Is the war over higher education spreading north?

In the US, higher education has become a partisan issue. While Democrats view colleges and universities as having a positive effect on the way things are going in the country, a majority of Republicans now view colleges and universities as a negative influence (see this Pew survey). There is also a partisan divide in the US over the fundamental purpose of university.  According to Pew survey data, Democrats, particularly educated ones, see the primary purpose of university as personal growth, whereas Republicans consider specific skills of more importance. Is there a similar partisan split in attitudes towards higher education in this country?

The only Canadian data I could find that gathered information about both attitudes towards university education and political leanings was the September, 2016 Forum Poll for Ontario, conduced by the company Forum Research. Two questions from the poll that ask about the purpose of university education are:

How important is it to you that Ontario´s universities excel at instilling a passion for lifelong learning in students?

and

    How important is it to you that Ontario´s universities excel at teaching soft skills?

To each of these questions, respondents could answer very important, somewhat important, not very important, not important at all, or don't know. For each question, the most common answer was "very important". So, for example, 66 percent of respondents who had an opinion on the matter said that it was very important to them that Ontario universities excel at instilling a passion for life-long learning in students.

In what follows, I try to understand people's attitudes towards universities relate to their political leanings. I have information about voting intentions from this Forum poll question:

"If a provincial election were held today, which party are you most likely to vote for?" 

Here is how the results to the "passion for learning" question differ by voting intentions. The dot represents the group average; the whiskers represent a 95% confidence interval. PC stands for "Progressive Conservative", the party associated with the right in Ontario politics. Undecided voters were dropped from the analysis. 

The majority of respondents, whatever their political affiliation, considered it "very important" that universities excel. Responses did differ across party lines. But what does this mean? Excelling is unimportant? Passion doesn't matter, or life-long learning doesn't? I would like to argue that "passion for life-long learning" is similar to Pew's concept of "personal growth", which is why it appeals to liberals and not conservatives, but the correspondence is not exact.

When it comes to soft skills, there is no clear political divide. Also, the overall percentage of people considering these to be very important is lower. I suspect the reason that the Pew poll quoted earlier finds such a strong partisan divide over the importance of teaching skills is that the phrasing of their question forces people to choose a single main purpose of college - to decide between skills and growth. In the Forum poll, people could answer that both passion and skills were very important. Many people, across the political spectrum, did so.

One reason to be slightly cautious about making too much of the Forum poll's soft skills question is that university-educated respondents could have been primed by an earlier question asking, " Do you agree or disagree your experience at university provided you with the soft skills needed for life-long success?" Interestingly, the differences in responses across party lines to this question are quite dramatic:

This graph shows a relationship between voting intentions and ex-post satisfaction with university experience. Yet what is driving this relationship? Perhaps people who are more successful in the job market would be more likely to agree that their university experience provided them with the tools for success, and are also attracted to the Liberal's pro-Establishment message? Perhaps PCs enjoy their university experience less than Liberals, because of anti-conservative sentiment on campus? But, if that is true, why do NDP voters align with Conservatives, and Greens have even more negative views of their university experiences than PCs? Perhaps educated younger voters who are struggling in the job market are driving Green voters' dissatisfaction with higher education?

The above graphs simply show raw relationships in the data, and do not control for a wide range of possibly confounding factors, such as age, education level, income, gender, and so on. So I  ran some regressions. What these regressions reveal is that the results described in the graphs are fairly robust. The differences that look large in the plots above are statistically significant with the addition of multiple controls, and the point estimates do not change much. 

 

 

This post started with the observation that, in the US, a partisan divide is emerging over the value and purpose of higher education. The evidence for this divide is taken from a series of Pew poll questions designed to emphasize division - questions that asked people whether colleges had an overall positive or negative influence; whether the purpose of college should specific skills or personal growth.

The Ontario Forum Research survey's questions did not force such disagreements. Respondents could opt for both soft skills and also passion for learning. Most did, painting an overall positive picture about attitudes towards universities in the province.

Yet there are partisan divides in the perceived purpose of universities in Ontario.The predictable liberal/conservative division is there in terms of beliefs about the importance of passion. There are also further, more subtle divisions, revealed by Canada's multi-party system. Supporters of the Green party, which has high levels of support among young and educated Canadians, are by some measures more negative about universities than conservatives.

Polling data is not the most reliable source of information in the world. Nevertheless, as someone in the education business, I find the the graph showing how many PC and Green leaning voters were dissatisfied with their university experience profoundly disturbing. 

Comments

[Nick Rowe]

Good post.
Greens surprised me. My *guess* is that Greens are the most skeptical about the Establishment Education System (in which Liberals are the true believers)?

[Frances Woolley]

Thanks Nick. I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of the Green party in Canada. On many issues e.g. income splitting for tax purposes, it lines up with a conservative position. It's "lefty" positions e.g. carbon taxes, marijuana legalization, tend to be socially liberal but fiscally conservative and market oriented. The leader of the Green Party, Mike Schreiner, is a local small business owner - admittedly of an organic company.

Given the extent to which traditional conservative parties are becoming gerontocracies/jumping the shark/both, there is space on the political spectrum for a non-looney centre-right party. That's where the Greens are, even if the mainstream media doesn't realize it.

[steve]

I wish they would ask the question the way I would want it phrased, but I guess we are probably guilty of that. he way I would phrase it is that universities should give us the skills to learn how to learn. Coming out with a specific set of skills is nice. Knowing how to teach yourself new ones as needed is even better.

Stevesteve

[Andrew Park]

The leader of the Greens has NOT been Mike Schreiner for over a decade. Elizabeth May MP for Saanich Gulf Islands is leader of the Green Party of Canada.

Another point, when one talks about "soft skills" maybe the supporters of different parties are thinking about different things when they conceptualize soft skills. For liberals it might be "schmoozing and influencing people" while for Greens maybe it's oh I dont know, emotional intelligence and student associations.

[Frances Woolley]

Andrew - provincially. Elizabeth May is the federal leader, Mike Schreiner is the provincial leader. This post is entirely about Ontario as it uses Ontario data only.

I agree with you about "soft skills" meaning whatever you choose it to mean - and the fact that the university educated were primed with "soft skills necessary for life-long success" whereas the non-university educated weren't means that the two groups may be interpreting "soft skills" differently in the second question, which doesn't have the "lifetime success" bit.