<p>I have noticed that a large majority of the top colleges have liberal ideologies, can anyone shed some light on that?</p>
<p>There are studies that show that liberals have higher average IQ's, but the differences seem negligible (4-5 points.) Could that play into it? Also, I've heard that college makes you more liberal, could that play into it as well?</p>
<p>The majority of conservative school that are reputable also have religious affiliations.</p>
<p>My guess is that it may be due to how most top colleges tend to be located in blue states, such as how the Ivy League is located in liberal New England or how the UCs and Stanford are located in California. Another guess would be due to most top colleges proximity to urban centers, which tend to be Democrat strongholds.</p>
<p>Generally, the more educated one is, the more liberal they tend to be. Fwiw, most colleges, not just top, are more liberal than conservative.</p>
<p>Statistically, most people with higher levels of education tend to be more liberal. I always hear comments on the notion that modern colleges are “liberal indoctrination centers,” but I think that’s really nothing more than a shallow argument from the conservative side. If by “liberal indoctrination” they mean “unconstrained education,” then I suppose they’re right.</p>
<p>It’s just how things turned out; liberals won the culture war and one of the bounty prizes was the nation’s top universities; that’s not to say conservatives aren’t still at top schools (like Stephen Carter at Yale Law School or Robert George at Princeton University), but liberals simply won out the battle for “will to power.” It’s the same reason why most tenured faculty tend to be white males in several academic disciplines; they won the battle early on and people have been trying to replace them with more diverse faculty for the past few years.</p>
<p>Most colleges are liberal.</p>
<p>Haven’t you heard that those commie professors are destroying the ethos of good old America?</p>
<p>Because it is a university and they don’t live in the real world.</p>
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in statistics, you can only speak in terms of probability rather than certainty, but if the difference is that small, it’s highly, HIGHLY unlikely that this means liberals tend to have higher IQs than conservatives.</p>
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well, every professor is biased. obviously a liberal proffesor’s teachings are going to lean to the liberal viewpoint (for some more than others).
if you assume that your side is the more open-minded/good/<em>insert subjective adjective here</em>, you’re going to end up painting yourself as the enlightened one and blocking yourself to reason</p>
<p>people who are more educated tend to be more liberal. I would guess that it would be because conservatives do tend to put on a few more constraints on education (not to say that liberal don’t), and also because most good schools (colleges and also high schools) are more liberal. so their students are the best educated and more liberal, and they get the best places and jobs in the education system, so the system stays more liberal, etc., etc.</p>
<p>I don’t need too many humanities classes as a petroleum engineering major, but both the professors and textbooks had a very liberal slant. I noticed in my conversations with them that they had spent their entire lives in academia around other liberals, so they are going to draw more liberals to those positions. Conservative professors exist (the freshwater economics schools come to mind), but they are rare. </p>
<p>I noticed that the students in those classes were split 50/50, but I was one of the few conservatives that engaged in the discussions.</p>
<p>“Because it is a university and they don’t live in the real world.”</p>
<p>A lot of my conversations led me to this conclusion. I spent 4 years in the Marine Corps, which brought me to parts of the world that aren’t exactly the nicest. I quickly learned that there is no such thing as ‘poor’ in America when compared to third world countries.</p>
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this. this is so true. I find that, though there are often quite a few conservatives, even in very liberal atmospheres, they are afraid to speak up and be accused of being close-minded. it’s very sad 
people shouldn’t be silent, because they fear attack or judgment.</p>
<p>not to say that conservatives can never be oppressive to liberals, but I live in a liberal area and am completely unfamiliar with what a conservative atmosphere is like, so I can’t speak much on it.</p>
<p>I know that getting a higher eduction has definitely made me more ‘liberal’. Learning about society (I study sociology) and different cultures has made me much more open minded.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure that it’s more like higher education tends to just favor “liberal ideologies”. It makes people more open to the things that are considered liberal. But, honestly, what do people usually mean by that? Probably that they’re pro-gay-marriage, pro-choice, pro-equal-rights-for-all, pro-environment, and pro-change. It just means they see the flaws with the world and want to fix them instead of being “conservative” and sticking to the same old, same old.</p>
