[snip]
However, if the reasoning is that college admissions at schools at the level of quality you would have been ok with (Ivys and equivalents), we should expect at least some right-wing schools that snatch those students up. Catholic colleges, perhaps: No, Boston College doesn’t count, and it’s a perfectly lovely school that couldn’t compete with Stanford. I’m going to guess that Georgetown is no poster-child for conservatism either, not to the extent that we would expect if student quality for admissions officers was distributed evenly across the political spectrum, Is anyone on my dash familiar with it?
Duke is southern by the standards of top schools: The Ivies have a history bias, obviously, but I can’t think of a school at that level in the South aside from Duke, while, starting from the steps of MIT, I can draw a straightish line that goes through University of Michigan, UChicago, the best writer’s program in the country at the University of Iowa, and wind up on the other side of the country coming towards San Francisco, home to your UC Berkeley and a junior university you may have heard of. One could make the case that UT Austin should be on the list, but one can make a stronger case that Austin is in the South in the same way that Japan isn’t Protestant.
This suggests that geography plays a role. Some students don’t want to go too far from home. While I obviously don’t understand this inclination, I am willing to accept that it is part of the equation.
I think it’s quite plausible that for a variety of reasons, possibilities ranging from (conservatism = survive/thrive = less focus on education and planning for future) to (perception of being unwelcome in academia leads to negative affect towards education) to (the Southern education system is terrible, & in modern American politics conservatism is increasingly southernized) to (younger people are more liberal), top students will be disproportionately liberal.
Oh, I definitely think top students are disproportionately liberal. But I think there might also be anti-conservative (or more accurately anti-Red Tribe) discrimination going on; according to Espenshade and Radford (or at least some description of their work I read somewhere) a lower-class white student is much less likely to be admitted to any given college than an upper-class white student with the same academic qualifications, and Red Tribe extracurriculars like 4-H club and ROTC decrease your admissions chances.
I’d guess that top Red Tribe students are more spread out and a lot are at their state universities.
But all that, I think, is completely beside the point. I think that the level of free speech is a sacred value, and student preferences will have very little impact (marginally, mass protests are different) on what mixture of free speech/silencing of liberal speech/silencing of conservative speech colleges, by which we mostly mean self interested administrators and to some extent professors, will choose.
Yeah, universities are not for-profit and I think the incentives of the administrators are pretty much “mold the university in accordance with my personal values as long as no one important gets too mad at me”