I've seen a lot of memes (mostly political) that refer college as a place that makes you a liberal, as in, a bad thing. How true is this?
34 comments
Seeking higher education opens you up to new ideas that would might not be exposed to otherwise. People who are better educated and have more experiences tend to be more liberal.
I mean, I could tell some professors had liberal views but it didn’t turn me into a liberal or anything. Ironically I started college in a heavily conservative area, as a liberal myself.
I’d like you to consider that the sources of that *opinion* may be biased.
Reality has a known liberal bias.
Going to college gets you out of your bubble. You meet out gay people, for example, and you learn they’re just people, like you.
It is true that there is a strong correlation between education level and how you vote.
College teaches many people how to think critically, and introduces them to experiences and people outside what they know.
College doesn’t make anyone liberal. It does expose people to a variety of belief systems and puts heavy emphasis on critical thinking. Between these things, many people who attend college end up questioning their own beliefs, whatever those beliefs were before they entered college.
If it turns out they only held those beliefs because they came from an environment where non-conformity was punished and information was tightly controlled… It’s not shocking that they may end up altering their own belief system once outside that environment.
And as it turns out, conservative belief systems are much more prone to those constraints than liberal ones.
“Conservative” in the US largely means you accept dogma unquestioningly. Education challenges this.
Imagine you’re from a small town and a very religious, conservative family. Suddenly, you’re confronted with an array of new ideas and people. It’s not hard to think your perspective could change.
That said, there are College Republican groups and evangelical campus ministries also. The “makes you liberal” thing is kind of a meme.
College makes you more educated and more exposed to different types of people (race, gender, sexuality, lifestyle, etc). This mental and physical exposures usually makes people be more open to different ways of thinking and different cultures and norms, which is the opposite of conservatism. If you become less conservative, you become more liberal.
There’s a nugget of truth to the stereotype but it gets blown out of proportion by some people.
College exposes people to a wider variety of people and ideas than they probably had been before going to college. That tends to make people more opened minded and liberal.
College exposes you to new ideas you may not have considered before. Perhaps more importantly it often exposes you to people with perspectives and experiences that are new to you. Conservatism almost by definition has a very narrow view of how the world is and how it should be, which doesn’t really hold up when presented with the new ideas and people mentioned above.
It doesn’t make you liberal, it teaches critical thinking and how to fact check and what is and isn’t a reliable source.
I haven’t seen colleges turn people liberal. I have noticed that colleges are more likely to attract liberals than conservatives. I have also noticed that conservatives in college tend to avoid skylining their political views while liberals will actively express them.
It does, just not in the way they think.
Statistically college educated people are more likely to be liberal.
Personally we had some brimstone, end is nigh types preaching outside the student center sometimes but like…the profs and admins never got political.
Some figure it’s just meeting a lot of people from all over and studying more. Maybe college in the first place appeals more to people with a lean that direction, there’s not a rigorous causal link established.
They don’t. People just leave their home towns, their home environments, and all the people trying to make them think a certain way.
They may or may not change their mind in college. It’s entirely up to them.
What upsets the conservative voting bloc is the *possibility* that they might, and so they lose power.
That’s why right wingers hate education. A mind exposed to new ideas might not fall for the BS.
like teachers say, “If I could indoctrinate these students I’d teach them to turn in homework.” More often than not Junior is away from home for the first time. They find that immigrants, people of other races, foreigners, etc. don’t act like the stereotypes. Nobody takes young earth creationism seriously. The news they hear every day bears little resemblance to the Fox media sphere. Little wonder that so many change once out of the carefully tended hothouse of conservatism where they were raised.
College *can* open up your mind to other cultures and perspectives. But it’s not always the case. The American economy is run by Ivy League graduates who call their cab drivers the n-word.
People who may have lived in cultural bubbles are suddenly exposed to lots of new ideas and are confronted with people who are different from them. This makes them more tolerant and more sympathetic to other people’s experiences. You are also thrust into an environment with other young college kids, who tend to be liberal to progressive. So your default environment will become left of center.
Anything about indoctrination into liberalism from my experience is just not true, at least in public universities. I say this having attended 3 public universities in 2 different states. I can’t speak to what they do in private universities.
It depends on what you mean by the word “liberal.”
If we’re using it to mean a liberal education — as in, a well-rounded knowledge base that is not limited to one discipline or trade — then yes, that is one of the goals of college. Most 4-year programs will be separated into two parts: a major course of study, which is the discipline the student wants to get their degree in, and a liberal arts component. The latter involves such things as general history, mathematics, science, economics, psychology, sociology, and anything else you can think of.
