People with more education used to be more likely to vote Republican than people with less education. Things have now reversed, so more educated people are less likely to vote Republican. Is that because more educated people have moved towards the Democrats, or less educated people have moved towards the Republicans, or some of both? The figure shows average party identification in the General Social Survey, 1972-2018 (I limit it to whites, because the black vote is overwhelmingly Democratic and there's never been a clear educational divide).
Republicans are 3, Independents 2, and Democrats are 1, so an average of 2.0 means equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans. Between 1972 and 1990, both college graduates and people without college degrees moved towards the Republicans, at about the same rate. Since the 1990s, the groups have diverged: college graduates have moved towards the Democrats, while people without college degrees have stayed about the same.
So the reversal of the "education gap" has been mostly the result of changes among more educated people. Of course, there may also be currents of opinion that affect people of all educational levels, so it's possible that the changes among college graduates reflect the general current of opinion, while the changes among less educated people reflect the general current plus some offsetting factor.
However, the practical implications of the two interpretations aren't too different. Either Republicans should be concerned about the trend among educated people, or they should be concerned about the general current. Either way, it means they should be concerned about stopping their losses among educated people, whether that's by specifically appealing to educated people or by appealing to people in general. But that doesn't seem to be the case--as I've mentioned before, they seem to be fascinated by the idea that they can win by becoming a "working-class party" (see this piece by Josh Hawley for an example), and uninterested in winning back educated voters.
They are concerned about stopping their losses among educated people. That's why they want to crack down on universities. The change isn't a result of knowledge acquired during education, it's a result of the rise of Democrats' use of education as a form of indoctrination, which targets credulous and inexperienced children to sell them a set of beliefs. It's been very successful, as the universities are populated almost entirely by Democrats - especially in social sciences and journalism, where finding a conservative is an extended project.
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