I sketched up the below the day after the 2020 presidential election, when folks started to notice the major realignment of education across partisan lines. I think my views have held up ok in the year since. I lightly edited it for clarity, and expanded a few points (I indicate these in brackets).
I’ve been thinking about Thomas Piketty’s recent work on the educational sorting of political parties in the United States, with Democrats and Republicans increasingly sorted by those with and without college degrees.
It appears that there is another educational sorting of partisanship by educational attainment, with Democrats increasingly becoming the party of the educationally credentialed.
Perhaps my view is a relic of the time I grew up: the mid 1980s through early 2000s, when there wasn’t as much of an education partisanship. I’d just lift out a few general points (these aren’t super well researched, think of them more as emerging from my recollection of many studies and theories read over the past decade):
Educational partisanship risks blunting notions of “intelligence”, “skill”, and “ability” [so that they fit into more neatly packaged ideological bundles]. But each are highly multidimensional. There is not a single “skill” that can sort all individuals into a single line. Labor economists and stratification scholars do a nice job demonstrating this fact. [Unfortunately, the typical way you see “skilled” versus “unskilled” defined in economics, and often prestige media outlets, refers to folks with and without a college degree.]
Our winner-take-all economy (see Robert Frank) probably distorts the purpose of education. These broader economic forces have, to some extent, refashioned educational attainment as the track on which the race for a larger reward is given to a shrinking number of contestants.
I do not have a clear picture of the era before 1970 visualized in Piketty’s graph above, when higher education was concentrated among the Republican party. That’s history I think I need to learn to help understand the contemporary situation. But it’s worth considering the particular issues that arise when the Democratic party specifically aligns with higher education. [When I participated in instructor training, I would often see a lot of talk and support and resources for things like, “what if a right-leaning students says or does X.” Often, this has been really important, especially because it was based around tamping down and avoiding issues related to sex, race, and sexuality. But what happens when our institution, which should be above partisan splits, gets absorbed into the process of political polarization? This feels new and I’m not sure how to handle it.]
If the Democratic party is becoming tightly aligned with higher education, meaning that higher education is in a more politically polarized position, I believe this requires a deep soul searching of the purpose of contemporary education. My fuzzy thinking is based on two anecdotal points:
I’ve talked with folks who highlight the radical transition of the higher education funding model, from an army of small donations to finding the needle-in-the-haystack billionaire entrepreneur. That’s why you see so many seemingly silly “innovation incubator hub of excellence” institutes popping up across campuses. What reason do people have to support this model of higher education, given that it presents a fundamentally restructured relationship to the broader public?
Similarly, I remember reading a New Yorker article years ago about robotics. A Brown professor was working in a lab, and decided to focus their next hand robot project to pick up blueberries, because that’s a space where a lot of industry funding was available. I don’t know why, but that really shook me. When you look at mission statements of universities, they typically include language of “public service,” “public benefit,” “improving quality of life for all,” etc. But perhaps what happens on the ground is that universities provide discounted access to labor savings technologies, which might undermine the lives and power of folks without college degrees, and soon enough, those with degrees. [If we’re seeing a realignment of the professional class to the Democratic party, higher education to the Democratic party, and higher education’s primary output is labor saving technology and managerial strategies, what does this imply for higher education’s broad mission? I have a lot of unsorted thoughts and worries about this blueberry robotics example that I need to smooth out here some day.]
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Anyways, I suspect these will be very eventful years ahead for higher education. Partisan realignment around education makes for new and very weird problems that we’ll have to grapple with.