If we’re using it in the sociocultural sense, meaning: open to new experiences, cultures, and viewpoints — then yes, it tends to do that. College campuses put you into contact with a wider variety of people and cultures than you’re going to find in most other parts of the country.
If we’re using it in the classical political sense, meaning: advocating for representative government, freedom of expression, a free press, freedom of religion (and freedom of the absence thereof), free association, and the social contract — then not necessarily. Colleges themselves generally don’t teach political ideologies, other than to explain what they are.
If we’re using it in the modern political sense, meaning: anything that pisses off a member of the Republican Party— then yep, usually. College is a place where you’re going to get exposed to members of other religions, students from foreign countries, LGBT people, et. al. One of the purposes of public colleges is to take kids from blue collar backgrounds and teach them the value system that the white collar employment world expects. If you can’t hang around foreigners without complaining loudly about their accents, or you can’t be around a gay person without trying to “save” them, then you’re not going to last very long in 21st century corporate America.
A friend I met freshman year was fairly centrist. She’d never really interacted with a non-white person, or even anyone who looked like me (olive skinned Jew), or any out gay people, or anyone from a different religion or significantly different economic background. It wasn’t professors who shifted her views; it was becoming friends with so many people outside her norm directly affected by conservative policies.
Well, I will say that my college experience wasn’t the same as most Americans but I did go further left than I had been before. It’s not like they force you or anything, it’s just that you learn a lot about facts.
People who go to college usually end up learning more. Especially among majors like history, political science, and economics, the facts they learn in class tend to make them more liberal, because conservative politics just don’t make for a good society. Even for those who choose other majors like engineering, just being around a large diverse group of people for the first time (depending on where they’re from) can open them up to new perspectives (such as “people in such-and-such minority group are actually fine after all!”) and make them less conservative.
left vs right tends to correlate to how educated you are. Those with college degrees trend left, those who don’t trend right. There are obviously exceptions but this can be seen in who tends to vote Democrat vs Republican.
I’m left of the Democrats so I’m obviously biased but I think this is because the more you know about the world the less conservative you get. An example is scientific literacy. The more you know about science, the more likely you are to not dismiss climate change, evolution, the age of the Earth, etc.
I mean, obviously, it doesn’t make everyone more liberal because there are College Republican groups on every campus and every single person in the leadership of the Republican party has some college education (except for Charlie Kirk).
That said, there, there are two major factors to this perception.
1) Especially when you’re talking about suburban/exurban/small town/rural kids, the ones that go to college are, generally, the ones that want to Get The Hell Out of their conservative area. I have never known a queer, atheist, artsy, goth, etc kid who wasn’t all “I just have to survive this hellhole until I can get to college and be ME.” So yes, these kids to their parents and community may seem to suddenly be ‘turned’ liberal by being away at college. In reality, they’re just getting to be in an environment where they can be themselves or even experience that there is some option about how to be.
2) Colleges teach and require the use of independent study, critical thinking skills, and discussing opinions and facts and thoughts in diverse groups of people. All of these things are indicative of liberal mindsets rather than conservative mindsets. So when people do these things instead of just listening to their community and their elders about ‘what is right’… they come up with different answers.
Some possible explanations:
* College exposes you to people with different viewpoints and backgrounds. It forces you to confront the idea that what you were taught about the outside world back home was overly simplified or just plain wrong.
* Some people were punished for disagreeing with their parents or other authority figures, so they learned to keep their mouths shut back home. Then, in college, they can open up more about what they really think.
* College is a place where you’re supposed to get honest answers to your questions. Sometimes all it takes is a handful of people who are willing to patiently answer the questions that a person could never get a straight answer to back home.
Can we please acknowledge the fact that this idea came from the fact that some colleges are named “liberal arts colleges,” which refers not to political ideas but to the philosophical movement towards educating people on a wide, aka, liberal, number of subjects, aka, well rounded. Liberal arts means a wide variety of subjects, not liberal subjects.
Lol no. From experience they literally just teach the subjects and I have no idea where this weird idea comes from. A lot of conservatives do believe it though. And good luck reasoning with people that believe absolute nonsense. It teaches critical thinking, so maybe more educated, logical and critical thinkers tend to be liberal.
