The partisan divide over higher education is deeper than you think
Republicans and Democrats don’t even agree on the point of a college degree, a new survey shows.
CHRISTOPHER ELLIS
The Trump administration has taken aim at American universities. For now, most of the threats have been toward a small set of highly selective schools, and most of the funding cuts have targeted scientific research.
But the White House has also proposed other ways to punish universities that do not comply with administration demands. These include taxing endowments, removing colleges’ tax-exempt status, overhauling the student loan program, and limiting international student visas. These measures target not just federally subsidized research, but the ability of colleges to educate and provide degrees to students.
The proximate reasons for these threats are rooted in social concerns, the administration claims. Combatting antisemitism, addressing the “ideological imbalance” among faculty, and abolishing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs have gotten a lot of media attention, among other things. But my recent research finds that even amidst the culture war, the divide between Democrats and Republicans on college education is based on a more fundamental question: What is college actually good for?
Why pursue a college degree?
The advantages of having a college degree are clear. College graduates earn substantially more than non-graduates. They also tend to be happier and healthier, have higher marriage and lower divorce rates, and do better on other markers of life satisfaction than those with a high school degree or less. Graduates of highly selective colleges do better still. Few critics of higher education act in a way that questions this: President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for example, all have Ivy League degrees.
The reason why college graduates are more successful, though, is less settled. Scholars have identified at least three different models for why college graduates earn more, each of which have radically different implications for how we might think about the government’s role in subsidizing higher education.
1. College provides “human capital”
This first model emphasizes the skills and experiences – the human capital – that college graduates acquire through the course of their education. This is the “learning” part of college.
The idea here is that college graduates do better because the college experience teaches them knowledge and skills that equip them to succeed in the workplace and in life. Under this model, college is inherently valuable, and colleges generate individual and societal returns on investment that are worth taxpayer support. The government thus supports innovation and a skilled workforce – which, in turn, help keep the economy growing.
2. A degree is an important “signaling” tool
This second view, the signaling model, suggests that college graduates do better because a degree provides an easy way for employers (and, perhaps, potential mates) to evaluate them. The logic here is that being able to get into (and out of) a good college shows people that you are a reasonably smart, responsible, and basically conventional person. These are traits that employers crave. It’s not important what you learned in college; the diploma itself is what matters.
The rationale for government support of higher education is weaker here, since college primarily serves as an inefficient and unequal social sorting mechanism. This means essentially doing the work that employers might otherwise do to figure out who is smart and talented enough to hire.
3. College reflects the “ability bias” in society
The third view, the ability bias model, posits that college graduates do better simply because they are innately more equipped to succeed at life, and would be successful whether they went to college or not. Colleges, then, are just places to park 18-year-olds for a few years, letting them mature before they enter the real world.
The rationale for government support is essentially nonexistent under this third model. College is where the privileged and gifted can party for a few years before doing what they were already going to do.
What the research tells us
It turns out that Republicans and Democrats have very different views about which of these theories is correct. That conclusion is based on a recent survey I conducted for the Bucknell Institute for Public Policy.
This poll, conducted by YouGov in September 2024, asked respondents to rank the relative importance of these three factors to explain why college graduates earn more:
The skills and knowledge that they learned while in college, which help them succeed in their career
The fact that they have a college diploma that they can put on their resume, regardless of what they learned in college
That they are smart and hardworking enough to be successful, regardless of whether they got a degree or not
Among all respondents, each explanation got roughly the same amount of support. For instance, 40% said that what college graduates learned was most important. And 31% said it was the degree, while 29% said that it was because they would be successful anyway.
The survey found a huge political divide
But there were large partisan differences in the survey responses. Among Democrats, 50% said that the premium was due to learning, 32% said that it was the diploma, and 19% said that they would be successful anyway.
Among Republicans, however, the rankings were reversed. Thirty-eight percent said college graduates would have been successful anyway, 35% said that it was the diploma, and only 29% said that it was because of learning skills and knowledge.
Democrats, in other words, believe that the college experience itself provides significant value. But Republicans were much less likely to feel the same, the survey found.
Critics of the Trump administration’s actions suggest that the administration is throwing the baby out with the bathwater: gutting the ability of colleges to do the educational work that they do in order to punish “woke” institutions. The idea that colleges could be gutted is, for the most part, true. Most universities would not survive in anything like their current form without research funding, student aid, and nonprofit tax status, along with other forms of federal support.
But if one perceives that the current model of college education is not providing a great deal of value anyway, as many Republicans apparently do, then making America’s traditional model of federally subsidized, on-campus higher education less viable may be precisely the point.
Christopher Ellis is a professor of political science and director of the Survey Research Laboratory at Bucknell University. He is the author of The Other Side of the Coin: Public Opinion Toward Social Tax Expenditures (Russell Sage Foundation), two additional books, and more than 20 journal articles on ideology, political polarization, and attitudes toward social spending.