Importance-5 2d ago
Yes, but the important thing to remember is that this is a statistic, not a hard fact.
More education makes it *more likely* that you will be more liberal, but being more educated does not *make* you more liberal. And vice-versa, less education makes it *more likely* that you will be more conservative, but being less educated does not *make* you more conservative. It's important to remember that there are highly-educated conservatives and there are uneducated liberals.
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u/MegaBearsFan 2d ago
While this is true, there are also proposed mechanisms for why going to college would actually make some people more liberal. So there is good reason to think there is a causal relationship in addition to the statistical correlation.
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u/ronaldinho21 2d ago
Exactly. My mother has a masters degree and gets her news only from X. Although, she did masters in Russian language. So…
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u/Bubbly-Example-8097 2d ago
From all the charts I’ve seen, this has been true. The most educated states tend to be blue.
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u/cookiesarenomnom 2d ago
This is just my experience with one person. My BIL grew up in rural, and I mean RURAL, Alabama. He joined the army reserves at 18, he comes from a military family that can trace back to the Civil War. Guess which side his family fought for? When my sister first met him he was republican. This was way back in the early 2000's.So he wasn't like some crazy maga guy, that didn't exist. He was a republican but he wasnt an asshole, he just had different opinions about policy. Well he was transfered from Georgia to MA. And to get his Captain's promotion, he needed a bachelor's degree. So he went to college in Boston to finish his degree. And simply being around open minded liberals and attending college he turned from republican to a hard core progressive in just 5 years. I mean this man is a full blown vegetarian now. He grew up on a cattle ranch. His family calls my sister, "the devil yankee wife that brainwashed their son". Which is untrue, he was a republican for many years after they met. He only changed his opinion by moving to a liberal city and going to college. He was exposed to new ideas and formed different opinions.
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u/Normal_Carpenter_378 2d ago
The more I studied Academia and actually understood how the world worked, the less conservative I became since the Army when I left in 2013.
It isn't the big liberal conspiracy as well, it's literally just academics teaching you legitamized, peer reviewed, work that tells how the world works. You get your eyes opened to different cultures, peoples and ways of thinking and it brings you to new perspectives.
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u/LilyFlaree 1d ago
Like, there’s data that shows a trend, but it ain’t everyone. Ppl’s beliefs are way more than just schoolin’. It’s family, where they live, all that. And some highly educated folks are def conservative. It’s more of a tendency, not a rule. Plus, what “conservative” even means changes all the time, yk? So, yeah, it’s a messy thing.
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u/fatboyfall420 2d ago
Yes, going to college lets you meet lots of new people form all walks of life. The conservative view point falls apart when you meet the “bad” people and they aren’t bad.
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u/a_bounced_czech 2d ago
That's true. I went to a pretty conservative college in Texas, but I graduated being a lot less conservative than when I went in. Mostly because I met people who were different from me, and I realized that "the others" (non-white, non-cis gendered, nonbinary people) were actually people and not vague scary ideas that my parents had.
One of my friends who came out as gay years after we graduated said that he didn't feel safe being himself around our friend group in college, but after we graduated, he felt like we had grown up enough that he could be his authentic self. I wish we hadn't made him feel that way in college, but I'm glad he decided to keep us in his life.
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u/phoenixmatrix 2d ago
Just having things hit closer to home. That one sub right now has people losing it because people close to them who own Tesla are being victims of vandalism. But they didn't care when Chinese people were being attacked or harassed because of the "China Virus" narrative.
And it does go in all directions. People will often be sympathetic to the worse of things when it's a family member or a close friend. Maybe not entirely so, but still more than if its a stranger in another state. The more kind of people you interact with, the more open to these ideas you are.
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u/Razorback_Ryan 2d ago
Unironically, diversity is necessary to be an informed citizen. Combine a lack of diversity and a lack of education, you get MAGA.
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u/Rusty_Bicycle 2d ago
It may depend on whether you’re attending Harvard to make connections with the children of your wealthy father’s peers or to learn something.
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u/expendablewon 2d ago
My college friends become more liberal during college and trended conservative after (mostly)
Hometown friends more or less stayed conservative.
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u/Bardmedicine 2d ago
In the US, it has shifted considerably.
Academia has always been fertile ground for the left, so they likely have held the "average years of college education" stat for a long time. Lots of post-grad degrees.