I can see it, but nobody I went to college with became any more liberal that I know of and all it did for me was reinforce my existing beliefs, which I can assure you are not liberal.
There are two meanings to the word liberal: first is exposure to a broad set of new ideas. A the second meaning is derogatory, left-leaning promoted by neo-conservative Buckley. I sense that top colleges do both of these meanings.
Many colleges have become little than job factories and dont push broad ideas anymore. And students and families are perfectly happy with that.
I went into college conservative, and came out of college conservative. But it’s certainly true that the vast majority of students, teachers, and programs are not just liberal, but very liberal. So I suppose if you’re someone who’s very susceptible to having their mind changed, you’d probably come out more liberal than you went in.
Also, there might be more conservatives than one might think. I didn’t really talk about my politics while I was in college, because I didn’t really want to get into debates or be shunned, lol. So most people that knew me would probably assume I’m liberal, I never said I was, but I would just nod along whenever they were talking politics. I have no evidence for this, but I’d bet there are more people like that in college, secret conservatives.
The claim comes almost entirely from conservatives. It – and related bullshit claims about “leftist indoctrination” and the like – is really a claim about epistemology. The model of knowledge to aspire to since the Enlightenment (in the West) is that knowledge is empirical, dialectical, and provisional: better thinking, observation and argumentation always has the potential to upend the truth.
This drives cultural and especially religious conservatives batshit, because their entire worldview is based on the idea that the answer is known before any question is asked, and that the point of “knowing” is to shine light on the perfection and immutability of their doctrines. The very idea that they and their holy truths are up for contention is scandalous and feels like an existential threat.
Tertiary education – insofar as it teaches, privileges and encourages you to observe well and think clearly – could I suppose be said to “make you liberal”, but only if by “liberal” you mean “engaged with the universe as it exists and not as you’re told to think about it from the perspective of frightened iron age goatherds”.
It’s nonsense. There’s no liberal accounting courses, no liberal math, chemistry, poetry or liberal physics classes. What happens is that students suddenly find themselves surrounded by people that come from different backgrounds and have different life experiences, beliefs and values than they’ve known. From that exposure they suddenly realize that what they’ve been taught and what they’ve heard about “others”
is bullshit. They find commonality and friendship, their beliefs and prejudices are challenged and they gain a new perspective. That what makes them liberal.
34 comments
Seeking higher education opens you up to new ideas that would might not be exposed to otherwise. People who are better educated and have more experiences tend to be more liberal.
I mean, I could tell some professors had liberal views but it didn’t turn me into a liberal or anything. Ironically I started college in a heavily conservative area, as a liberal myself.
I’d like you to consider that the sources of that *opinion* may be biased.
Reality has a known liberal bias.
Going to college gets you out of your bubble. You meet out gay people, for example, and you learn they’re just people, like you.
It is true that there is a strong correlation between education level and how you vote.
College teaches many people how to think critically, and introduces them to experiences and people outside what they know.
College doesn’t make anyone liberal. It does expose people to a variety of belief systems and puts heavy emphasis on critical thinking. Between these things, many people who attend college end up questioning their own beliefs, whatever those beliefs were before they entered college.
If it turns out they only held those beliefs because they came from an environment where non-conformity was punished and information was tightly controlled… It’s not shocking that they may end up altering their own belief system once outside that environment.
And as it turns out, conservative belief systems are much more prone to those constraints than liberal ones.
“Conservative” in the US largely means you accept dogma unquestioningly. Education challenges this.
Imagine you’re from a small town and a very religious, conservative family. Suddenly, you’re confronted with an array of new ideas and people. It’s not hard to think your perspective could change.
That said, there are College Republican groups and evangelical campus ministries also. The “makes you liberal” thing is kind of a meme.
College makes you more educated and more exposed to different types of people (race, gender, sexuality, lifestyle, etc). This mental and physical exposures usually makes people be more open to different ways of thinking and different cultures and norms, which is the opposite of conservatism. If you become less conservative, you become more liberal.
There’s a nugget of truth to the stereotype but it gets blown out of proportion by some people.
College exposes people to a wider variety of people and ideas than they probably had been before going to college. That tends to make people more opened minded and liberal.
College exposes you to new ideas you may not have considered before. Perhaps more importantly it often exposes you to people with perspectives and experiences that are new to you. Conservatism almost by definition has a very narrow view of how the world is and how it should be, which doesn’t really hold up when presented with the new ideas and people mentioned above.
