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The Political Causes of the College Enrollment Crisis

Republican high schoolers don’t want to attend college anymore. That’s a problem for conservatives, for colleges, and for the country.

While Democratic boys and girls have expressed roughly the same desire to graduate from college since 2002, Republican high school students have significantly less interest in higher education than they did twenty years ago. According to a 2020 survey, for example, approximately 40% of social science and humanities faculty members agreed with the statement “I would consider myself as an activist.” As Derek Thompson recently wrote in the Atlantic, “in the past few years, many elite colleges and universities have cast themselves as “anti-racist” and “decolonial” enterprises that hire “scholar activists” as instructors and publish commentary on news controversies, as if they were editorial boards that happened to collect tuition.” Facing low birth rates and declining interest from international students, colleges and universities will not be able to travel along their current course and hope to remain fiscally solvent or socially relevant.

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