Why do America’s largest cities consistently vote Democratic, while much of rural America remains firmly Republican?
The usual explanations involve demographics, income, race, cultural differences, and dependence on government assistance. These factors undoubtedly contribute to the political divide. But they do not fully explain why so many financially successful, highly educated Americans also favor the Democratic Party.
Could part of the answer be found in America’s colleges and universities?
More specifically, are universities simply educating future professionals, or are they also helping shape the political beliefs those professionals carry into their careers and communities?
As a long-time educator, I find this question particularly interesting. I understand firsthand the influence an instructor can have on students. I also understand how easily classroom instruction can move beyond the established curriculum and into an instructor’s personal beliefs.
A substantial body of research connects higher education with liberal political identification. More importantly, a major study released as a working paper in December 2025 offers compelling evidence that the ideological influence of college education differs considerably by academic discipline and that faculty ideology and instruction play measurable roles.
That research deserves attention, especially from those who insist that universities merely attract liberal students rather than help create them.
The Political Divide Between Urban and Rural America
The geographic division in American politics is unmistakable.
According to a 2024 Pew Research Center study, 60% of registered voters in urban counties identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, compared with 37% who align with Republicans.
Rural counties present nearly the opposite picture: 60% Republican and 35% Democratic.
Suburban voters are more evenly divided, although individual metropolitan areas vary substantially.
These differences become especially important during national elections because urban and suburban counties contain enormous concentrations of voters.
One explanation often offered for urban Democratic support is that city residents favor government assistance programs. There is some logic to this argument, particularly among lower-income voters who may depend on public benefits.
However, the income statistics complicate that explanation.
Pew found that 58% of lower-income registered voters identified with or leaned toward Democrats. Yet 53% of upper-income voters did as well.
More revealing was the relationship between income and educational attainment.
Among Americans without bachelor’s degrees, higher income was associated with greater Republican identification. Among college graduates, however, political affiliation varied relatively little by income.
In other words, financial success did not necessarily translate into greater political conservatism among college-educated Americans.
That raises a legitimate question: Does the college experience itself contribute to these political differences?
College Education and Political Identity
The connection between educational attainment and political affiliation is well documented.
Pew Research Center’s analysis of the 2024 presidential election found that voters holding at least a four-year college degree favored Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by 16 percentage points.
Voters without college degrees favored Trump by 14 percentage points.
Among voters with postgraduate degrees, Harris enjoyed an even larger advantage, approximately 65% to 33%.
These figures demonstrate a substantial political divide associated with educational attainment.
But there is a fundamental difference between observing that college graduates tend to be liberal and establishing that their college experiences contributed to making them liberal.
Perhaps liberal-minded young people are simply more likely to attend college. Perhaps they choose careers that concentrate them in large metropolitan areas. Perhaps their political views reflect social and professional influences rather than classroom instruction.
Those explanations deserve consideration.
Fortunately, researchers have examined precisely these questions.
A Major Study Examines What Happens During College
In December 2025, researchers Yoav Goldstein and Matan Kolerman Shemer released a working paper titled Changing Minds: How Academic Fields Shape Political Attitudes.
The researchers examined survey information from approximately 300,000 students attending 477 American colleges.
The data covered students who entered college between 1990 and 2015 and included information about political attitudes at college entry and graduation.
This distinction is critical.
Rather than merely comparing college graduates with people who never attended college, the researchers examined changes occurring while students were actually pursuing their degrees.
They discovered that, on average, students became approximately seven percentage points more likely to identify as liberal or far-left between entering college and graduating.
That finding alone would be noteworthy.
But the differences between academic majors were even more revealing.
What Students Study Makes a Difference
The researchers found that ideological changes varied considerably depending on students’ academic fields.
| Academic discipline | Observed change in liberal/far-left identification |
|---|---|
| Social sciences | +10.7 percentage points |
| Humanities and arts | +10.5 percentage points |
| Business and economics | +2.4 percentage points |
Students studying engineering, mathematics, natural sciences, health, and education generally experienced smaller leftward movements than those studying humanities or social sciences.
These figures describe the observed changes during college. The researchers also conducted adjusted analyses to separate the influence of academic fields from differences students brought with them when they enrolled.
Those analyses found that, compared with natural-science majors, studying humanities or social sciences produced an estimated additional leftward shift of approximately 0.09 standard deviations.
