College enrollment is falling fast, and while the demographic cliff—that is, the declining number of college-age Americans right now—has long been anticipated, it is still a crisis for higher education, which depends on steady or rising enrollment for their business model to work. (This is one reason colleges are refusing to expel pro-Hamas foreign students, because they pay full tuition.)
But maybe colleges are driving some students away because of their ideological skew. When colleges tacitly say, “We hate white male Republicans,” maybe fewer white male Republicans will want to enroll. The Missing Data Depot Substack has some compelling data on this point:
The more likely explanation is that the rising disinterest among Republican high schoolers is a function of the fact that, over the last 15 years, universities have become more ideologically homogenous, more overtly activist, and more monomaniacally focused on power and identity. These changes, and the extensively covered political opposition mobilized in response, have eroded trust in higher education among those on the political right and decreased young conservatives’ desire to attend college.
And here’s one of the charts in the MDD piece:
Maybe colleges should stop hating on white males. Or letting their faculty get so skewed:
