Decline in GOP Support for Higher Ed, 30 Years in the Making

Political scientist Eric Shickler has fond memories of his years as an undergraduate at the New College of Florida, and he recalls that many other Floridians in the late 1980s and early 1990s felt the same.

“You have this odd liberal arts college in a relatively conservative part of Florida. But at the time, there were a lot of Republican politicians who were really supportive of the school and saw it as an asset for the community,” Shickler said.

As he went on to complete his Ph.D. at Yale University and then join the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley—researching the development of polarization in American politics—Shickler’s memories of New College took a back seat.

That all changed in January 2023, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis began an all-out political attack on Shickler’s alma mater.

Declaring the once politically neutral college a place of “ideological conformity” and “woke activism,” DeSantis vowed to turn the campus into a “Hillsdale of the South,” invoking the small, private Christian liberal arts college in Michigan that—unlike New College—does not take government funding.

DeSantis appointed Christopher Rufo and five other conservative trustees to the board, who fired then-president Patricia Okker and axed the DEI office, among other things. As the campus chaos made national headlines, Shickler thought back to the New College he once knew.

“I found myself asking, how did we get from there to this takeover?” he said. “I was thinking, is this just the same story we’ve seen for issue after issue or is there something distinctive about higher ed that differentiates it from abortion, civil rights, gay rights and lots of other issues where the parties have polarized?”

So he decided to explore those very questions in his research. Drawing on a dataset based on the text of more than 1,000 state and national party platforms from 1980 to 2025, Shickler and his co-author, Elina Maria Rodriguez, conducted a series of keyword searches, tallying each time the platform used a term relevant to higher ed, such as “education,” “college,” “university,” “teach,” “professor” or “campus.” Then, using a detailed criteria guide and coding system, they hand scored each reference to higher ed. Explicitly negative remarks scored -2, while explicitly positive remarks scored +2. Many fell somewhere in the middle.

(To assess the reliability of this hand-scoring method, Shickler and Rodriguez each scored an overlapping sample of 50 platforms. Their scores matched exactly 73 percent of the time and fell within one point of each other 97 percent of the time.)

Based on the total scores, the final report, released in late April, concluded that like many other political issues, polarized perceptions of higher ed have been more than 30 years in the making. Republican criticism of higher ed began well before the second Trump administration proclaimed colleges and universities “the enemy.” But those critiques have really crystallized under the current government, Shickler and Rodriguez say.

Data showed that in the 1980s and early 1990s, Democrats and Republicans each devoted about 3 percent of their platform text to higher education. By the late ’90s, Republican attention had fallen to about 2 percent. But in 2020, near the end of Trump’s first term, the Republican focus increased, reaching nearly 4 percent by 2024. Democrats, on the other hand, stayed roughly the same over time.

At the same time, the average favorability scores among Republicans declined. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the GOP was “mildly favorable” toward higher ed, the study shows, with an average platform score of about 1.0 to 1.3—about a half point lower than the average Democratic favorability. From 2005 to 2010 the scores came in fairly neutral, hovering right around 0.0. But by 2024, the average Republican platform score was -1.6.

To the researchers, the period of neutrality followed by a rise in negative comments indicates changing priorities. But unlike other polarizing national issues, the shift in party views toward higher education—especially among Republicans—came from the top down, starting at the federal level and trickling down to states, rather than from the bottom up.

For years, political scientists have viewed the polarization of America’s two-party system as something that begins at the grassroots level, led by local activists who seize on a particular issue that then gets scooped up by a political party, crusading on behalf of those ideological groups to win over their votes.

While many party-line issues like abortion, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s—a time when bipartisanship and overlapping values were far more common than today—party-based concerns regarding higher education didn’t truly emerge until the late 1990s, when most party-line issues were already firmly nationalized.

“Conservative cable television outlets and social media platforms acted as a force multiplier for these efforts, making it more likely that each case of an alleged campus outrage would become a national story,” the report reads. “Rather than emanating from state and local politicians and parties responding to specific constituent demands, issue polarization today may be driven by nationally oriented ideological groups with little connection to grassroots actors.”

Other academics, including Tim Cain, associate director and professor of higher education at the University of Georgia, say the study is helpful in backing trends that college and university leaders have experienced but have found challenging to combat.

“The study helps to elucidate just how deeply entrenched these efforts to attack higher education are. We have a different sense of the scope and the scale of what higher education is up against,” he said. “It confirms things that we might have thought, but it does so in ways that provide real data to help us understand the current context of the politics of higher education.”

Cain, who has focused recently on tracking state legislation that attacks tenure—a staple of academic freedom—said the top-down model for ideological realignment regarding higher ed made sense. He pointed to his own focus area as an example.

“It’s not unusual that some of the legislation in different states has very similar language, because it’s being written by groups like the Goldwater Institute or the Heritage Foundation and then put out into the policy world,” he said. “So these national conversations are driving state action through conservative think tanks that are writing sample legislation, getting them into statehouses and getting them enacted.”

Other Key Findings

The report also shows that conservative criticisms of higher ed often trace back to ideological issues of race, gender and sexuality—like whether colleges used affirmative action in their admissions process, taught the history of racism in the U.S., affirmed and protected transgender students’ rights on campus, or provided LGBTQ+ affinity groups.

At first, Republicans often placed such concerns under the guise of free speech for conservative and religious individuals. Today, the Trump administration blatantly targets race and gender identity as issues that need to be managed on campuses, Shickler said.

One reason it may have taken public skepticism of higher ed so long to spread, he also noted, is that colleges have historically been a point of nonpartisan communal pride. Concepts like college spirit, the college town and football fandom are all ingrained in American culture. Many local leaders who are key to developing party platforms have personal ties to a particular institution.

“Their own kids went to the state university, often, or went to a good private university in the state. So they saw it as beneficial for their own voters,” Shickler said. “I still remember when I got to Berkeley [in the ’90s], Bruce Cain, my senior colleague, saying to me, ‘We actually do better when there’s a Republican governor, because the Democratic governor wants to fund a ton of stuff. For a Republican governor, that’s like one of the few big public programs that they see their own constituents really benefiting from.’”

That may explain why Republicans publicly criticize higher ed, but when funding is on the line, they are reluctant to act, Shickler added. While the Trump administration has proposed major funding cuts for university research, student success programs and federal student aid, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have almost unilaterally stymied the president’s goals.

Still, both Shickler and Tim Cain said, the rhetorical attacks, along with concrete tactics used by the White House and think tanks—such as lawsuits, investigations and funding freezes—can have a powerful effect.

That makes it hard to regain bipartisan support for higher ed, both men said. And while it makes sense that college administrators are hesitant to push back, Cain, of Georgia, hopes the data reminds them they cannot shy away in fear. Rather, if higher ed leaders want American academia to survive, they must prioritize a coordinated response to the criticism, he said.

“This is a much deeper problem than just Donald Trump. This is a long-term process of estrangement between higher ed and the Republican Party,” Shickler said. “In a two-party nationalized system, if one party views you as an enemy, that puts you in a vulnerable position. So any institution, if you’re in that vulnerable position, you just have to think really hard about what are our best options for addressing that.”