Fear Not Over Liberal Professors

I found this OpinionJournal.com piece somewhat comforting since my daughter will be heading off to college next fall in Northern California where liberals reign supreme. I have no fear in her political and social views being changed for the worse by the experience, and this article says the facts seem to bear that out:

Most studies of the subject have indicated that, indeed, upward of 90% of college professors at many universities hold liberal political views. In some schools and departments, faculties are virtually 100% left-wing. It is one thing to lament this ideological lopsidedness in the academy. But it is quite another to assume that professors actually bend the little minds in their care toward a liberal point of view, or even a radical one. Imagine a student with God-fearing Republican parents exposed to the depredations of an English professor aiming to use his class as a Bolshevik training camp. Will the professor succeed in turning the kid into a Red? The evidence says, probably not: When it comes to politics, people from conservative families follow their parents, not their professors.

The most recent evidence on this subject comes from the mid-1990s, in the University of Michigan's National Election Studies. These survey data uncover two facts. First, people who go to college are more likely to vote Republican than those who don't go to college. Adults 25 and under from Republican homes are, for example, 11 percentage points more likely to vote Republican if they attended college than if they didn't. And young adults from Democratic households are 11 percentage points less likely to vote Democrat if they've gone to college than if not.

Second, nearly everybody grows more likely to vote Republican as they age--but especially college graduates. It is no shock that the vast majority of people of all educational backgrounds from Republican homes vote Republican by age 40. It may come as more of a surprise that 40-year-olds with Democrat parents are far less likely to vote Democrat if they've gone to college than if they haven't. In fact, while three-quarters of the uneducated group still vote Democrat, the odds are only about 50-50 that the college graduates vote this way. And they've not all become skeptical political independents: Fully a third are registered Republicans.

Obviously, some kids turn left in college--but this appears to be the exception, not the rule. Does all this mean that our colleges and universities are actually breeding grounds for conservatism? Hardly. What the statistics really show is that higher education by itself doesn't affect political views very much. Rather, in addition to the strong influence of parents, it is higher incomes--which typically reward a college education in America--that push people to the right politically. In Republican families, the income effect reinforces parents' influence on their kids. In Democratic families, the two effects work against each other.

To fearful Republican parents, then: Sleep tight. When it comes to politics, your kids are in good hands--yours.

My daughter has learned to laugh at lefties like I do, which may aggravate a prof or two, but will certainly keep her sane during her college years.