It doesn’t make you liberal, it teaches critical thinking and how to fact check and what is and isn’t a reliable source.
I haven’t seen colleges turn people liberal. I have noticed that colleges are more likely to attract liberals than conservatives. I have also noticed that conservatives in college tend to avoid skylining their political views while liberals will actively express them.
It does, just not in the way they think.
Statistically college educated people are more likely to be liberal.
Personally we had some brimstone, end is nigh types preaching outside the student center sometimes but like…the profs and admins never got political.
Some figure it’s just meeting a lot of people from all over and studying more. Maybe college in the first place appeals more to people with a lean that direction, there’s not a rigorous causal link established.
They don’t. People just leave their home towns, their home environments, and all the people trying to make them think a certain way.
They may or may not change their mind in college. It’s entirely up to them.
What upsets the conservative voting bloc is the *possibility* that they might, and so they lose power.
That’s why right wingers hate education. A mind exposed to new ideas might not fall for the BS.
like teachers say, “If I could indoctrinate these students I’d teach them to turn in homework.” More often than not Junior is away from home for the first time. They find that immigrants, people of other races, foreigners, etc. don’t act like the stereotypes. Nobody takes young earth creationism seriously. The news they hear every day bears little resemblance to the Fox media sphere. Little wonder that so many change once out of the carefully tended hothouse of conservatism where they were raised.
College *can* open up your mind to other cultures and perspectives. But it’s not always the case. The American economy is run by Ivy League graduates who call their cab drivers the n-word.
People who may have lived in cultural bubbles are suddenly exposed to lots of new ideas and are confronted with people who are different from them. This makes them more tolerant and more sympathetic to other people’s experiences. You are also thrust into an environment with other young college kids, who tend to be liberal to progressive. So your default environment will become left of center.
Anything about indoctrination into liberalism from my experience is just not true, at least in public universities. I say this having attended 3 public universities in 2 different states. I can’t speak to what they do in private universities.
It depends on what you mean by the word “liberal.”
If we’re using it to mean a liberal education — as in, a well-rounded knowledge base that is not limited to one discipline or trade — then yes, that is one of the goals of college. Most 4-year programs will be separated into two parts: a major course of study, which is the discipline the student wants to get their degree in, and a liberal arts component. The latter involves such things as general history, mathematics, science, economics, psychology, sociology, and anything else you can think of.
If we’re using it in the sociocultural sense, meaning: open to new experiences, cultures, and viewpoints — then yes, it tends to do that. College campuses put you into contact with a wider variety of people and cultures than you’re going to find in most other parts of the country.
If we’re using it in the classical political sense, meaning: advocating for representative government, freedom of expression, a free press, freedom of religion (and freedom of the absence thereof), free association, and the social contract — then not necessarily. Colleges themselves generally don’t teach political ideologies, other than to explain what they are.
If we’re using it in the modern political sense, meaning: anything that pisses off a member of the Republican Party— then yep, usually. College is a place where you’re going to get exposed to members of other religions, students from foreign countries, LGBT people, et. al. One of the purposes of public colleges is to take kids from blue collar backgrounds and teach them the value system that the white collar employment world expects. If you can’t hang around foreigners without complaining loudly about their accents, or you can’t be around a gay person without trying to “save” them, then you’re not going to last very long in 21st century corporate America.
A friend I met freshman year was fairly centrist. She’d never really interacted with a non-white person, or even anyone who looked like me (olive skinned Jew), or any out gay people, or anyone from a different religion or significantly different economic background. It wasn’t professors who shifted her views; it was becoming friends with so many people outside her norm directly affected by conservative policies.
Well, I will say that my college experience wasn’t the same as most Americans but I did go further left than I had been before. It’s not like they force you or anything, it’s just that you learn a lot about facts.
People who go to college usually end up learning more. Especially among majors like history, political science, and economics, the facts they learn in class tend to make them more liberal, because conservative politics just don’t make for a good society. Even for those who choose other majors like engineering, just being around a large diverse group of people for the first time (depending on where they’re from) can open them up to new perspectives (such as “people in such-and-such minority group are actually fine after all!”) and make them less conservative.
left vs right tends to correlate to how educated you are. Those with college degrees trend left, those who don’t trend right. There are obviously exceptions but this can be seen in who tends to vote Democrat vs Republican.
I’m left of the Democrats so I’m obviously biased but I think this is because the more you know about the world the less conservative you get. An example is scientific literacy. The more you know about science, the more likely you are to not dismiss climate change, evolution, the age of the Earth, etc.
