What’s driving Stanford’s culture of political apathy?

In late January, nearly 600 students and faculty members gathered at White Plaza as part of a coordinated national walkout to protest the Trump administration’s violent deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. In isolation, 600 participants may sound impressive, but on a campus of roughly 8,000 undergraduates, it represents only a small fraction of the student body.

The day before the protests, I asked several friends and peers whether they were planning to participate. The answers were negative across the board. One friend admitted that her primary reason for being at Stanford was to get a high-paying job rather than change the world. Several peers mentioned that as international students, they were afraid to risk their legal status for something as trivial as a protest. But whatever the case, students invariably seemed, to me, uninterested in civic engagement and disillusioned with its effects. 

This phenomenon is not unique to Stanford — in the past several years, Gen Z seems to have grown increasingly burnt-out when it comes to political participation. But Stanford in particular seems to hold a particularly apathetic culture when it comes to civic engagement in comparison to other prestigious universities. 

Stanford has, for some time, lagged behind peer institutions in voting rates and civic participation. According to the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement, 48.5% of eligible Stanford students voted in the 2016 presidential election, lower than the national average of 50.4% for higher education institutions and 52.3% for research universities. In 2024, ALL IN, a nonpartisan organization, released a list recognizing 458 universities, including six California state schools and seven of the eight Ivy League schools, for their commitment to increasing civic engagement. Stanford’s name was nowhere to be found.

So why is it that Stanford students, a group renowned for their intellectual curiosity, seem so disinterested in political engagement? There has been some speculation that Stanford’s administration comes down more harshly on student activism than other college campuses. But I believe the root problem is not disciplinary deterrence but Stanford’s campus culture. When comparing Stanford to its East Coast peers or even UC Berkeley across the Bay, discrepancies in civic involvement can be attributed to vastly different institutional values. Stanford’s campus environment and culture encourage channeling ambition toward technological and market solutions rather than democratic participation.

Unlike institutions like Georgetown, whose proximity to political power reinforces civic ambition, or Berkeley, whose identity is inseparable from protest culture, Stanford is embedded in Silicon Valley, a region that prizes private innovation over public governance. Students here are implicitly and explicitly taught that the path to greatest impact runs through venture funding and product design. Politics, by contrast, feels slow, bureaucratic and largely irrelevant to students’ career goals. The result is a culture in which civic participation is perceived as optional at best and unimportant at worst.

Stanford’s STEM-focused culture is a major factor in this discrepancy. STEM courses inherently prioritize different skills than humanities classes, emphasizing efficiency, problem-solving and quantifiable outcomes over interpretation, moral reasoning and open-ended deliberation. Because the humanities are often looked down upon by Stanford students, the latter skill set is neglected in favor of the former, leading to a student body that is ill-equipped to analyze, understand and impact our political system. 

This pattern cannot be solely attributed to Stanford’s technical focus; regional ethos also plays a role. Other STEM-heavy institutions do not exist within the same venture-capital ecosystem that defines Stanford’s cultural identity. From its garage startup origin stories to its long list of entrepreneurial alumni, Stanford is shrouded in stories that venerate the founder, the innovator, the disrupter — not the lawmaker or the politician. It is perhaps unsurprising then that compared to other technology-focused schools such as MIT or Caltech, Stanford students pay less attention to politics than is perhaps warranted. Success, for us, is measured by reinventing institutions and disrupting normalcy instead of helping to uphold those long-lasting democratic systems. 

Not every university needs to be a breeding ground for activism. Technological innovation and private equity are as fundamental to shaping society as politics and law. But the outsized influence Stanford graduates exercise in society makes it vital that they understand our political landscape and uphold democratic values — regardless of what field they choose. Silicon Valley tech executives influence elections, surveillance systems and information ecosystems. Venture capitalists affect which platforms mediate public discourse and which data systems governments rely on. Students preparing to take on such roles must also prepare to exercise their disproportionate power with political awareness and ethical responsibility. 

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