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A new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology provides evidence that completing a college degree has become increasingly linked to a liberal political identity over the past decade. The research suggests that while college students do tend to adopt more left-leaning identities during their education, the actual changes are much smaller than the general public assumes.
Public discussions often focus on the idea that higher education makes students more liberal. Commentators and politicians frequently debate whether colleges actively impose left-leaning ideologies on young adults. This perception contributes to a growing lack of trust in higher education among the American public.
“The ideological effects of higher education are a hotly disputed topic in the United States,” said Michael Prinzing, a research scholar at Wake Forest University. “Yet the evidence for such effects is remarkably mixed.” Prinzing and his colleague wanted to investigate exactly how political views shift during college and which factors influence those changes.
“So, we wanted to look at both how college graduates differ from non-graduates and how students change during their college years,” Prinzing explained. He noted that the study aimed to distinguish between “what people think about political issues (social and economic) and how they think about themselves within the political landscape.”
To understand this issue, it helps to separate political ideology into two distinct categories. Issue-based ideology refers to a person’s specific views on concrete topics like taxation, abortion, or immigration. Identity-based ideology refers to the label a person uses to describe themselves, such as liberal or conservative.
“I was struck by how much the results differ depending on which aspect of ideology one considers,” Prinzing said. “So, when we talk about ‘ideology,’ it can be really important to specify what exactly we mean. Are we talking about how people think about particular issues (and, if so, economic or social ones) or are we talking about how people think about themselves?”
While a person might hold several liberal views on specific policies, they might not actually identify as a liberal. Identity-based ideology tends to be a stronger predictor of political polarization and hostility toward opposing groups. When people strongly identify with one group, they tend to show favoritism toward their own side and hostility toward the other.
The authors examined whether the supposed division between college graduates and non-graduates actually exists and if this relationship has changed over time. They analyzed data from two large, nationally representative surveys of United States adults. These included 52,908 participants from the American National Election Studies between 1972 and 2020, as well as 69,273 participants from the General Social Survey between 1974 and 2022.
Participants were divided into three groups based on their education. These groups included those with no college education, those with some college but no degree, and those with a bachelor’s degree. The researchers measured issue-based ideology by creating composite scores from questions about social issues and economic issues.
They measured identity-based ideology using a seven-point scale. Participants placed themselves anywhere from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. The scientists used statistical weights to ensure their samples accurately represented the broader population.
“Going back at least half a century, people with bachelor’s degrees have held more left-leaning views on social issues but not economic ones,” Prinzing said. When looking at economic issues, college graduates and those with some college were actually slightly more conservative than adults with no college education. These trends remained relatively stable over the decades.
The findings for political identity looked quite different. “Until the 2010s, however, graduates did not identify differently from non-graduates,” Prinzing noted. “Since around 2012, something has changed specifically in the political identities of college graduates.”
Starting around 2012, college graduates increasingly identified as liberal, while the identity of those with some or no college education remained mostly steady. By the early 2020s, the ideological gap between graduates and non-graduates had roughly doubled in size. The phrase “diploma divide” appears to accurately describe this relatively recent split in how people label their politics.
The researchers then focused on whether these shifts in political identity actually happen while students are enrolled in college. They analyzed survey data from 361,704 undergraduates who attended 740 different higher education institutions across the country. These students graduated between 1994 and 2019.
Participants reported their political identity on a five-point scale during their freshman year and again at the end of their senior year. The survey also collected demographic information, standardized test scores, and academic majors. The authors calculated change scores to see if students moved to the left or the right over their four years of school.
Most students, about 58 percent, did not change their political identity during college. However, among those who did change, the average shift was slightly to the left. Students who graduated in the mid 1990s showed almost no average change in either direction. In more recent years, this leftward shift has grown larger.
Students who entered college as conservatives tended to move leftward. Students who entered as liberals tended to move slightly rightward, but these rightward shifts were much smaller, resulting in an overall average movement toward the left.
“Grads increasingly come to identify as liberal, though there are major differences across majors (e.g., English & arts move most to the left, while business and engineering actually shift right), demographics (e.g., women move leftward more than men), and other individual characteristics,” Prinzing explained. Students with higher SAT scores also tended to experience larger leftward shifts.
Institutional characteristics had very little impact on students’ political identities. Students at private, non-religious colleges moved slightly more to the left than those at private, religious colleges. Beyond that, the authors found no meaningful differences between public and private schools or between less and more selective institutions.
“Overall, our findings reveal an important and growing divide in political identity; they also undermine sweeping claims about ideological effects of higher education,” Prinzing said. The researchers conducted a supplemental study to see how the public perceives these changes.
They asked 494 adults to estimate the political identity of students at the start and end of college. “The changes in political identity that we observe between students’ freshman and senior years are considerably smaller than people tend to think,” Prinzing noted.
“In fact, in a supplemental study, we found that US adults think college students’ political identities change about twice as much as they actually do,” he added. Participants across all demographics and political affiliations tended to overestimate the leftward shift of college students.
“So, although something interesting and important is going on here, people tend to overestimate the ideological impact of higher education,” Prinzing concluded. Readers should avoid assuming that college directly causes people to become liberal. The authors note that they could not conduct a randomized experiment, which limits their ability to make definitive claims about cause and effect.
It remains possible that unmeasured factors influence both a person’s educational choices and their political identity. Another limitation is that the researchers lacked a comparison group of young adults who did not attend college. The ideological shifts observed in college students might just reflect a normal developmental process.
Young adults might simply explore new identities during this stage of life regardless of whether they attend a university. Future research should focus on developing more specific theories about political socialization. Scientists need to investigate exactly how, when, and for whom different educational experiences influence distinct parts of a person’s worldview.
The study, “Clarifying the Diploma Divide: The Growing Importance of Higher Education for Political Identity,” was authored by Michael Prinzing and Michael Vazquez.