Liberal Arts, Conservative Wallets: How College Majors Steer Students’ Politics

For the roughly 15 million college undergraduates in the United States, the benefits of pursuing higher education include better employment prospects, greater social mobility, and even longer-lasting marriages. Research released last year, however, finds that at least one important life outcome — political ideology — is heavily dependent not merely on the decision to attend college, but also on the particular subjects students choose to study. 

The paper, authored by Israeli academics Yoav Goldstein and Matan Kolerman, used survey responses from nearly 500 American colleges and universities to isolate the political impact of students’ choice of college majors. Those who predominantly take classes in humanities and most social science disciplines became substantially more likely to self-identify as liberal over the course of their college years; those earning economics and business degrees, meanwhile, largely resisted that drift, adopting more right-leaning stances on economic issues like taxation and socialized healthcare. 

Because those effects might result from self-sorting by liberals and conservatives into majors that affirm their already-held beliefs, the authors controlled for undergraduates’ pre-college ideologies, intended majors, and life goals. Those steps showed very similar young people taking opposite political paths after being exposed to divergent academic content. 

Kolerman, a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, didn’t offer an explanation for why those changes occurred, observing only that the main result clearly showed “very, very important” consequences resulting from the choices made by students selecting their course of study.

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“It just seems that college majors have huge effects,” he said. “We don’t know many other social science papers that find such large effects on any institution in democratic societies.”

Kolerman and Matan drew their data from UCLA’s Cooperative Institutional Research Program survey, which has been administered to both incoming freshmen and exiting seniors since 1990. Their sample focused on roughly 310,000 undergraduates attending 477 four-year colleges between 1990 and 2015. The poll includes students’ intended course of study upon enrollment, their actual major upon college completion, and a spectrum of political self-description along a five-point scale (1 for furthest right, 5 for furthest left). 

The average respondent was about seven percentage points more likely to self-identify as liberal or left-wing by the end of college. Humanities and social science majors were especially likely to move left (by 10.5 points and 10.7 points, respectively), while business and economics majors migrated much more incrementally in that direction (2.4 points). In general, students who began in the middle of the spectrum were more likely to eventually describe themselves as liberal (26 percent) than conservative (15 percent).

The authors also studied how students in each category changed their positions on individual policy questions relative to those studying the natural sciences (such as physics or biology), who were chosen as a reference group because of the largely apolitical content of their coursework. The comparison showed humanities and social science students gradually taking a much more leftward orientation on virtually every item, including the death penalty, marijuana legalization, climate change, and higher taxes on the wealthy. But business and economics majors developed more conservative positions than those focusing on natural sciences — and the effect on economic issues, such as tax levels or socialized healthcare, was more than three times that of cultural issues like abortion or LGBT rights.

Kolerman remarked that, given America’s “heated debate” over both college instruction and social politics, it was significant how much of the influence of different majors hinged on economic questions.

“Much of the political debate in the U.S. is related to cultural issues, but it seems like a larger fraction of the effect is on economic issues,” he observed.

Strikingly, some evidence also pointed to broader behavioral shifts depending on major choice. 

Queried about their life goals, business and economics majors were more likely to assign greater importance to financial success than other students, even including those focusing on high-earning fields like engineering. They were also more likely to prioritize starting a family, while social science and humanities majors placed more emphasis on keeping up with current events, influencing social goals, and seeking purpose in life.

‘Compelling evidence’

While the researchers hesitated to make strong claims about the cause for students’ ideological movement, the data do suggest that these trends reflect the political values of college faculty themselves.

Most polls of professors demonstrate a heavy imbalance favoring liberals and Democrats across virtually all academic departments, though a 2025 study appeared to show the skew receding as more instructors disaffiliated from parties altogether. To examine the relationship of teacher and student beliefs, Goldstein and Kolerman relied on UCLA’s faculty survey, which has been conducted regularly at the same colleges enrolling their undergraduate sample.

Among students who chose the humanities or social science same major, they discovered, exposure to more liberal liberal faculty members was significantly correlated with the adoption of more liberal views.

Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at Ohio State University, called the study “compelling evidence” that students’ political transformation during their college years can be attributed to what is being taught in classrooms, rather than the residue of social interactions between students. Still, he added, the force of professors’ ideology is likely applied indirectly — in the sheer predominance of liberal-minded faculty, for example — rather than through deliberate preaching.

“I wouldn’t go as far as calling this evidence of indoctrination,” Kogan argued. “I don’t think this is conscious. I just think it reflects the lack of ideological diversity in some of these disciplines.”

Goldstein and Kolerman’s work has already attracted significant public attention. Its conclusions also dovetail with those of some other scholars. In 2024, British political scientist Ralph Scott published a study showing that U.K. graduates who studied the arts, humanities, and social sciences became more socially liberal than their peers at the same institutions. Another of his papers pointed to a similar phenomenon even earlier in the education cycle, finding that high school students who devoted more time to arts and humanities subjects were later more likely to vote for more liberal political parties. 

Kogan warned that institutions of higher learning, especially those accountable to Republican voters and officeholders, could pay a price if they are seen as shepherding their charges to the left. Already, red states like Texas have targeted DEI programs and policies in public universities, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched the takeover and reform of the New College of Florida, vowing to recreate it into a school steeped in the principles of classical education.

“We want to continue getting support from taxpayers, and it’s going to be really hard to make that argument if policy makers think that you’re going to be turning future voters against them,” Kogan concluded. “It’s something that I definitely think we need to take seriously.”