Business and economics majors, by contrast, shifted approximately 0.14 standard deviations to the right relative to natural-science majors.
The differences extended beyond how students identified politically.
Humanities and social-science students moved leftward on cultural issues, including questions involving race and LGBTQ rights. They also became more supportive of certain government policies, including national healthcare.
Business and economics students moved relatively rightward on economic questions involving taxation and government involvement in healthcare.
The researchers also identified behavioral differences. Humanities and social-science education was associated with increased political activism, while business and economics education increased the importance students placed on financial success.
These are not trivial distinctions.
Students attending the same university, sometimes living in the same residence halls and sharing similar social environments, experienced different ideological developments depending on what they studied.
That suggests something more specific than a general liberal college atmosphere.
It suggests the content and character of education matter.
What Happens to Students Who Enter College as Conservatives?
One of the most interesting questions is whether students who enter college holding conservative beliefs eventually abandon those positions.
The research suggests that some do, although complete ideological conversions are less common than gradual movement toward the political center.
For example, among students who initially identified as middle-of-the-road, 33% of humanities majors and 34% of social-science majors identified as liberal by graduation.
Among business and economics majors, that figure was approximately 18%.
Across all majors, initially moderate students were more likely to become liberal than conservative, 26% compared with 15%.
Initially conservative students also sometimes moved toward the center or left. But those changes must be distinguished from the movement of students who began college politically moderate.
This distinction is important because ideological influence need not produce a complete political conversion to have consequences.
A student who enters college strongly conservative and graduates moderately conservative has still undergone a political change.
Likewise, a moderate student who graduates liberal may eventually become a reliable Democratic voter.
Over time, such changes can influence the political composition of the professional workforce.
But what causes them?
The Most Revealing Finding: Instruction Matters
Perhaps the most significant part of the Goldstein and Kolerman Shemer study concerns the mechanism behind these ideological changes.
One frequently offered explanation is that liberal students choose liberal majors.
Certainly, self-selection exists. Students do not enter college as politically identical individuals, and their interests and beliefs can influence their choice of academic discipline.
The researchers accounted for students’ initial political positions, intended majors, personal goals, demographics, and other factors.
They also examined whether the ideological composition of classmates or anticipated future earnings could explain the differences.
Their findings suggested that neither peer composition nor earnings expectations adequately explained the substantial differences between academic disciplines.
In fact, their estimates indicated that changes in the ideological composition of classmates within programs accounted for less than 10% of the overall effect associated with majors.
Instead, the researchers identified academic content, teaching practices, and faculty ideology as important mechanisms.
They examined departments with different faculty political orientations and compared the ideological development of their students.
Students in departments with more liberal faculty did not necessarily enter college with more liberal beliefs.
But by graduation, students exposed to more liberal faculty had experienced greater leftward ideological shifts.
Among humanities students, a one-standard-deviation increase in faculty liberalism was associated with an additional leftward shift of approximately 0.08 standard deviations.
Among social-science students, the corresponding estimate was approximately 0.07 standard deviations.
The researchers estimated that differences associated with faculty ideology could account for roughly 40% of the ideological effects of studying humanities or social sciences rather than business or economics.
That is a substantial finding.
The researchers used faculty ideology as a measure of the broader instructional environment rather than directly recording what professors said in classrooms. Their analysis therefore supports an important role for instruction without identifying every specific classroom behavior responsible.
Nevertheless, the conclusion is difficult to dismiss: The political orientation of those providing the education is associated with measurable differences in the political beliefs of the students receiving it.
Intentional Influence Is Not Necessarily Organized Indoctrination
This is where my own experience as a professional educator becomes relevant.
I know the difference between presenting a lesson based on an established syllabus and introducing my personal beliefs into a lecture.
I have recognized occasions when my own instruction moved beyond the designated subject matter.
An instructor with substantial classroom experience generally knows when that happens.
Teaching is not merely reading information from a textbook. Instructors decide which examples to use, which questions to emphasize, how to frame difficult subjects, and how much weight to give competing explanations.
Those decisions can influence how students interpret information.
And experienced educators understand that they hold a position of authority.
Students, particularly young adults still developing their personal and political identities, often regard their instructors as knowledgeable authorities. Instructors have the opportunity to influence how those students understand society, government, economics, and moral questions.
This brings us to a distinction that I believe is too often overlooked.
Intentional influence does not necessarily require a deliberate plan to convert students to a particular political ideology.