<p>the people in the sci/med/and biz schools tend to be more conservative…those in things like poly sci/history/lit./sociology are almost always liberals. the liberal arts professors self select the other people in their departments to be just like them. it is not somehow a random thing.</p>
<p>I think a lot of people really have a skewed perspective of what exactly it means to be a liberal(I’m not referring to anyone here…just in general). Many people confuse liberality with being a far left radical…which is not a justifiable comparison. Being liberal basically just means progress. You are willing to see the bad in the world and promote change. Conservative ideologies generally preach that everything in the world is just fine, and that nothing really needs to change, aside from getting the liberals out of office.</p>
<p>I fail to see how one can look around the world today and not see what’s wrong with it. There are so many controversial issues on the table right now…they should be pretty blindingly obvious. So many people see liberality in the same sense that they see radicalism…and that is very far from the reality.</p>
<p>being open minded is not determined by your political and social stance- being open minded means being willing to listen to others including liberals listening to conservatives, and vice versa. it’s hypocritical to say you’re more open minded and then only think that the side you agree with is worth hearing</p>
<p>change for the sake of change is as bad as conservation for the sake of conservation. you keep what needs to be kept and change what needs to be changed. just because something is new doesn’t mean it is good, just like how something new isn’t always bad.</p>
<p>Aren’t most colleges liberal in general?</p>
<p>Yes, pretty much.</p>
<p>Attending a major American college or university means that a student will be exposed to a wide array of new ideas, thoughts, cultures, paradigms and questions. The very concept of a university is actually inherently liberal, in the broadest of senses - it is an institution designed expressly to be a place where new knowledge is formed. This does <em>not</em> imply that everything which is developed and thought about is right or best. But it does imply that constant thinking and rethinking is a valuable process that improves human society.</p>
<p>For example, few would argue today that Marxism is a workable theory of economic and societal design. Yet without Marxism challenging the dominant laissez-faire capitalist paradigm of the early 20th century, it is unlikely that capitalist thinking would have been forced to address issues such as worker rights, safety, retirement and fair hiring. Would we have workman’s compensation, union laws, OSHA, etc. without that pressure? Unlikely. Marxism drove the improvement of capitalism.</p>
<p>Taking “liberal” in its modern American sense, meaning “left-wing,” then I’m reminded of this quote by former left-winger Thomas Sowell:</p>
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<p>He would know, he was an economist at Brandeis, UCLA, etc. Another relevant Sowell quote:</p>
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<p>Academia is an ideal job for a leftist. Results don’t matter, so compensation has nothing to do with ability, except the ability to attract grant money. And as anyone can tell you, the allocation of grant money has very little to do with results.</p>
<p>Which leads directly to another reason why universities are so monolithically left-wing: virtually every professor is a de facto government employee. By that I mean even profs at private institutions rely on handouts from the government, this is where most research funding comes from. So it is in academia’s interest to have a bigger government spending more money. The more “problems,” either real or imagined (disease, poverty, social programs, pollution, etc.) the more “justification” for spending tax-payer money on research. Think I’m making this up? You aren’t reading faculty newsletters and newspapers, this is the modus operandi.</p>
<p>Also, as for “more education correlates with being more liberal,” this is wrong for two reasons:
<p>Also, a lot of “conservatives” are scared of academia because they’re worried they won’t get anywhere because of their views. Sometimes I’m terrified of being “outed” as a libertarian Christian but I wear my religious t-shirts anyway. I know another guy who was upset that he was outed as a Republican. He’s the smartest guy in my school, triple-majoring in math, cs, and physics, and like me plans to get a PhD in physics. So you have the discouragement incentive going on. Which is a vicious cycle, because faculty begets faculty.</p>
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<p>Just…wow.</p>