The Daily Escape:
Antarctic Relic, 2017 – photo by Daniel Kordan
Pink Floyd’s big mainstream hit has new relevance today, since Pew Research produced these interesting findings on US attitudes towards higher education: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
While a majority of the public (55%) continues to say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country these days, Republicans express increasingly negative views.
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. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years.
The Pew study, conducted from June 8 to 18 among more than 2,000 respondents, found that Democrats and Republicans are growing substantially more divided in their opinions on public institutions, including higher education.
According to the survey that Pew released on Monday, this is the first time that a majority of Republicans have thought that higher education is bad for the country. As recently as 2015, 54% of Republicans said colleges and universities had a positive impact on the way things were going in the country, but by 2016, those results split to 43% positive and 45% negative. On the other side of the aisle, 72% of Democrats continue to think colleges and universities have a positive effect on the country, holding steady with past years’ results. Here is a chart with the study’s top findings:
And if we get granular about the viewpoints, we see the positive view by Republicans has declined dramatically in just three years:
Only 1/3 of Republicans who have graduated from college now believe that college is a positive contributor to the way things are in America today. In fact, Republicans over age 50 support college and universities the least (28%). Even a majority of GOP Millennials do not see higher education as a positive force in our society.
While Pew doesn’t speculate on the reasons for the shift in thinking, it is clear that the last few years have not been kind to higher education. Elite colleges have made headlines for a series of controversies and protests around racism, free speech, and civil rights. We hear constant debate about “trigger warnings”, and “safe zones” for students who can’t be exposed to uncomfortable ideas or situations.
In 2015, the football team at the University of Missouri went on strike to protest the handling of racist incidents on campus, and Yale was rocked by controversy about the proper way to address insensitive Halloween costumes.
More recently, students have protested and sometimes disrupted appearances from controversial figures. But only 28% of college-educated GOP’ers support higher education? From Booman:
It’s really not compatible with being a country club Republican to have a negative view of a college education. A college degree confers respectability and signals status.
Booman makes the point that more and more of them home school their kids to protect them from the opinions of educated people who might have different views, and fewer of them want their children to go to a college where those religious and political views may be undermined.
Perhaps it also says that college is NOW no longer a good thing, either due to economic factors, or all the strict social/cultural paths people want their kids to follow. But, in America today, the unemployment rate for college grads is 2.4%, while it is 4.6% for those without a degree.
Why would Republicans want to deny their children the opportunity to earn a living?
And there is our PISA ranking. PISA rankings are produced by the OECD based on tests taken by 15-year-olds in more than 70 countries every three years. Comparing the US ranking in both 2012 (the last time the test was administered) and 2015, the US fell to 38th from 28th in math out of 71 countries. We ranked 24th in science. For whatever reasons, we just don’t do a good job educating our kids.
But to the larger point, perceptions of college’s value/non-value is symptomatic of a much deeper and very dangerous schism, the devaluation of facts and scientific evidence. The GOP discredits facts and reality. They emphasize school choice (although it is the only thing that they are pro-choice about).
Resentment and fantasy based on ideology drives our discussion of education. So education has become a low priority for the young and old alike.
Today’s tune is appropriately, “The Wall” by Pink Floyd. It was their 11th studio album, released as a double album in November 1979:
Takeaway Lyric:
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teacher!
Leave them kids alone!
All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall
All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
The increasing suspicion that a growing % of republicans have about Higher education represents, in my mind, just another area in which our attitudes make us less and less “exceptional”.as a society. Our system of higher education is the envy of the world just by virtue of its magnitude and the contribution it has made to the world in terms of educating and carrying out useful research that has saved lives and provided life changing innovation through technology. Now, because extolling these virtue does not fit the current political narrative, the base has deemed it necessary to disavow the very ability to think and reach independent conclusions. Moreover, they, apparently, view those who do as un-loyal Americans. Instead, this Fox news crowd espouses emotional group think of the worst order; a sort of apologist approach which aims to defend the administration no matter how much it lies to us or how far off the constitution track it may try to steer us as a people. Now, we can add institutions of higher learning to the growing list of things the base would like to eliminate out of their own fear and paranoia. Banana anyone.