Should your political leanings influence your college list? Dave Berry investigates. https://www.collegeconfidential.com/articles/politics-and-college-choice/
Nice article. As the mom of a son who leans towards conservatism, this is a part of our research. Aside from the top ten lists, how else does one determine the general leanings of a school? I have some notes, but at this point have been making notes for so long, I don’t remember where they came from!
Pepperdine University should be added to the top 10, or maybe top 11, list of conservative leaning schools.
And add Columbia to the list of liberal schools.
I’m not wild about this line: “ln other words, it appears that the most liberal schools, at least according to this evaluation, are small, appropriately named “liberal” arts colleges.” That statement contributes to a really dumb stereotype and keeps students from applying to LACs. There are plenty of more conservative-leaning LACs that don’t appear on the “top ten” list provided, including Davidson, Washington & Lee, Gettysburg, Union, U Richmond, and many others.
Davidson is no longer conservative leaning like it was in the past. (I grew up there and have a current student.) It has all views, but overall is moderate/left leaning with significant focus on social justice and creating leaders equipped to impact the world for good.
It’s not far left like Reed, Grinnell, etc. so I realize it’s relative. But it’s def. not conservative-leaning. In fact, in NC I’d say Wake Forest and perhaps Duke (huge feeder to Wall St.) have more conservative students than Davidson today.
Just pointing this out b/c I’ve seen this come up before on CC regarding Davidson, and I think it’s an outdated perception.
And, yet, one should never pre-judge the results of a good liberal arts education:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/opinion/my-liberal-university-cemented-my-vote-for-trump.html
Yes, many posters seem to have a very skewed impression of what a conservative college looks like.
Very, very few top colleges lean right. Of the top 50 LACs and universities, only Notre Dame, Pepperdine, and W&L are right of center, IMO. Most of the other colleges often labeled as conservative (Union, Bucknell, Sewanee, Wake, etc.) are solidly moderate.
I would add William and Mary University in Virginia, for a conservative student body, and U of Alabama in Tuscaloosa which may not have a great rank, but it does have outstanding programs in many subjects and quite conservative. Alabama offers very top merit awards and thus is very popular with middle class students who
can go there for a great bargain as well.
Baylor University in Texas,
which is very strong for engineering, and asks students to sign a Christian promise.
Trinity University in San Antonio has a conservative student body, as does Southern Methodist
University in Dallas Texas.
A number of other schools around Los Angeles are rather conservative. Chapman U comes to mind
as does the Christian school, Azusa Pacific University, which requires a “Christian Behavior Contract”.
There are other Roman Catholic schools that are surprisingly conservative such as Boston College.
U of San Diego, private, Roman Catholic, is not that highly ranked but also attracts a more conservative crowd.
Then there are the ultra conservative private Christian colleges in Michigan. Some are quite extreme.
And U of Tulsa is preferred by many conservative families in Colorado, its a private Christian school
with a strong Roman Catholic student group.
Then pretty much all schools in Utah are conservative, some cater to Mormon students.
Kansas has its share of very conservative choices too.
U of Wyoming is very conservative, in Laramie at 7000 feet above sea level!
U of Colorado in Colorado Springs is very conservative as is Colorado State in Pueblo Colorado.
People on this forum have noted that Claremont M College has a very conservative econ dept and the school leans conservative.
Hamilton History dept has been noted as conservative.
Hope College
Wheaton in Illinois fired a professor for wearing a scarf on her head.
Liberty
Hampden Sydney
Realistically, most college students attend colleges that tend to be relatively apolitical on campus. I.e. the local community college and commuter based state university, where most students study preprofessional subjects.
People of college student age also tend to be less political generally, though those who are can be noisier and more hotheaded than others.
S1 informed me that he didn’t have any interest in U of Toronto because of it’s rep as a place with OTT political correctness. I’m old enough to remember when it was considered conservative, and stuffy.
It’s probably not the U of Toronto that’s moved left. As with the rest of the population, you have polarization. And there is a contingent that calls anything they don’t agree with OTT PC and vice versa, whatever the extreme alternate is on the conservative side – various names that probably if I type here will get me booted from the forum. Both types of views and comments probably exist at the same school, but the examples are cherry picked to reward the preconceived notions of the person making the comment.
No, U of T has moved way left relative to society as a whole.
University-age people in Canada are probably more left-leaning than Canadians overall (similar to the US), and Canadians overall are probably more left-leaning than Americans overall. So someone living in the US may see University of Toronto as much more left of where s/he is living, even though it is a huge (70,000 undergraduates) public school that is probably heavily commuter.
Last year, this was a criteria in my S18’s college search since he’s leaning conservative. He ended up choosing U of Washington. We kind of worried a little bit, as Seattle is known as a far left city. However, his experience so far (well, only a few weeks in) has been very positive, Not only the student body is middle of the road, but also many faculties. In one of his Honors seminars, the professor assigned a reading book “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure”. That’s a positive surprise!
A common but incorrect stereotype. As I noted in post #6, the numbers of conservatives at many of the top colleges are greatly exaggerated on CC. An active Republicans club does not a conservative college make!
In 2015, the political affiliations of CMC freshmen were as follows:
45% Liberal
35% Moderate
15% Conservative
4% Far left
1% Far right
The political leanings of CMC freshmen and seniors are virtually identical to those of peer schools (“Private/Nonsectarian 4 year Colleges-very high selectivity”). Indeed, CMC actually has a higher than average percentage of seniors identifying as liberal.
See pages 8-9:
https://www.cmc.edu/sites/default/files/student-imperative/Diversity-Data-for-2015-16.pdf
I found the article extremely unhelpful. It only offers operational definitions of what constitutes a liberal or conservative student. It equate liberalism with protests of any type. And, because it’s hard to imagine what a conservative protest would even look like (is anyone really going to risk mass arrest for a lower marginal tax rate for corporations? Probably not) it basically leaves conservatives in the position of defining themselves as “not liberals”. Thus, all the signaling and processing seems to point to the political divide being less about ideology than about some kind of cultural tribalism that is designed to set the teeth of the other side on edge. Back in the day, a little cultural dissonance was considered a good thing.
Last year, near the UVA campus, there was a widely publicized right-wing protest. But it was about identity politics, not about tax policy or anything like that.
No surprise, given that the loudest voices in politics are yelling about identity politics and drawing the battle lines based on identity rather than policy. Since most people cannot easily change their identity, it is not surprising that it is less likely that they will agree to disagree like they could on other policy matters.
My D goes to a right leaning university and it’s been fine. Makes for lively debates (after which she calls me to rant. lol).
Boston College is actually pretty liberal or balanced these days. Young Democrat’s are extremely popular student organization. FWIW