New
study reveals majority of Republicans believe education hurts
America
Turn on Fox News or AM talk radio any given day, and you’re bound to hear stories about radical professors from liberal universities brainwashing children with leftist, socialist ideology and imposing an anti-American worldview.
Stories about
political correctness run amok, or liberal groups protesting speeches by
conservative personalities, or professors denigrating or vilifying the United
States, are regular fodder for opinion hosts like Tucker Carlson, on the aforementioned three letter news
network.
Ivy League
schools and universities
from liberal,
coastal states are the favorite
targets, but colleges everywhere have increasingly found themselves in the crosshairs
for conservatives who’ve spent decades
constructing the narrative that pursuing a degree at an American university is the
cause of our country’s problems, not their solutions.
All of that dedication to attacking higher education appears to be paying off in a horrifying though not altogether surprising way. According to a new study out by the Pew Research Center, “A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year.”
Democrats, not
surprisingly, had a very different view. According to the same Pew study,
“most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have
a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years.”
The Washington
Post cited the pew study in a larger piece about the Republicans’
assault on higher education, creatively titled “Elitists,
Crybabies, and Junky Degrees.” In it, investigative journalists Kevin Sullivan and Mary
Jordan track the work of Frank Antenori, a former Green Beret and Arizona
legislator at the forefront of the GOP’s increasingly aggressive campaign
against our nation’s colleges and universities.
“Why does a kid go to
a major university these days?” Antenori asked rhetorically. “A lot of
Republicans would say they go there to get brainwashed and learn how to become
activists and basically go out in the world and cause trouble.”
Sullivan and Jordan
frame this growing anti-higher education position in the most charitable way
the could, writing, “Though U.S. universities are envied around the world,
[Antenori] and other conservatives want to reduce the flow of government cash
to what they see as elitist, politically correct institutions that often fail
to provide practical skills for the job market.”
The war on higher
education has only intensified in the Trump era, and it’s bearing fruit among
the president’s base, which was statistically the most undereducated block any candidate enjoyed in 2016.
The Atlantic published an
in-depth report on
the phenomenon, and characterized this new zealotry against our nation’s
universities this way:
For the white middle class, a turn against
college is a profound historical irony. The GI Bill was more responsible than
almost any other law in fashioning the 20th century’s middle class.
Many Trump voters feel left behind, or worry that their children will grow up poorer.
It’s extremely unlikely that these families will personally benefit from a large tax cut for General Electric and Apple.
What they could use, instead, is some extra money today, plus an education system that prepares their kids for a new career, in a field that isn’t in structural decline.
Many Trump voters feel left behind, or worry that their children will grow up poorer.
It’s extremely unlikely that these families will personally benefit from a large tax cut for General Electric and Apple.
What they could use, instead, is some extra money today, plus an education system that prepares their kids for a new career, in a field that isn’t in structural decline.
What’s ironic – even
bordering on tragic – is that those same Trump voters who feel left behind
elected a man who has no interest in fixing the problems with education.
You can read the
entire Pew study here.