Intent exists along a spectrum.
An instructor might unintentionally allow personal beliefs to influence the presentation of course material. Another might recognize that personal political opinions are shaping the lesson but make little effort to separate those opinions from instruction.
Still another might deliberately introduce ideological perspectives because the instructor believes those perspectives represent the correct understanding of the subject.
And, of course, an instructor might consciously attempt to persuade students to adopt particular political beliefs.
These are different degrees of intention, but they can produce similar effects on students.
The distinction matters because discussions of ideological influence in higher education frequently become focused on whether professors are deliberately attempting to indoctrinate students.
That sets an unnecessarily narrow standard.
A professor does not need to announce an intention to change students’ political beliefs for those beliefs to be influenced. Nor should we ignore the fact that many professors use graduate students to teach their classes.
Nor does the absence of an organized indoctrination effort establish that the influence is entirely accidental.
As an educator, I find it difficult to believe that experienced instructors are universally unaware of the influence they exercise when presenting personal political perspectives to students.
That is my professional assessment, not something the Goldstein and Kolerman Shemer study directly measured.
The researchers investigated changes in student ideology and their association with instructional environments. They did not determine the private intentions of individual professors. But the fact that intentionality was not measured does not make intentionality irrelevant. It makes it a legitimate subject for further examination.
Are Working Adult Students Less Susceptible to Ideological Influence?
There is another distinction I believe deserves attention, particularly from the perspective of someone who has spent years educating adults.
A student entering college immediately after high school and a 35-year-old returning to college after years in the workforce are not necessarily entering the classroom with the same intellectual and political foundations.
The younger student may still be developing a political identity. For many, college represents their first prolonged experience living away from parental influence, making independent decisions, and encountering unfamiliar political and social perspectives.
Their instructors and fellow students may become particularly important influences during that formative period.
Working adults generally bring a different perspective. They may have spent years earning a living, paying taxes, supporting families, serving in the military, operating businesses, or dealing directly with government institutions. Those experiences provide a practical framework through which they evaluate what they hear in a classroom.
A professor discussing taxation, employment, healthcare, or government regulation may encounter a different response from a student who has spent fifteen years navigating those issues than from someone whose understanding comes primarily from textbooks and classroom discussions.
This distinction is consistent with research on the development of political attitudes.
In a 2020 study published in The Journal of Politics, Johnathan C. Peterson, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Hibbing examined political attitudes across a substantial portion of adulthood using longitudinal survey data.
Their research found that political attitudes tend to remain remarkably stable over long periods. Other research examining political development during adolescence and early adulthood has found that ideological attitudes generally become more stable as individuals mature.
Neither finding establishes that working adult college students are immune to political persuasion. But together they provide a reasonable basis for expecting that older students with established beliefs and substantial life experience may respond differently to ideological influences than younger students entering college directly from high school.
I would take that argument a step further based on my own experience as an educator.
An adult student may be more likely to recognize when an instructor has crossed from explaining course material into advocating a personal political position.
That recognition does not necessarily require political conservatism. A politically liberal working adult may recognize ideological advocacy just as readily as a conservative one.
The relevant difference is experience. Someone who has already formed opinions through employment, family responsibilities, and direct interaction with institutions may be more inclined to question an instructor’s assumptions rather than automatically accept them.
There is also the question of immersion. Traditional college students may spend years in an environment where instructors, classmates, residence halls, student organizations, and campus activities collectively influence their developing beliefs. A working adult taking evening classes while maintaining a career and family life may have far less exposure to that broader campus culture.
The Goldstein and Kolerman Shemer study did not directly establish how much ideological change differs between traditional college students and working adults returning to school. That is an important limitation, but also an interesting opportunity for further research.
Would the same differences between academic majors appear among students entering college at age 30 or 40? Would faculty ideology have the same measurable influence? And would students with substantial professional experience be more willing to challenge instructors whose lectures move into personal political advocacy?
I suspect the ideological shifts would be smaller among many working adults, not because they are necessarily more intelligent or better educated, but because their beliefs have already been tested and reinforced through years of experience outside the classroom.
That is a hypothesis rather than a demonstrated result of the major university study. Nevertheless, it raises an important point: The age, maturity, and life experience of students may be just as relevant to understanding ideological influence as the political orientation of their instructors.
The Difference Between Education and Advocacy
A university education should challenge students’ assumptions. There is nothing inherently improper about exposing students to ideas that conflict with their existing beliefs.
