Why are academics in the United States so politically liberal? Are conservative students oppressed by a biased professoriate, or are liberals simply smarter?
CREDIT: M. WOESSNER
Neither, says public policy expert Matthew Woessner of Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg, who, with political scientist April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, has tackled the question using data on more than 15,000 college students collected by the Higher Education Research Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles.
The Woessners found that self-described liberals and conservatives report no difference in grades or in the quality of their education. Yet liberal college students are twice as likely as conservative ones to pursue Ph.D.s. The main reasons, the authors conclude, are differences in values, goals, and preferences. Liberals placed higher values on creativity; conservatives were more oriented toward raising families and making money. As a result, conservatives gravitated more to "professional" majors. But even within the same area, such as social science, almost twice as many liberals wanted advanced degrees. "Our findings hold for the hard sciences as well," says Woessner, who presented a paper on the results last month at a meeting at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.
Jeremy Mayer of George Mason University's School of Public Policy in Fairfax, Virginia, says many people pontificating on the subject have "no or bad data, [but] the Woessner paper is simply excellent."
