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Richard Roman's avatar

Your regression analysis here finds that the two strongest negative predictors of faith in higher education are being white and identifying as Republican. That’s a politically loaded finding, but I think it reflects years of cultural messaging from conservative media and politicians, especially if we recall how often colleges are discussed as bastions of liberal indoctrination.

Add in high tuition costs, DEI controversies, and campus protests, and it’s easy to see how the image of academia has shifted from ivory tower to ideological battleground.

What’s notable, though, is your finding that religious affiliation itself isn’t a significant predictor of views on higher ed; instead, religious attendance is. In fact, regular churchgoers, particularly those with graduate degrees, tend to view higher education more positively.

This data would contradict any tidy claims that religion is inherently anti-intellectual. It seems to me the real divide may be cultural orientation: whether someone is actually embedded in institutions that foster trust and engagement, or alienated from them entirely.

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Spouting Thomas's avatar

In terms of the way education is structured, I think there's a lot of regret that the system is what it is, even if we have different ideas about how to repair it (if that's even possible).

I would predict that many of the college-educated people agreeing with the statement "college is not a smart investment" are mainly trying to express that they think the system is broken and overpriced. But in most cases they're nonetheless going to direct their own children (or grandchildren) towards college, while trying to be smarter about it. I'm mainly of this view.

The schools that are getting most badly crushed by the enrollment cliff are those that plainly offer bad value for the money. Above all, private schools that are less selective than nearby public schools, priced much higher, without much of an endowment for scholarship money, and whose survival has mainly relied on recruiting middling athletes to play sports in pursuit of a hopeless dream.

In terms of actual intent to send one's kids to college, I suspect there's a bigger divide than appears in these numbers between those who did, and did not, complete college themselves. If you could break out the "some college" crowd here, I'll speculate that they might be the most hostile to it: those who attended college and didn't flourish there or otherwise didn't see enough value to stick with it, and possibly ended up with some loans but no degree for their trouble.

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