Anathema With Good Reason? (December 21, 2007)

Former Prime Minister, John Howard, may have had good reason for viewing academia with a jaundiced eye.

Matthew Woessner of Pennsylvania State University, with political scientist April Kelly-Woessner of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania have analysed data on more than 15,000 US university students collected by the Higher Education Research Institute of the University of California, Los Angeles.

In a  paper presented last month at a meeting of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Professor Woessner reported that self-described liberals and conservatives report no difference in grades or in the quality of their education. However, liberal college students are twice as likely as conservative ones to pursue PhDs. The Woessners concluded the the principal reasons are differences in values, goals, and preferences. Liberals placed higher values on creativity; conservatives were more oriented toward raising families and making money. As a result, conservatives are attracted more to "professional" majors. But even within the same area, such as social science, almost twice as many liberals wanted advanced degrees, and "Our findings hold for the hard sciences as well."