I’m not trying to mislead anybody, nor introduce unnecessary complexity into this question. I fear you, Richard Parker, though, are doing so by posting such a hedging and contradictory post.
For one thing, you seem to want to delink education levels and income levels when it comes to this question, neglecting the fact that in this society they are hopelessly linked. Rich people tend to obtain more education for their children, and more educated people tend to have higher incomes. How would you control for this when these trends do a good bit of controlling themselves?
And then you state that the correlation between education and ideology is slim, which I said above, citing the fact that there were few differences between conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats. However, most people do not join parties for ideological reasons, a fact you are conveniently ignoring. Union Democrats aren’t ideologues, for the most part. Neither are black Democrats. Neither are most Republicans.
Conservative does not equal Republican, and liberal does not equal Democrat. There are some of each, as well as moderates, in both parties.
In general a conservative Republican will likely be one for ideological reasons, and will tend to be more intelligent than a conservative or moderate Democrat because that Democrat is moderate or conservative for cultural reasons, not because of any well thought out philosophy.
You gave a black and white answer (“your teacher is *certainly *not correct”) to a gray question.
I’m sorry, it isn’t clear to me what you’re claiming. Are you claiming that we cannot measure both education and wealth, and then control for one?
I did conflate party with ideology in my post. My mistake. But you’ll find that my cite (which incidentally isn’t just someones conjecture but an actual study) does not make the same mistake. Additionally, I got the sense from this discussion that the OP and other posters were interested in ideology more than the party.
That is an interesting hypothesis that we can empirically test. And, lo and behold, we have tested it. And, at least according to one test, it is false. But I am willing to concede–indeed my main point has been–that it is a complicated issue. No doubt you could find studies that have different findings than the one I cite.
I’m not sure I believe this (at least not anymore. The GOP has become more and more the party of the underclasses in the last 20 years or so) but it still does not equate to a conclusion that educated people are more likely to be conservative. I once read somewhere (I can try to find a cite) that there is something of an arc. The more education someone gets the more likely they are to be liberal (especially on social issues) but the more successful they become financially, the more likely they are to become conservative (especially economically).
I know this is worthless and anecdotal but the liberals I’ve known in my life have always tended to be vastly more educated than the conservatives, but ironically, in my academic experience, the only professors who openly advocated any political position in their classrooms were self-identified Republicans.
How about a cite for any of this? What does ideology have to do with intelligence. I would argue that the more of an idealogue someone is, the less intelligent. Look at what you’ve got in the White House right now. A purely ideological conservative who is not even in the same intellectual ballpark as his Moderate Democrat predecessor.
I’m originally from Lousiana and I spent many years in North Dakota (where my wife is from). I’ve spent much more time in conservative regions than liberal.
They just weren’t talking about politics at all. They were talking about Medieval theology or Buddhist history or metamorphic rocks or Latin conjugations. The only time anything remotely political came up was in some history classes I took and for some reason all the history profs seemed to be Republicans. I had one who started off the first day of class by announcing that he was a conservative and that we could expect hear conservative opinions in his lectures but that we were free to disagree with him in our papers. He was actually a very good prof with a dry biting wit (he was wont to take potshots at Hillary Clinton).
If any of my other profs were liberal (and I’m sure some of them were) they never said anything about in class.
Eh? How is ‘Is it true that most college graduates are democrats?’ grey? Is ‘Is it true that most college graduates are male?’ grey? The reason for it might be, but I don’t think that question has grey areas. Either more democrats, republicans or independants or whatever graduate that the other groups.
You should have gone to junior college in the SF Bay area. Yeowzas!
It just means that if you take your average, miserable Democrat, hook them up with a decent church congregation, teach them the value of hard work do that they can get a good paying job, and teach them family values that help keeps their spouse happy, it wouldn’t be for anyone else’s good but their own.
The read the OP as asking a question more complicated than your paraphrasing. First, the OP asks about the educational aspect of college graduation specifically, rather than say the affect of screening out poor people that cannot afford to graduate college. In order to answer that question, we have to control for the effect that wealth has on who graduates from college, among other things. Further, and this may just be speculation on my part, the OP seemed to be invoking a question of causation–does education cause people to become democrats/liberal (the OP says both). Clearly this latter question cannot be answered by measuring the number of republican and democrat graduates.
One of my majors in college was political science and this topic was covered in detail in one of my upper level seminars (1988).
I don’t have any cites handy, but I remember that we did come to the conclusion that more college graduates are Democrats. However, it was only statistically significant through 4 year undergraduate degree and ONLY. Once one reached graduate education, there was no correlation between education and declared party identification.
Government workers and teachers provide the “swing” towards Democratic affiliation in the research.
Again, not sure how relevant this would be today. It was a very interesting seminar.
Did the OP really mean “Democrat” as in registered member of the party or simply left-leaning? I find it hard to believe that “most college graduates are Democrats” given that party membership has been declining for the past few decades, not to mention the general apathy and apoliticalness of college-aged individuals in general. A healthy but not overwhelming majority of college graduates may be left-leaning, however.
I noticed the same thing about my college professors. If they were outspoken about politics they were uniformly liberal.
The old adage: “those who can’t do, teach” seemed to apply to my college professors (regardless of politics). They were collectively as helpless as babies with anything outside their sphere of study. Yes there were exceptions but they were usually engineering professors.
This leaves me with a statistical anomaly. All of my college-educated friends (regardless of politics) are well rounded. Either I hang around with more capable people or college professors tend to isolate themselves from the real world by virtue of their academic lifestyle. I can’t generate a statistical quantity of friends or professors to make a case for my observations but it certainly colors my view of the world.
BTW, what the heck is a “logic design study class” and what does it have to do with politics?
Just because you vote for a Democratic presidential candidate (or even a straight Democratic ticket) doesn’t mean you’re a member of the Democratic party. The closest I could find in your article supporting the proposition that most college graduates are Democrats was “Kerry also did exceptionally well in ’04 among the new generation of voters, winning 18-to-29-year-old voters by 54 percent to 45 percent, compared with a narrow 48-percent to 46-percent margin for Gore in 2000.” This conspicuously not only doesn’t include actual hard numbers of 18-29 year old voters but has nothing to do with either college graduates or registered Democrats.
So for the past two election cycles at least, a college graduate is as likely to vote for a Republican presidential candidate as a Democratic one.
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