{"id":16133,"date":"2026-05-13T16:21:42","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T16:21:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/13\/decline-in-gop-support-for-higher-ed-30-years-in-the-making-inside-higher-ed\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T16:21:42","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T16:21:42","slug":"decline-in-gop-support-for-higher-ed-30-years-in-the-making-inside-higher-ed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/13\/decline-in-gop-support-for-higher-ed-30-years-in-the-making-inside-higher-ed\/","title":{"rendered":"Decline in GOP Support for Higher Ed, 30 Years in the Making – Inside Higher Ed"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The political polarization of lawmakers\u2019 views on higher ed may be at an all-time high, but it didn\u2019t come out of nowhere. One researcher says it\u2019s been brewing since the late 1980s.
By <\/span> Jessica Blake <\/a>
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison\/Inside Higher Ed | Vasyl Helevachuk and Chinnasorn Pangcharoen\/iStock\/Getty Images | Rawpixel
Political scientist Eric Schickler has fond memories of his years as an undergraduate at the New College of Florida, and he recalls that many other Floridians in the late 1980s and early 1990s felt the same.
\u201cYou have this odd liberal arts college in a relatively conservative part of Florida. But at the time, there were a lot of Republican politicians who were really supportive of the school and saw it as an asset for the community,\u201d Schickler said.
As he went on to complete his Ph.D. at Yale University and then join the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley\u2014researching the development of polarization in American politics\u2014Schickler\u2019s memories of New College took a back seat.
That all changed in January 2023, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis began an all-out political attack on Schickler\u2019s alma mater.
Declaring the once politically neutral college a place of \u201cideological conformity\u201d and \u201cwoke activism,\u201d<\/a> DeSantis vowed to turn the campus into a \u201cHillsdale of the South,\u201d<\/a> invoking the small, private Christian liberal arts college in Michigan that\u2014unlike New College\u2014does not take government funding.
Eric Schickler
DeSantis appointed<\/a> Christopher Rufo and five other conservative trustees to the board, who fired then-president Patricia Okker and axed the DEI office<\/a>, among other things. As the campus chaos<\/a> made national<\/a> headlines<\/a>, Schickler thought back to the New College he once knew.
\u201cI found myself asking, how did we get from there to this takeover?\u201d he said. \u201cI was thinking, is this just the same story we\u2019ve seen for issue after issue or is there something distinctive about higher ed that differentiates it from abortion, civil rights, gay rights and lots of other issues where the parties have polarized?\u201d
So he decided to explore those very questions in his research<\/a>. Drawing on a dataset based on the text of more than 1,000 state and national party platforms from 1980 to 2025, Schickler and his co-author, Elina Maria Rodriguez, conducted a series of keyword searches, tallying each time the platform used a term relevant to higher ed, such as \u201ceducation,\u201d \u201ccollege,\u201d \u201cuniversity,\u201d \u201cteach,\u201d \u201cprofessor\u201d or \u201ccampus.\u201d Then, using a detailed criteria guide and coding system, they hand scored each reference to higher ed. Explicitly negative remarks scored -2, while explicitly positive remarks scored +2. Many fell somewhere in the middle.
Elina Maria Rodriguez<\/span>
(To assess the reliability of this hand-scoring method, Schickler and Rodriguez each scored an overlapping sample of 50 platforms. Their scores matched exactly 73 percent of the time and fell within one point of each other 97 percent of the time.)
Based on the total scores, the final report<\/a>, released in late April, concluded that like many other political issues, polarized perceptions of higher ed have been more than 30 years in the making. Republican criticism of higher ed began well before the second Trump administration proclaimed colleges and universities \u201cthe enemy.\u201d But those critiques have really crystallized under the current government, Schickler and Rodriguez say.
Data showed that in the 1980s and early 1990s, Democrats and Republicans each devoted about 3 percent of their platform text to higher education. By the late \u201990s, Republican attention had fallen to about 2 percent. But in 2020, near the end of Trump\u2019s first term, the Republican focus increased, reaching nearly 4 percent by 2024. Democrats, on the other hand, stayed roughly the same over time.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the average favorability scores among Republicans declined. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the GOP was \u201cmildly favorable\u201d toward higher ed, the study shows, with an average platform score of about 1.0 to 1.3\u2014about a half point lower than the average Democratic favorability. From 2005 to 2010 the scores came in fairly neutral, hovering right around 0.0. But by 2024, the average Republican platform score was -1.6.
To the researchers, the period of neutrality followed by a rise in negative comments indicates changing priorities. But unlike other polarizing national issues, the shift in party views toward higher education\u2014especially among Republicans\u2014came from the top down, starting at the federal level and trickling down to states, rather than from the bottom up.
For years, political scientists have viewed the polarization of America\u2019s two-party system as something that begins at the grassroots level, led by local activists who seize on a particular issue that then gets scooped up by a political party, crusading on behalf of those ideological groups to win over their votes.