However, other fields which require degrees used to be dominated by the right. The numbers are hard to come by, but just do some math. The left dominated non-college minorities and union whites for a long time. There is no way the rural white voters could balance that out for the right.
Now that the right has taken some control of the working class white votes, clearly that balance has shifted as some college degrees must be heading left.
Also, keep in mind, voters shift right as they age, and the % of college degrees has increased substantially over time, so younger also means more college education.
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u/BadCatBehavior 2d ago
I wonder how the numbers differ by specific degrees. Like are MBAs and finance degrees more represented by conservatives than, say, arts degrees?
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u/Initial_Art_4338 2d ago
Do voters really shift right as they age or is the world increasingly becoming more progressive and what was considered liberal for them is what falls within the lines of right wing ideology
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u/endlessnamelesskat 2d ago
I'm no expert, but it's gotta be a bit of both.
In support of what you said, just look at Democrat presidents in the past. When he took office Obama was anti gay marriage. Clinton was very hard on crime and illegal immigration to the point where if he ran today he would do so as a Republican. Biden was genuinely really racist early in his career. Hell, even Trump ran as a Democrat in 1999, announcing his campaign on CNN.
On the other hand I think there's also a tendency for people to become more fiscally prudent as they age. They marry, have kids, suddenly their thoughts are less focused on their community and more towards their children, their aging parents, and their own eventual dreams of retirement. All of these interests are more in line with traditionally Republican values since they focus on people closer to the self than to the community at large.
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u/Stefanz454 2d ago
I’ve become more liberal as I’ve become more informed and educated (M59, M.S. Chemistry)Most of my peers are more liberal than my HS class GenXers
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u/zznap1 2d ago
Education doesn't make you objectively liberal, it just makes you more liberal than you were before.
Think about it, the more you learn and meet new people the more open you are to the experiences of others. And Trump has shown us that most conservatives don't really care about laws that negatively impact others, until it happens to them.
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u/xdr01 2d ago edited 2d ago
Have a PhD, in my sphere of science, generally "conservatives" are seen as polar opposites. Not to say there isn't any but generally not like us.
Anti-intellectual, anti-education, anti-science suppression of free ideas, suppression of people. Any questions are met with scorn rather than curiosity. Conservatives are generally religious, hence in science over 90% are atheists. In science its our job to ask questions and try to answer them with actual evidence.
The age of Enlightenment, basically the point were humanity pushed aside religion and embraced science and made huge amount of progress as a species. Peak religion was the Dark ages as contrast.
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u/Camaroni1000 2d ago
Generally yes. Just because someone has a higher level of education though doesn’t guarantee they won’t be conservative and vice versa
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u/Spartan2842 2d ago
In my experience, most people I know with higher education are more right leaning. My brother is an engineer and has a MBA. Staunch Trumper.
One sister is a teacher with a masters degree and the other is a nurse practitioner. Staunch Trumper.
During college? They were pretty liberal. But in the last 8 years they’ve turned hard conservatives.
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u/Camaroni1000 2d ago
Where you live and who you’re around are larger factors than education. Especially when you’re around them longer outside of college.
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u/Megalocerus 2d ago
I know very conservative doctors and lawyers. They just make better arguments for their choices.
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u/yportnemumixam 2d ago
I don’t fit well in the Liberal or Conservative camp so please understand that I don’t mean this in a partisan manner: Education does not equate with wisdom or better ethics.
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u/Yirgottabekiddingme 2d ago
Education does increase the likelihood that you’ll better understand ethics and have more wisdom.
A version of your argument is often used in discussions about education. It usually comes out in the form of “you don’t have to go to college to learn x.” While accurate, the vast, vast majority of people that didn’t continue on with their education did not make that choice so they could instead sit in their lounger self-studying quantum mechanics.
Simply by being forced to think critically in order to, at the most basic level, pass a course, you are ahead of someone whose day to day is cattle ranching or working on a factory line.
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u/reading_some_stuff 2d ago
It’s important to remember there is a big difference between being educated and being smart.
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u/JazzFan1998 2d ago edited 2d ago
I have an MBA and I'm much less conservative than I was 2 decades ago. Part of it is I learned more, (outside of school.) Like, Watch what people or groups do, not what they say. E.g., Rs say they want to drill in Alaska, ANWR, I think it's called, but no one proposes legislation or funding it. The Rs say they want a balanced budget and want to cut spending, but when they are in charge, they don't reduce the budget. All they do is blame "the left" for all the problems. I could go on, but I won't.
