Getting the wrong idea

 In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Mitch Daniels said that higher education "has failed to deliver value: Its prices rocketed upward even as its rigor, quality and the marketplace value of its degrees eroded."  Rigor and quality are matters of judgment, but the marketplace value of college degrees can be measured, and over the last 50 years it has increased substantially.  But Daniels was president of Purdue University from 2013 to 2022, so you might expect him to be informed about the latest trends--maybe it has declined in recent years?  I looked up the median earnings of wage and salary earners with a high school diploma and no college and wage and salary earners with a bachelor's degree and computed the ratio:

It increased rapidly from 1979 (the first year for which data was available) until the early 1990s and more slowly since then.  Looking more closely, it's been roughly constant since about 2010.  But there's no period in which it has "eroded."  

The bachelor's degree group includes people with advanced degrees.  So maybe there's been "degree inflation"--people discover that their BA isn't worth much, so they go on to get a master's or professional degree?  Since 2000, there is data for people with a BA only--the next figure compares the ratios for BA only to BA and above to high school only.  

Almost the same:  the payoff to a college degree has not declined.  

What do people think about the value of a college degree?  In late 2023, a Pew survey asked "Thinking about the cost of getting a four-year college degree today, would you say it is worth it, even if someone has to take out loans in order to attend, worth it, but only if someone doesn't have to take out loans in order to attend, or not worth it?"  Among Republicans 19% said worth it, 41% worth it only if without loans, and 38% not worth it; among Democrats, it was 26%. 54% and 19%.  That question was only asked once, but in 1997 a survey asked "A college education can now cost on average from $7,000 to $18,000 a year. Do you think a person gets enough out of a college education to justify what they might pay for it?"  The difference by party was small (Democrats 52-36%, Republicans 49-39% and not statistically significant.  In 2015, there a survey of parents of children under 18 asked "how important is it to you that your child earns/children earn a college degree--extremely important, very important, somewhat important, or not too important?"  Among Democrats, it was 49%, 31%, 16%, and 3%; among Republicans, 36%, 31%, 22%, and 8%.  There was another question on how important it was for the child to be financially independent, and there was no partisan difference on that, suggesting that Republican parents had less confidence that a college degree would help to achieve that.  

So it seems that the gap between Republicans and Democrats on the value of a college education opened up before Trump and the years of "peak wokeness" in the late 2010s and early 2020s (also see this post).As far as why, I don't have any definite evidence, but think it was driven by Republican elites (like Mitch Daniels, who was governor of Indiana before he became president of Purdue).  I offered a possible reason for their increasingly negative views of higher education in a post from 2013.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Separate ways

 A few days ago, Andrew Gelman observed that views on scientific authority have become more politically polarized in over the last few decades.  This post will take a closer look at the timing.  The General Social Survey has a series of questions of the form "as far as the people running these institutions are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or very little confidence at all in them."  One of the institutions they ask about is "the scientific community."  The average among self-rated liberals and conservatives (I leave moderates out in order to make the figure easier to read), with higher numbers indicating more confidence:  

The next figure shows the size of the gap (liberal minus conservative).  

There was no consistent difference in the 1970s and 1980s, but a gap emerged in the 1990s and grew gradually for several decades (see this paper by Gordon Gauchat for a detailed account), before growing dramatically in the last few years (the four most recent surveys are 2016, 2018, 2021, and 2022). 

The GSS also asked about "medicine."  The liberal and conservative means:  

No consistent difference until the last few surveys, when a substantial gap has emerged.  

The GSS also asks about confidence in education.  The liberal and conservative means:

The pattern is similar to "the scientific community":  a difference emerging in the 1990s and then growing gradually before increasing dramatically in the last few years.  

This pattern is not universal:  for example, the gap in confidence in business has been pretty constant since the 1970s, and the gap in confidence in organized labor has grown gradually.  The obvious explanation for the recent growth with science, medicine, and education is the response to Covid.  Will it persist or will things shift back to where they were previously?  There was another round of the GSS in 2024; the data will be released soon, which will at least provide the beginnings of an answer.  