I mean, obviously, it doesn’t make everyone more liberal because there are College Republican groups on every campus and every single person in the leadership of the Republican party has some college education (except for Charlie Kirk).
That said, there, there are two major factors to this perception.
1) Especially when you’re talking about suburban/exurban/small town/rural kids, the ones that go to college are, generally, the ones that want to Get The Hell Out of their conservative area. I have never known a queer, atheist, artsy, goth, etc kid who wasn’t all “I just have to survive this hellhole until I can get to college and be ME.” So yes, these kids to their parents and community may seem to suddenly be ‘turned’ liberal by being away at college. In reality, they’re just getting to be in an environment where they can be themselves or even experience that there is some option about how to be.
2) Colleges teach and require the use of independent study, critical thinking skills, and discussing opinions and facts and thoughts in diverse groups of people. All of these things are indicative of liberal mindsets rather than conservative mindsets. So when people do these things instead of just listening to their community and their elders about ‘what is right’… they come up with different answers.
Some possible explanations:
* College exposes you to people with different viewpoints and backgrounds. It forces you to confront the idea that what you were taught about the outside world back home was overly simplified or just plain wrong.
* Some people were punished for disagreeing with their parents or other authority figures, so they learned to keep their mouths shut back home. Then, in college, they can open up more about what they really think.
* College is a place where you’re supposed to get honest answers to your questions. Sometimes all it takes is a handful of people who are willing to patiently answer the questions that a person could never get a straight answer to back home.
Can we please acknowledge the fact that this idea came from the fact that some colleges are named “liberal arts colleges,” which refers not to political ideas but to the philosophical movement towards educating people on a wide, aka, liberal, number of subjects, aka, well rounded. Liberal arts means a wide variety of subjects, not liberal subjects.
Lol no. From experience they literally just teach the subjects and I have no idea where this weird idea comes from. A lot of conservatives do believe it though. And good luck reasoning with people that believe absolute nonsense. It teaches critical thinking, so maybe more educated, logical and critical thinkers tend to be liberal.
I can see it, but nobody I went to college with became any more liberal that I know of and all it did for me was reinforce my existing beliefs, which I can assure you are not liberal.
There are two meanings to the word liberal: first is exposure to a broad set of new ideas. A the second meaning is derogatory, left-leaning promoted by neo-conservative Buckley. I sense that top colleges do both of these meanings.
Many colleges have become little than job factories and dont push broad ideas anymore. And students and families are perfectly happy with that.
I went into college conservative, and came out of college conservative. But it’s certainly true that the vast majority of students, teachers, and programs are not just liberal, but very liberal. So I suppose if you’re someone who’s very susceptible to having their mind changed, you’d probably come out more liberal than you went in.
Also, there might be more conservatives than one might think. I didn’t really talk about my politics while I was in college, because I didn’t really want to get into debates or be shunned, lol. So most people that knew me would probably assume I’m liberal, I never said I was, but I would just nod along whenever they were talking politics. I have no evidence for this, but I’d bet there are more people like that in college, secret conservatives.
The claim comes almost entirely from conservatives. It – and related bullshit claims about “leftist indoctrination” and the like – is really a claim about epistemology. The model of knowledge to aspire to since the Enlightenment (in the West) is that knowledge is empirical, dialectical, and provisional: better thinking, observation and argumentation always has the potential to upend the truth.
This drives cultural and especially religious conservatives batshit, because their entire worldview is based on the idea that the answer is known before any question is asked, and that the point of “knowing” is to shine light on the perfection and immutability of their doctrines. The very idea that they and their holy truths are up for contention is scandalous and feels like an existential threat.
Tertiary education – insofar as it teaches, privileges and encourages you to observe well and think clearly – could I suppose be said to “make you liberal”, but only if by “liberal” you mean “engaged with the universe as it exists and not as you’re told to think about it from the perspective of frightened iron age goatherds”.
It’s nonsense. There’s no liberal accounting courses, no liberal math, chemistry, poetry or liberal physics classes. What happens is that students suddenly find themselves surrounded by people that come from different backgrounds and have different life experiences, beliefs and values than they’ve known. From that exposure they suddenly realize that what they’ve been taught and what they’ve heard about “others”
is bullshit. They find commonality and friendship, their beliefs and prejudices are challenged and they gain a new perspective. That what makes them liberal.