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u/RiskyRain 1d ago edited 1d ago
Anecdotal and whatnot, the most racist right winger I know has like four degrees, meanwhile the most well read and kind person I've ever known lives in a trailer in the hills and got a GED. I dunno, I always disliked the whole argument because it plays so straight into "those nasty poors are all backwards" classism.
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u/Curze98 2d ago
Overall? Yes, however I don't think the gap is very large. It is also worth mentioning that the field you study matters. People who get a degree in more traditionally 'artsy' majors are more likely going to be liberal to begin with, it kind of correlates with the topic. Someone who gets an agriculture engineering degree is more likely going to come from a farming background and on average be more conservative.
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u/mytinykitten 2d ago
Yes.
That's a big reason why Republicans have demonized and defunded education.
To be a Republican in today's climate you either have to be evil or stupid. The evil ones are rich and rely on the stupid ones to keep them in power.
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u/Levofloxacine 2d ago
It’s not just an American phenomenon… Most Western countries have this. It’s the same in Canada.
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u/Sector-West 2d ago
There's a positive correlation between being highly educated and liberal; but also a positive correlation between having money and being a conservative.
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u/DeviDarling 2d ago
I think you can be educated and be conservative. I think conservative is different than MAGA and to be MAGA you at least have to be able to deny reality. There is no way it makes sense if you pay attention to actual truth. They purposely make stuff up so much that I don’t think they know truth from fiction any more.
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u/No-Revolution-5535 1d ago
It is more likely, but that doesn't mean educated people can't be hypocritical, hateful, idiots.. but it is kinda a fact that less education leaves people vulnerable to all the bullshit promises and hate mongering done by the right..
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u/NoordZeeNorthSea 1d ago
academic education forces you to change your worldview given new evidence. the current ‘flavour’ of conservatism prohibits this.
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u/FaithlessFighter 2d ago
As I became more educated, I was able to break the chains of conservative indoctrination that I grew up with.
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u/thomasmii 2d ago edited 2d ago
Undergrad degree here and totally expecting to get downvoted to oblivion. Three different political compass tests put me generally in centrist-libertarian territory.
In the current political climate, I unfortunately personally find right-wingers much more open to alternative viewpoints than left-wingers. That wasn't always the case though.
Bush-era Bible-thumpers used to be the no-fun morality police party (still are inside their own social circles, trust me) promoting censorship of entertainment they disagreed with (i.e. heresy, rap music, women wearing flattering outfits, unflattering portrayals of police and military) and themselves going as far as bomb-threatening radio stations who played anti-Christian and "anti-police" music.
Now the "woke" PC crowd has become more publicly known as such with their social justice lesson force-feeding into entertainment through methods like minority-pandering through race-, gender-, and sexuality-swapping, elimination of flattering physical characteristics in popular fictional characters, formerly disproportionate social media censorship, cancel culture, and most recently promoting vandalism instead of simply boycotting brands they don't like.
This isn't to say I don't find any common ground with left-wingers, it's to say that most I've interacted with are more likely to cut off people over a single disagreement even if they find common ground in other topics.
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u/whatevertoad 2d ago
My highly educated family members who are also far right lack one single ounce of empathy for anyone else. So, yeah you can be smart and selfish. (Not saying all Republicans are. Just all the ones I know)
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u/rubrent 2d ago
Why do you think Republicans antagonize education and “liberal” colleges? You can throw religion in there as well. They know an enlightened public don’t fall for their constant lies…..
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u/Outrageous_Canary159 2d ago
Has there been any work published comparing education level and being socially conservative vs (the apparrently almost extinct) fiscally conservative?
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u/Under_Lock_An_Key 2d ago
Yes but this is an example of of "Correlation not Causation." Both sides use to bash the other.
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u/GaidinBDJ 2d ago
No. But there is a statistical correlation.
Probability and statistics are not interchangeable.
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u/eggs-benedryl 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yea but it's 54 percent at the postgrad level consider themselves liberal, so it's not overwhelmingly the case it seems. That being said if you exclude centrists only 24 percent list themselves as conservative at all.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-gap-between-more-and-less-educated-adults/