A few days ago, David Brooks wrote that Donald Trump "has an advantage that Haley can't match. He is reviled by the coastal professional classes. That’s a sacred bond with working-class and rural voters who feel similarly slighted and unseen." Today, Damon Linker offered a similar analysis: "fundamental to Mr. Trump’s strength is populist anger at 'them' — the progressive-leaning elites who graduate from the country’s most selective universities, control the commanding heights of culture, run America’s leading public institutions and media outlets and sneer at him and his supporters, calling them racists, xenophobes, misogynists and fascists." I could go on piling up citations--Bret Stephens wrote something similar a few days ago--but this is a blog post, not a research paper, so I'll get to the data. In 2021, a Pew survey asked how people felt about various possible characteristics of political leaders, including "Has a degree from a prestigious university, such as Harvard or Stanford." Overall, 7% said they liked that a lot, 14% that they liked it a little, 5.6% that they disliked it a little, and 5.8% that they disliked it a lot. The majority (about 67%) said they neither liked nor disliked it. What if we break it down by groups? To make comparison easier, I show the percent who say they like it minus the percent who say they dislike it--e. g., among college graduates, 23% say like and 10% say disklike, for a net of +13.
College grad +13
Some college +8
No college +8
Metropolitan +12
Non-metro -3
Educational differences are small, and there are more likes than dislikes in all groups; the metro/non-metro difference (coded by the survey organization, not a self-report) is bigger, and people outside of metropolitan areas are more likely to see an elite degree as a minus than as a plus.
There are substantial partisan differences:
Democrats +18
Republicans 0
Neither +5
Turning to some other groups:
aged 18-29 +15
30-49 +15
50-64 +4
65+ +3
White +7
Black +7
Hispanic +20
Asian +17
Men +8
Women +11
I was a bit surprised at the age differences: my impression is that anti-elite rhetoric has been growing in recent years, so younger people would be more attuned to it. (For example, Donald Trump seems to admire elite universities: he frequently boasts that he's not just a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, but of the Wharton School, and a secondary part of his "birther" campaign was a demand that Obama release his academic records to prove that he deserved to be admitted to Columbia and Harvard Law School). The Pew survey contains a question that has some bearing on this issue: who was the best president of the last 40 years.
Reagan +4
GHW Bush +13
Clinton +14
GW Bush -0
Obama +20
Trump -5
Biden +8
As the differences by party identification suggest, people who name one of the Democratic presidents as the best have more favorable views of degrees from elite universities, but the people who name Trump are more negative than those who name Reagan or one of the Bushes.
Some of the partisan division is undoubtedly created by the parties--Republican leaders denounce elite universities, so Republican voters follow them and Democratic voters react against them--but the substantial divisions by age, ethnicity, and metro status suggest that opinions have some independent basis. However, education itself doesn't make much difference, and only 13% of people who didn't attend college see having a degree from an elite university as a negative.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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