A conservative student studying sociology should encounter credible arguments supporting government intervention in social problems. A liberal student studying economics should encounter credible arguments concerning free markets, taxation, and the unintended consequences of regulation. That is education.
The problem arises when instructors move from explaining competing ideas to consistently presenting one political perspective as the intellectually or morally acceptable position.
Students should be encouraged to examine evidence, identify weaknesses in arguments, and develop their own conclusions. They should not feel compelled to adopt an instructor’s worldview to demonstrate that they have understood the subject.
I believe the real question is not whether professors have political opinions. Every instructor has personal beliefs and experiences that influence how they see the world. The question is whether they recognize their professional responsibility to distinguish those beliefs from the material they have been entrusted to teach. And whether they consistently honor that responsibility.
The Goldstein and Kolerman Shemer study does not prove that university instructors routinely abandon that obligation. But it does provide evidence that the ideological character of academic instruction matters. That should be sufficient reason for universities to examine the issue seriously.
What About the Influence of Fellow Students?
There is legitimate research showing that students can influence one another politically.
A 2021 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined the effects of randomly assigned college roommates. Researchers found that students tended to move toward their roommates’ political ideology during their first year of college. Interestingly, that study did not find an overall leftward shift among the students examined during that first year.
At first glance, those findings might seem to contradict the Goldstein and Kolerman Shemer research. But the studies examined different questions. One investigated how students influence one another through close residential relationships during their first year.
The other examined longer-term ideological development across academic disciplines and found that changes in peer composition within programs did not account for much of the difference between majors.
Both findings can be valid.
Students can be influenced by their friends, roommates, instructors, and the academic material they study. The important distinction is that the larger study found evidence connecting differences between majors specifically to the instructional environment. That is the finding most relevant to concerns about ideological influence in university classrooms.
From College Classrooms to America’s Major Cities
How does this research relate to the political divide between America’s metropolitan and rural communities?
Large cities attract educated professionals because they offer concentrated employment opportunities in law, healthcare, technology, finance, government, education, and numerous other fields. Many of these individuals eventually become financially successful. Yet their political affiliations do not necessarily become more conservative as their incomes rise.
The Pew Research findings are especially relevant here. Higher-income Americans without college degrees are more likely to identify as Republicans, while college graduates remain more Democratic across income levels.
It is reasonable to consider whether political attitudes developed or reinforced during college help explain this difference.
A young adult who experiences an ideological shift during four years of university education does not necessarily abandon those beliefs upon receiving a diploma. Those beliefs may follow the graduate into a professional career, marriage, parenthood, and community involvement. Multiply that process across millions of graduates concentrated in metropolitan areas, and educational experiences become a potentially important contributor to urban political culture.
This does not mean that universities alone explain why cities vote Democratic. Race, religion, age, migration, economic interests, and local political conditions also matter. Nor does the research establish how much of today’s urban Democratic vote can be attributed specifically to classroom instruction. But it establishes a plausible mechanism through which higher education can contribute to the political composition of the professional class.
And the researchers attempted to estimate the broader electoral implications. Using relationships between political ideology and voting behavior from other surveys, they estimated that studying humanities or social sciences rather than business or economics could increase the likelihood of voting Democratic by approximately six percentage points.
That was a modeled estimate, not a direct measurement of how every student eventually voted. Nevertheless, it illustrates the potential political significance of academic specialization.
A Wider Political Divide Created by Different Fields of Study
The researchers also examined what might happen if the distribution of academic majors changed. They estimated that if all students studied business or economics, rather than their actual mix of majors, the ideological gap between college graduates and non-graduates could shrink by approximately 30%.
This was a hypothetical statistical exercise, not an argument that every student should pursue a business degree. Its significance is that different academic fields appear to produce different political effects.
The researchers also found that students entering college with more liberal political beliefs tended to select academic disciplines associated with greater leftward shifts. This creates the possibility of a reinforcing cycle. Students begin college with political preferences that influence their choice of majors. Those majors then expose them to instructional environments that can further reinforce or modify their political beliefs. As a result, ideological differences between graduates of different disciplines may become greater than the differences that existed when they entered college.
That is not simply an education issue. It has implications for the political composition of professions, institutions, and ultimately the communities in which those graduates live.
