The Republican Party War Against College Students... And Education

Old white men-- rich ones or stupid, angry ones-- they're ok with. Everyone else... it's a jihad. But the GOP doing all they can to keep college students from voting is understandable for a GOP strategist. College students don't tend to vote for Republicans. Their concerns aren't usually addressed, at least not adequately, by a Law of the Jungle vision for a society dominated by a few wealthy families and omnipotent, unaccountable corporations. So wherever the GOP has taken over, they have done their best, or worst, to disenfranchise as many students as possible. The American tradition of encouraging citizen participation in democracy has always been antithetical to conservative interests and conservatives have always fought hard to prevent expanding the franchise. Once the American Revolution, largely opposed by conservatives, was won and democratic ideals were enshrined in the national consciousness, the conservatives who didn't flee to England or Canada set about to limit democracy as best they could. Aside from demanding that slavery been institutionalized, they opposed lowering the voting age, opposed women being allowed to vote, opposed non-property owners being allowed to vote, etc. And now the Republican Party would like to re-litigate all of these issues.

A few days ago Tomas Edsall's NY Times column dealt with the threat to conservatism by an educated populace. We already saw earlier in the campaign how Romney and Santorum have questioned the American tradition of educating our young. Santorum went so far-- just at the point when the bottom fell out of his quasi-plausible campaign-- as to call President Obama a snob for advocating educational opportunities for young people. That didn't make sense to anyone-- except die-hard Republicans (and, of course, morons).

Romney, the all-but-certain nominee, was blunt when speaking in March at a metal assembly plant in Youngstown, Ohio: “It would be popular for me to stand up and say I’m going to give you government money to pay for your college, but I’m not going to promise that.”

There is a partisan logic to the Republican hostility to higher education: the well-educated-- a reliable source of conservative support as recently as the 1980s — have been moving steadily toward the Democratic Party. In a head-to-head contest, a March 26 McClatchy-Marist Poll shows Romney ahead of Obama 47-42 among those without college degrees, while Obama leads Romney 51-42 among those with them. Similarly, those without college degrees lean toward voting for Republican congressional candidates 49-40, while those with them lean toward Democrats 46-44.

Not only are Democrats making gains among the better-educated, but these voters are becoming a larger share of the electorate. Exit polls show the growth of the college-educated voting bloc.
In 1984, those with college and advanced degrees made up 35.3 percent of the electorate. Reagan’s strongest margins were among the college educated, who backed him over Walter F. Mondale by a crushing 62.7-36.9 margin. Among all those with both college and advanced degrees, Reagan won 58.7 percent, a landslide margin.

Jump to 2008. Even though those with college degrees made up 27.9 percent of the population that year, they cast 45 percent of the presidential vote. These voters register and go to the polls in substantially higher numbers than the less well educated.

By 2008, the Republican advantage of the early 1980s among voters with a college degree or higher had disappeared. Barack Obama carried this demographic with 54.1 percent. He beat McCain 50-48 among those with bachelor’s degrees, and by a decisive 58-40 among the 17 percent of the 2008 electorate with post-graduate degrees.

The shifting allegiance of the better-educated-- together with the growth of such pro-Democratic constituencies as single women, Hispanics and African-Americans-- has been a crucial factor in the revival of the Democratic Party as a fully competitive force in presidential elections. The party’s gains have, in many respects, made up for losses among white working class voters.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the defection of Reagan Democrats gave the Republican Party a clear edge in national contests; by the 1990s and 2000s, the once reliably Republican affluent suburbs surrounding cities like New York and Philadelphia had moved in the opposite direction, empowering the Democratic Party to win the White House in 1992, 1996, and 2008, and the popular vote, if not the presidency, in 2000. By contrast, in the 1970s and 1980s, Republican presidential candidates won, on average, 59 percent of the upscale suburban vote.

The gains the Democrats made were concentrated in one major segment of the well-educated: professionals-- salaried employees in schools and colleges, social workers, the arts, the natural and social sciences, knowledge/information workers, “symbol analysts,” “creatives” and so forth.

...On the Republican side of the aisle, the aversion to federally funded scholarship aid-- as demonstrated, for example, in the budget passed last week by the Republican House-- has significant consequences for the party’s core supporters.

The children of the white working class are in need of financial support to pay for tuition at a two or four-year colleges as a path to upward mobility. The overwhelming majority of Pell Grants, 63.3 percent, go to low income whites, while 11.8 percent goes to African-American students, 13.2 percent to Hispanics, 6.8 percent to Asian-Americans, and the rest to other groups.

This year, Romney will need to win by a wide margin among those for whom access to post-secondary education is a key issue-- particularly white men whose wages have stagnated or eroded more than those of women.

...Romney’s refusal to promise that he will “give you government money to pay for your college” is a risky approach to courting ambitious lower income voters. Democrats see Romney setting a trap for himself and have already begun to lay the general election groundwork.

The increasing salience of education provides Democrats with an effective means of countering the problem of an underperforming economy, as President Obama demonstrated in a speech on Feb. 27: “We can’t allow higher education to be a luxury in this country. It’s an economic imperative that every family in America has to be able to afford.”

Romney, in turn, appears to recognize that he has stepped onto treacherous terrain. His Web site now declares: “Post-secondary education cannot become a luxury for the few; instead, all students should have the opportunity to attend a college that best suits their needs. Whether it is public or private, traditional or online, college must be available and affordable.”