The researchers analyzed four decades of data on 7 million first-year college students and found that, since the 1980s, political polarization on college campuses has grown. Schools that traditionally enrolled more liberal students have become even more liberal, while conservative-leaning colleges have become more conservative. These shifts cannot be fully explained by changes in student demographics, academic readiness or state-level political trends, suggesting that enrollment choices and political self-sorting are playing a role. 

To better understand how ideology shapes enrollment, the researchers surveyed 1,028 undergraduates, presenting them with hypothetical colleges that varied in cost, type, location and political leanings of both the schools’ student bodies and the states in which they’re located. Using this experimental design, Acton, Cook and Araya found a strong willingness to pay for political alignment. 

Liberal students were willing to pay $2,617 more to attend a college with fewer conservative classmates, $1,162 more for campuses with more liberal peers and $3,064 more to attend a college in a state with a higher share of Democratic voters.

Conservative students were willing to pay $2,201 more to avoid liberal classmates and $2,720 more for colleges in states with fewer Democratic voters. But conservatives did not show a statistically significant preference for attending schools with more conservative students. Moderates, meanwhile, showed little political preference, though they tended to favor colleges in Democratic-leaning states. 

The research says these results suggest that students are increasingly uncomfortable with political differences on campus. Assuming that survey participants’ stated preferences reflect real-world decision-making, political identity appears to influence college enrollment choices alongside academic and financial considerations — a development with consequences not just for higher education, but for the nation more broadly.  

As the authors note, decreased political diversity on college campuses limits opportunities for students to engage with and be challenged by different perspectives. Exposure to diverse viewpoints has long been considered a core component of the college experience, helping students sharpen their reasoning skills, question assumptions and develop empathy. A more homogenous campus, by contrast, risks reinforcing echo chambers and discouraging the kind of debate upon which democratic societies depend. The Trump administration has criticized colleges for diminishing conservative voices, but as the new study suggests, homogeneity on campus doesn’t run in a single direction. 

Political self-sorting may also reinforce geographic and demographic divides. Political identity is correlated with factors such as race, income and whether students come from urban or rural areas, and these patterns could deepen the divides that already shape where Americans live and learn. And since college experiences strongly influence students’ long-term civic engagement, social networks and political identities, such self-sorting could further entrench polarization. 

“If colleges seek to ensure that students interact with others with opposing views,” the authors write, “our findings imply that they will need to actively work to attract a politically diverse pool of applicants and enrollees.” That is no easy task. As colleges face declining enrollment and intensifying political scrutiny, deliberate steps toward ideological diversity will require both resources — including outreach and recruitment efforts and scholarships — and political resolve. Efforts to promote free expression or diversity of viewpoints are often cast as political statements themselves, and recent federal restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion programs have made universities more cautious about launching initiatives that touch on identity or representation.

But if colleges are to remain places for open inquiry and civic preparation, campus leaders may need to make a more concerted effort to foster political diversity just as they do with racial, socioeconomic and other forms of representation. Otherwise, the sorting in higher education may further reinforce the social and political divides currently shaping the country.

As students head back to school this fall, how are they really doing in the aftermath of COVID-19? 

My organization, YouthTruth, a nonprofit that elevates student voices to help schools improve, set out to answer this question by consulting the experts: students themselves. We analyzed quantitative and qualitative feedback from over 500,000 middle and high school students gathered before, during and after the pandemic. From that data, we learned that student perceptions of learning and belonging in the 2022-23 school year returned to pre-pandemic levels — though troubling differences across student demographic groups remain, with LGBTQ+ students and students of color rating their sense of belonging less positively than their peers. Concerningly, however, students’ experiences with mental health and support from adults in school that worsened during COVID-19 have not recovered.

The most positive of the findings: Young people’s perceptions of learning and belonging followed similar patterns over the course of the pandemic, and both have bounced back to pre-COVID levels, according to the students.

Nonetheless, there remains much room for improvement. Only 42% of students say they feel like a real part of their school’s community. This matters both because of its intrinsic value – young people deserve to feel like they belong — and because belonging is and can catalyze students’ motivation to learn. 

Nearly half of all students surveyed in the 2022-23 school year reported that depression, stress or anxiety makes it hard for them to do their best in school. This proportion had increased steadily over the course of the pandemic, from 39% in spring 2020 to 48% in 2022-23. Meanwhile, the proportion of students saying there is an adult at school they can talk to when feeling upset, stressed or having problems decreased to just 41% in the 2022-23 school year from 46% pre-COVID.

This support gap, created by the simultaneous rise in students’ mental health as an obstacle to learning and decline in support from adults at school, emerged in fall 2020. It has since widened, despite significant attention to COVID’s impact on . Students in our surveys say there are not enough counselors and ask that their schools increase their efforts to reach out to students, to make the help they need “more accessible and clear” rather than just “pushing it under the surface.” The bottom line is that young people’s challenges with mental health and insufficient support are not getting better — not yet, anyway. And these challenges directly impact students’ ability to learn.

Amid this alarming mental health crisis and plummeting NAEP scores, the national narrative on is limited. The obsession with test scores, the pressure to catch up and one-dimensional accountability systems crowd out other integral sources of feedback about how students are doing. The world is taking shape around this younger generation, and decisions are being made about their future. Yet, far too often, their voices are ignored. 

Students are telling the country in no uncertain terms that education doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Social, emotional and academic learning are intrinsically linked, and it can progress only so far when these pieces are separated. This has always been true but is especially so now.
Students are imploring adults in and around schools not to go back to business as usual. In some of their own words: “Put us before test scores.” “Work alongside us.” “Actually listen to us.” As educators, administrators and policymakers move forward in this next chapter, they should remember that students are whole people who need whole solutions to succeed in school and in life. Part of the solution must be truly listening to them.

