Political Leanings by Occupation and Industry

[cookderosa]

When I was studying my MBA, my husband joked that they had teaching manuals for how to be a republican.    While I still consider myself a bleeding heart liberal, I will say that b-school definitely made me slightly more fiscally conservative.

Here are a couple of articles on how colleges affect (or don't affect) students' ideological views. 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014...al-college

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opini...beral.html

If this isn't a duh moment...

Their research found that the tendency of college graduates to be more liberal reflects to a large extent the fact that more liberal students are more likely to go to college in the first place.

It's stunning that universities aren't attempting to incorporate more republicans in their diversity efforts. As few as 12% of Harvard undergrads identify as conservative and a similar number of professors identify as such. The whole point of college is to learn critical thinking skills and challenge pre-conceived notions. Turning universities into echo chambers for either side doesn't appear like a good long term strategy.

Maybe we need a kind of political affirmative action to even out the political distribution represented by the student body and teaching staff to closer reflect the demographics of our country.