Universities Should Be Willing to Examine Their Own Influence
The Goldstein and Kolerman Shemer research is a working paper, and its conclusions should continue to be examined. Its principal student data cover earlier college cohorts, and faculty ideology serves as a proxy for instructional influence rather than a direct record of classroom conduct. The researchers’ causal interpretation also depends on statistical methods and assumptions that deserve scrutiny. But those limitations do not erase the findings.
The study examined a large population, controlled for students’ initial political attitudes, tested competing explanations, and identified meaningful differences associated with academic disciplines and faculty ideology. The results provide evidence that university education is not politically neutral in its effects.
For an institution whose stated mission includes developing independent thought, that should be a matter of professional interest. Universities routinely examine whether their instruction achieves intended educational outcomes.
Why should the ideological consequences of that instruction receive less scrutiny?
If faculty members are influencing students’ political beliefs, intentionally or otherwise, universities should be willing to consider whether students are receiving balanced opportunities to evaluate competing ideas. The objective should not be to prohibit professors from expressing opinions or to demand that every academic discipline produce equal numbers of liberals and conservatives. It should be to maintain a professional distinction between educating students and using the authority of an educational position to advance personal political convictions.
Final Thoughts
I don’t believe every liberal college graduate was indoctrinated by a professor. Nor do I believe every conservative student who changes political views has somehow been manipulated. People are capable of examining information and changing their minds for legitimate intellectual reasons. But does an 18-year-old approach that process the same way as a 25-year-old?
But I also reject the notion that university instructors are merely passive transmitters of information whose personal political beliefs have no meaningful influence on their students. My own experience as an educator tells me otherwise.
I understand the authority an instructor brings into a classroom. I understand how personal beliefs can enter a lecture, sometimes subtly and sometimes quite deliberately. And I understand that experienced instructors generally recognize when they are moving beyond the established curriculum.
It’s also my belief that the age and experience of the student matter. An 18-year-old beginning college and a 40-year-old returning to complete a degree are not necessarily equally receptive to the same ideological influences. The research gives us reason to take those distinctions seriously.
The ideological differences between academic majors are measurable. The relationship between faculty ideology and students’ political development is measurable. And the potential political consequences extend beyond college campuses.
America’s political divide between educated metropolitan communities and rural populations has many causes. I believe one of those causes deserves considerably more attention: the ideological influence of the institutions responsible for educating much of America’s professional class.
The critical question is not whether universities influence their students’ beliefs. The evidence suggests they do. The more important question is whether that influence consistently serves the purpose of education or sometimes crosses the line into political advocacy.
As a professional educator, I believe that distinction matters. And I believe universities have a responsibility to take it seriously. Or perhaps they know exactly what they are doing.
References
- Changing Minds: How Academic Fields Shape Political Attitudes, by Yoav Goldstein and Matan Kolerman Shemer (working paper, Dec. 2, 2025; revised June 2026).
- Changing Partisan Coalitions in a Politically Divided Nation, by Pew Research Center (April 9, 2024).
- Partisanship in Rural, Suburban and Urban Communities, by Pew Research Center (Changing Partisan Coalitions in a Politically Divided Nation, April 9, 2024).
- Partisanship by Family Income, Home Ownership, Union Membership and Veteran Status, by Pew Research Center (Changing Partisan Coalitions in a Politically Divided Nation, April 9, 2024).
- Voting Patterns in the 2024 Election, by Hannah Hartig, Scott Keeter, Andrew Daniller and Ted Van Green (Pew Research Center, June 26, 2025).
- College Roommates Have a Modest but Significant Influence on Each Other’s Political Ideology, by Logan Strother and colleagues (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2021).
- Do People Really Become More Conservative as They Age?, by Johnathan C. Peterson, Kevin B. Smith and John R. Hibbing (The Journal of Politics, 2020).
- Political Attitudes in Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: Developmental Changes in Mean Level, Polarization, Rank-Order Stability, and Correlates, by Roderik Rekker and colleagues (Journal of Adolescence, 2015).
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Dave Chamberlin runs a consulting and training company and brings more than 40 years of civilian and military aviation experience to his work. He retired as a Chief Master Sergeant after 38 years as an aircraft crew chief in the U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard, and has also worked in technical, instructor, consultant, and leadership roles. He holds an FAA Airframe and Powerplant license and a master’s degree in aeronautical science, and his writing often focuses on military issues, especially those affecting aircraft maintenance personnel.
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