In the third and final survey of young people during the pandemic by the national nonprofit YouthTruth, 49 percent of students talked about the detrimental effects of growing mental and emotional issues while just 39 percent said they had an adult at school to whom they could turn for support. The gap in access to social and emotional help has widened even from fall 2020 survey data, at the start of students’ first full pandemic school year.

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YouthTruth Executive Director Jen Wilka said adult connection was actually at its highest at the start of emergency distance learning in spring 2020. Those interactions and energy, which students say is key to learning, are not as strong now a year and a half later, evidenced by the declining number of young people who say they have a supportive adult in their school orbit.

“Students really felt that increase in their teachers making an effort to sort of reach outside and beyond those virtual walls and understand what it is like,” Wilka said. “That has now waned, and is closer to normal, maybe a little bit higher than normal. We saw that really peak in spring 2020.”

One aspect of student-adult relationships in school that has improved over time is respect. Some 70 percent of students said they think adults treat youth with respect — up significantly from the 57 percent who believed that pre-pandemic.

A narrative animation compiles student write-in responses on stress, anxiety, and depression and how it affected their learning in 2020-21. (YouthTruth)

YouthTruth, which solicits student, family, and educator feedback, analyzed data from 206,950 third- through 12th-grade students across 19 states and 585 urban, suburban and rural schools. Open-ended and choice responses were solicited via anonymous 15-minute surveys from January through May 2021.

Previous pandemic-era surveys were conducted in 2020 by YouthTruth from (20,000 students) and (85,170 students). Mental health concerns have consistently been a barrier to learning, and high school seniors’ plans post-graduation continue to be affected by the pandemic. Students have been vocal about the importance of building relationships with their teachers, and their sense of belonging within their school community peaked in fall 2020.

Twenty-one percent of those most recently surveyed attend high-poverty schools, similar to the national average of 25 percent, and students’ racial identities mirror national averages.

For students of all gender identities, depression, stress, and anxiety has become more prevalent as a barrier to learning since fall 2020. For female- and non-binary identifying students, the rates are much higher, 60 and 83 percent, respectively.

Youth cite overwhelming workloads with assignments that lack relevance to their daily life and futures, according to write-in responses and qualitative analysis.

“School restricts me from being content with who I am,” one high school upperclassman shared. “We need to radically change the education system, it’s way overdue for that and it needs to right now. I cannot get out of bed anymore. I hate school more than how I used to. I’m mentally strained because of distance learning […] However, an English assignment and 11 other assignments are due by 11:59pm tonight because grades are so important – more important than surviving and finding new healthy coping mechanisms after all.”

Education leaders across the country are seeking ways to ameliorate growing concerns for students’ emotional and social well-being; a number of states plan to utilize American Rescue Plan funds to bolster mental health access.

In the North Clackamas School District, serving the greater Portland, Oregon area, social and mental health services were established pre-COVID yet leaders saw emotional needs grow during the pandemic. In response to the changing ways students needed access to adults and sought connection, the district partnered with providers and nonprofits to offer telehealth services, devices, and hotspots to youth and their families districtwide.

Through the pandemic, the district sought to make “sure that we had established pathways that were normalized, made very typical and open for families to access a mental health therapist,” Dr. Shelly Reggiani, the district’s director of equity and instruction, told The 74 during a YouthTruth press call last week.

In sharing other ways to remove learning barriers and improve engagement, youth said they’d like to see more real-world topics, like applying for higher education, financial aid, and jobs and learning personal finance.

Survey results show that fewer seniors surveyed this spring will head to four-year institutions this fall, a trend also reflected by declining enrollment rates, which saw the worst single-year decline since 2011. And though more will enroll in two-year colleges than in fall 2020 — about 20 percent of those surveyed — the proportion hasn’t yet rebounded to pre-pandemic levels.

Qualitative survey data revealed some of the barriers that persist for high schoolers looking to access higher education. Students recognized “the need for social capital (like from a teacher or sibling) as part of college access,” the confusing nature of the application process, which is typically formally taught during the school day, and felt that finding information and choosing to apply came “too late,” YouthTruth researchers told The 74.

“The school is pushing students to go to a four-year college and for most students they don’t want to go to a four-year college because they don’t want to go into debt,” one student said.

“Give us Pathways for the Future,” one of four video animations depicting trends from 480,000 open-ended responses and reflections on the 2020-21 academic year. (YouthTruth)

“They’re really searching for meaning in learning, and that’s an opportunity for us as educators to connect learning, and real life, and relevance to help address students’ needs here,” Sonya Heisters, YouthTruth’s deputy director, said.

Other notable findings

• Secondary school students’ perceptions of learning and belonging returned to pre-pandemic levels
• Many Spanish-speaking students detailed how language barriers became an additional obstacle to their learning during virtual and hybrid environments, and 21 percent of Hispanic/Latino students cited lack of teacher support as an obstacle to learning compared to just 14 percent of other students.
• Providing inclusive curricula, adopting anti-racist policies, and treating students fairly are common recommendations found among data from 5,000 Black / African-American students.
• Many students enjoyed paper-free learning, and hope to maintain access to online materials with the return to in-person school
• Black/African-American and Hispanic/Latino students report feeling unsafe in school at higher rates than their peers, at 11 and 16 percent respectively vs. 9 percent for non-Black, non-Hispanic students.
• 65 percent of students report that their teachers give extra help when needed, but this is more common among students who receive high academic grades

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to YouthTruth and The 74.