Unpacking claims that higher education leads to more liberal political viewpoints

Claims purporting that holding a degree from a higher education institution, such as a university or postgraduate program, is directly linked to the likelihood of being aligned with liberal-leaning political policies have circulated online for years. 

Most recently, a Reddit thread posted in April 2025 resurfaced the claim as U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration took aim at the U.S. Department of Education.

Other Reddit threads posted in late 2024 and as far back as 2017 posed a similar question, suggesting that liberalism is tied to higher education because learning more about how the world works leads to a better understanding of political policy. 

How much truth is there to the claim that people with higher educational attainment are “more liberal” due to education’s exposing students to diverse perspectives?
byu/Hexagram_Activist inAskSocialScience

The threads in which the claims surfaced appeared to reference studies performed by the Pew Research Center in the U.S., a self-described “nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world,” published in 2015 and 2016. 

While data exists to suggest some truth to this claim, Pew’s studies are specific to the American two-party system of Republicans and Democrats. An alternative study published in 2022 by The British Journal of Sociology found less of a link between higher education and liberalism. 

What Pew research shows

Pew’s 2016 study, titled, “A Wider Ideological Gap Between More and Less Educated Adults,” states, “Highly educated adults – particularly those who have attended graduate school – are far more likely than those with less education to take predominantly liberal positions across a range of political values. And these differences have increased over the past two decades.”

Pew’s 2015 report tracking trends in party identification from 1992 through 2014 offered further insight by stating that the higher the level of education, the more likely a person will identify with liberal policies. 

For example, “among those who have received a college degree but have no postgraduate experience,” the gap between those identifying as a Democrat or Republican is “narrower” than that of those with higher education. 

“48% identify as Democrats or lean Democratic, while 43% affiliate with the GOP or lean Republican,” Pew wrote of college-level education, while the difference for those with postgraduate degrees widened to “57% [Democratic] to 35% [Republican].” This aligns with claims that higher education does indeed lead to a higher rate of identification with left-leaning policies. 

Further, Pew stated, “Across all educational categories, women are more likely than men to affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic. The Democrats’ advantage is 35 points (64%-29%) among women with postgraduate degrees, but only eight points (50%-42%) among post-grad men.”

As for people who top out at a high-school education, Pew reported, “Roughly half of those with no more than a high school education (48%) are ideologically mixed, along with 36% of those with some college experience. By contrast, only about a quarter of more educated Americans have ideologically mixed views.”

(Pew Research Center)

Pew’s research also offered insight on peoples’ views in general of higher education from the position of American ideologies, with a 12% increase in negative views of such education since 2012, predominantly among Republicans. 

Additionally, Pew reported that “Republicans and independents who lean Republican” who declared colleges were having “a negative effect on the country” increased from “37% to 59%” from 2015 to 2019.

The report continued: 

Roughly eight-in-ten Republicans (79%) say professors bringing their political and social views into the classroom is a major reason the higher education system is headed in the wrong direction (only 17% of Democrats say the same).

Republicans focused more on political and ideological factors: 32% said colleges and universities are too political or too liberal (only 1% of Democrats volunteered this type of response). And 21% of Republicans pointed to colleges not allowing students to think for themselves and pushing their own agenda as reasons they didn’t have a lot of confidence in them.

In comparison, a study of the link between higher education and liberal values from 1994 through 2020 by The British Journal of Sociology concluded that the results were not so clear-cut, at least in Great Britain. 

The authors wrote, “Apart from economic attitudes, where graduates take a statistically significantly more conservative position than non-graduates, graduates typically have attitudes which are significantly more ‘liberal’ than non-graduates — they are more environmentally friendly and gender egalitarian.” 

The report emphasized the role a person’s life outside of education plays in the data, suggesting that it is not necessarily the university itself impacting the political viewpoint but rather that more people who are in a position to attend college in the first place are predisposed to liberal values. 

The report read: 

This paper offers novel insights in showing that obtaining a HE [higher education] qualification only has a small direct causal effect on British individuals’ adult attitudes, and that this effect is not always liberalizing. Universities are not institutions of left-liberal bias which encourage the development of distinctive political values. Rather, the well-established association of HE with economic and cultural attitudes is largely spurious — materializing mostly because those who experience pre-adult environments conducive to the formation of certain values disproportionately enroll in universities. Scholars should now expand the scope of this enquiry by using novel quasi-experimental methods to identify how, and to what extent, educational attainment is causally linked with a range of adult outcomes.

The report concludes other factors must be taken into account to determine the effect of higher education on liberal views, such as whether the subject grew up with siblings, and asserts that conservative concerns that colleges have a left-leaning bias are “greatly exaggerated.”

In sum, there is data to support the claim as it pertains to American politics, but it is not as straightforward as it might seem. Many factors must be considered about a person’s life experience that could impact political viewpoints, but those same factors could also determine whether a person attends higher education in the first place.

Snopes has covered other claims regarding the relationship between education and the United States, including the rumor that the U.S. dropped from first to 24th in education since 1979.

Sources