While many party-line issues like abortion, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s\u2014a time when bipartisanship and overlapping values were far more common than today\u2014party-based concerns regarding higher education didn\u2019t truly emerge until the late 1990s, when most party-line issues were already firmly nationalized.
\u201cConservative cable television outlets and social media platforms acted as a force multiplier for these efforts, making it more likely that each case of an alleged campus outrage would become a national story,\u201d the report reads. \u201cRather than emanating from state and local politicians and parties responding to specific constituent demands, issue polarization today may be driven by nationally oriented ideological groups with little connection to grassroots actors.\u201d
Other academics, including Tim Cain, associate director and professor of higher education at the University of Georgia, say the study is helpful in backing trends that college and university leaders have experienced but have found challenging to combat.
\u201cThe study helps to elucidate just how deeply entrenched these efforts to attack higher education are. We have a different sense of the scope and the scale of what higher education is up against,\u201d he said. \u201cIt confirms things that we might have thought, but it does so in ways that provide real data to help us understand the current context of the politics of higher education.\u201d
Cain, who has focused recently on tracking state legislation that attacks tenure\u2014a staple of academic freedom\u2014said the top-down model for ideological realignment regarding higher ed made sense. He pointed to his own focus area as an example.
\u201cIt\u2019s not unusual that some of the legislation in different states has very similar language, because it\u2019s being written by groups like the Goldwater Institute or the Heritage Foundation and then put out into the policy world,\u201d he said. \u201cSo these national conversations are driving state action through conservative think tanks that are writing sample legislation, getting them into statehouses and getting them enacted.\u201d
The report also shows that conservative criticisms of higher ed often trace back to ideological issues of race, gender and sexuality\u2014like whether colleges used affirmative action in their admissions process, taught the history of racism in the U.S., affirmed and protected transgender students\u2019 rights on campus, or provided LGBTQ+ affinity groups.
At first, Republicans often placed such concerns under the guise of free speech for conservative and religious individuals. Today, the Trump administration blatantly targets race and gender identity as issues that need to be managed on campuses, Schickler said.
One reason it may have taken public skepticism of higher ed so long to spread, he also noted, is that colleges have historically been a point of nonpartisan communal pride. Concepts like college spirit, the college town and football fandom are all ingrained in American culture. Many local leaders who are key to developing party platforms have personal ties to a particular institution.
\u201cTheir own kids went to the state university, often, or went to a good private university in the state. So they saw it as beneficial for their own voters,\u201d Schickler said. \u201cI still remember when I got to Berkeley [in the \u201990s], Bruce Cain, my senior colleague, saying to me, \u2018We actually do better when there\u2019s a Republican governor, because the Democratic governor wants to fund a ton of stuff. For a Republican governor, that\u2019s like one of the few big public programs that they see their own constituents really benefiting from.\u2019\u201d
That may explain why Republicans publicly criticize higher ed, but when funding is on the line, they are reluctant to act, Schickler added. While the Trump administration has proposed major funding cuts for university research, student success programs and federal student aid, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have almost unilaterally stymied the president\u2019s goals<\/a>.
Still, both Schickler and Tim Cain said, the rhetorical attacks, along with concrete tactics used by the White House and think tanks\u2014such as lawsuits, investigations and funding freezes\u2014can have a powerful effect.
That makes it hard to regain bipartisan support for higher ed, both men said. And while it makes sense that college administrators are hesitant to push back, Cain, of Georgia, hopes the data reminds them they cannot shy away in fear. Rather, if higher ed leaders want American academia to survive, they must prioritize a coordinated response to the criticism, he said.
\u201cThis is a much deeper problem than just Donald Trump. This is a long-term process of estrangement between higher ed and the Republican Party,\u201d Schickler said. \u201cIn a two-party nationalized system, if one party views you as an enemy, that puts you in a vulnerable position. So any institution, if you\u2019re in that vulnerable position, you just have to think really hard about what are our best options for addressing that.\u201d
A review of tens of thousands of admissions essays at a selective college show an increase in homogeneous language af
Trump\u2019s Justice Department has ramped up enforcement of the Supreme Court ban on race-conscious admissions prac<\/span>
Pamela Evette said Thursday she\u2019s \u201cnot a vindictive person.\u201d But she\u2019s gotten behind a push by some lawmakers t<\/span>
Learn how institutions are rethinking assessment and validating learning in this new era.<\/span>
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Institutional AccessYour institution provides full access to Inside Higher Ed content.Institutional AccessYour institution provides full access to Inside Higher Ed content.The political polarization of lawmakers\u2019 views on higher ed may be at an all-time high, but it didn\u2019t come out of nowhere. One researcher says it\u2019s been brewing since the late 1980s. By  Jessica Blake […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16134,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-16133","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16133\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globalnewstoday.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}