Progressives’ Aversion to Private Industry Does Not Extend to Private Universities
All 13 presidents of the United States since Dwight D. Eisenhower have been college graduates. The years after high school are critically formative ones when adolescents become adults, so most presidents in the modern era were significantly influenced by their collegiate experiences.
The historical image was that Republican presidents usually came from wealthy privileged families and thus attended prestigious private schools — think of Bush 41 and 43, both Yale University graduates, or Donald Trump, who graduated from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania.
Democrats, however, were thought to more often resemble Lyndon B. Johnson (who graduated from the distinctly downscale Southwest Texas State Teachers College) or Joe Biden (whose undergraduate degree came from a mid-quality flagship state school, the University of Delaware).
A Dec. 5 study by Declan Bradley for the Chronicle of Higher Education, supplemented by some additional research of my own, shows that image is profoundly misleading today: Democratic members of Congress and governors, members of a political party historically purporting to champion the poor and “working class” and favoring aggressive government policies, disproportionately attend very expensive elite private schools. By contrast, their traditionally wealthier and more business-friendly GOP colleagues, who are far more skeptical of government involvement in our lives, typically attended less expensive and exclusive state (government-owned) schools.
Eight American universities have eight or more members of Congress as graduates, and not one is a state university — the only “public” school to make the list is the highly specialized U.S. Military Academy at West Point. With one exception, Brigham Young University, all eight schools are in Atlantic or Pacific coastal states or D.C. Schools. The Midwest, South, and Great Plains states — “flyover country” to coastal elites — are dramatically underrepresented.
For example, 12 members of Congress have bachelor’s degrees from Georgetown University in D.C. The same number comes from the top four Midwest universities in the U.S. News college rankings combined (Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Notre Dame, and Washington University in St. Louis), even though all four of those Midwestern schools are rated higher than Georgetown in the U.S. News rankings.
Some 28 members of Congress, over 5 percent of the total, graduated from colleges located within walking distance of the Washington D.C. Metro, which strikes me as amazing since most presumably attended college well before they were even old enough to be elected to Congressional office. Do parents move to Washington expecting their kids will ultimately go to college there and then become powerbrokers in the D.C. swamp?
Looking at governors reinforces the general conclusion that Democratic political leaders are far more likely to attend elite private schools. Some five of 23 Democratic governors (22 percent) attended Ivy League schools (three went to Harvard University), compared with but one of 27 GOP state leaders (Florida’s Ron DeSantis who attended Yale). One GOP governor, Mike Parson of Missouri, did not even go to college at all. Moreover, several other Democratic governors attended non-Ivy League elite private universities like Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Vanderbilt University, or Swarthmore College, more so than Republicans.
Philosophically, Democrats tend to be highly sympathetic to notions going back to Plato’s Republic of “philosopher kings” or, more recently, to Woodrow Wilson’s vision of highly educated technocrats governing our lives through a powerful administrative state. Wilson and later similarly minded folks believed that some persons are smarter and educationally better equipped than others, so they should be running things. The best and brightest of them go to Harvard or similar Ivy League schools.
Republicans are more smitten by the wisdom found in Adam Smith, where the “invisible hand” controlling competitive markets does a far better job of allocating and creating resources and promoting public welfare than Wilsonian bureaucrats.
Of the CEOs of the dozen largest companies on the Fortune 500 list at this writing, only one did his undergraduate degree at an Ivy League school, others mostly attended public universities such as Auburn University, the University of South Carolina, the University of Nebraska, the University of Arkansas, and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Most of the largest companies making critical market decisions are headed by graduates of decent quality public schools without strong pretensions of claiming that they are intellectually superior and wiser academic communities.
So what? A Republican-controlled federal government may be less sympathetic to higher education in general but is especially less awed by elite private schools. Contributing to Republican Ivy League skepticism: a number of studies show that while college faculty in general have a strong left-wing orientation, that is particularly true of elite private schools like Harvard and Yale. The faculty at the Ivies largely hate the socioeconomic background of their customers.
One qualification, however. The “private” school designation generally is highly misleading (excepting a few that take no federal funds like Hillsdale or Grove City colleges) since they almost all take copious amounts of money from the federal government. They also generally do not have to provide First Amendment protections afforded to students at state (public) universities because of their truly mislabeled “private” status.
All of this becomes important as a new administration contemplates the future of higher education. For example: Vice President-elect Vance, as a senator, championed a big increase in the federal endowment tax imposed on some wealthy schools. The perpetuation of an academically created aristocracy through private school legacy admissions may be challenged — I suspect with bipartisan support.
Other new constraints on universities are likely. For example, the tying of federally-funded research grants to strong university support for academic freedom (an idea from National Institutes of Health director nominee Jay Bhattacharya) will get consideration. More federal policing of fraudulent research findings can be expected.
President Trump has already served notice that he wants to revamp accreditation, too often used today to harass colleges to adopt policies more concerned with student skin coloration or gender identity than with academic merit. The Musk-Ramaswamy Department of Government Efficiency will very likely recommend consolidation of civil rights oversight, which now includes the contentious civil rights division in the Department of Education, along with a Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice, the U.S. Civil Rights Commissions, and other agencies.
Ridding the Education Department of civil rights involvement could be an important first step in eliminating the entire department, furthered by moving federal student loan activities to the Treasury Department in the short run and perhaps even eliminating them completely in the long term.
In such an evenly divided nation as the U.S., political control over the federal government is constantly oscillating, creating perpetual policy uncertainty for institutions of higher education, still another argument for downplaying the federal role, allowing the states, on average more homogenous in political philosophy, to oversee most higher education governmental regulation.
Richard Vedder is a distinguished professor of Economics Emeritus at Ohio University, senior fellow at the Independent Institute, and author of the forthcoming Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education.
READ MORE from Richard Vedder:
Does Academic Research Advance Human Welfare? Not Always.
Time to Put Our Fiscal House in Order
Are We at the Beginning of the End of Homo Sapiens?
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