Postscript

 In my last post, I forgot to mention that in 2004 they asked whether American trade policy towards other countries was fair or unfair.  People consistently rated American policy towards them as more fair than their policy towards us, but there were some differences in the judgments regarding different countries:  

The more fair people saw a country's policy towards the US, the more fair they saw our policy towards it.  As I mentioned in my previous post, most people have no experience they can draw on to make these judgments, so I think it's just general feeling about whether we are in a cooperative or antagonistic relationship with them.  

The survey also asked about American trade policy towards "poor countries":  51% said it was fair, 36% unfair.  That is considerably less fair than perceived policy towards the other countries:  it is equal to the lowest value on the y-axis.  They didn't ask about poor countries' policies to the United States.  If you extrapolated from the numbers here, you would say their policies must be seen as highly unfair to the United States.  But I don't think they would follow that pattern:  rather, to some extent people figure that rich and powerful countries will mistreat poor countries.  There's some evidence of that in the figure: of the countries included, Mexico would be seen as the weakest economically (China's per-capita GDP was smaller, but it was already seen as an economic power because of the combination of a large population and rapid growth).   And Mexico is below the line, meaning that American trade policy towards it was seen as less fair than would be expected given their perceived policy towards us. 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Totally unfair

Sometimes Donald Trump has said that tariffs are good in themselves and other times he has said that they're just a bargaining chip to get other countries to reduce their trade barriers--that he's working towards free trade.  The one constant is that he believes that other countries have treated us unfairly.  Between 1987 and 2018, there have been a number of survey questions asking if various countries have "fair or unfair trade policies toward the United States."  The list of countries differs, but Canada, Europe*, Japan, Mexico, China, and South Korea have been included pretty frequently.  The figure shows the log of the ratio of "fair" to "unfair" responses (positive numbers on the y-axis mean more people see them as fair; negative mean that more see them as unfair):

Canada is seen most favorably, then Europe, then Mexico and Korea (and India, which was asked about a couple of times), with China at the bottom.  Views of Japan's policy have become substantially more favorable--from 25% fair and 65% unfair in 1987 to 55% fair and 33% unfair in 2018.  South Korea and Europe also seem to have moved upward, while Mexico and China may have moved downward.

The next figure shows the average perceived fairness, adjusted for the nations included in each round (ie, the year effects from a year+nation model). 

It has been higher in the 21st century than in the 1980s and 1990s, although it dropped substantially in 2018.  Unfortunately, the questions weren't asked between 2012 and 2017, so we don't know what people thought during the rise of Trump, and haven't been asked since 2018.  However, the fact that perceived unfairness has been lower in the 21st century--despite the "China shock," the post-2008 recession, and Trump's rhetoric--is important.

On the national differences, most people don't have any direct personal experience on which to base a judgment, so how do they decide?**  In some cases, like Japan in the 1990s and China more recently, there is substantial media coverage.  But the trade policies of Europe, Canada, and South Korea don't generally get much media attention.  An obvious possible influence is general cultural affinity.  Another one is suggested by the upward trends for South Korea and Japan:  people view low prices with suspicion--they figure that someone must be doing something unfair in order to offer them.  So countries that are seen as competing on the basis of quality are viewed more favorably than those that are seen as competing on the basis of price.   

*Under different names:  "Western Europe," then "the Common Market," and more recently "the European Union"

**Don't know answers averaged 13%.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Motes and beams

Starting in May 2020, the Fox News poll asked "do you plan to get a vaccine shot against coronavirus when a vaccine becomes available, or not?"  Once a vaccine became available, they asked people if they had received it; if not, they asked if they intended to.  The figure shows the responses broken down by party.  Before the vaccine became available, it's the log of the ratio of intend/don't intend (ie, omitting don't knows); after, it's the log of the ratio of have/don't intend to (ie, omitting haven't but intend to and haven't and not sure).  

Before the vaccine was available, the only substantial variation among Democrats was that intention was lower in September 2020--the ratio in December 2020 was just a little larger than it had been in May (68%-17% in May and 75%-16% in December).  For Republicans, there was a drop between May and August, and it stayed pretty much constant after that point.  The ratio was somewhat lower in December than it had been in May (54%-29% in May and 49%-39% in December).  Once the vaccine was available, the ratio increased for both--that is, more people got the vaccine than had said they would--but it increased more for Democrats.  In the last survey (August 2021) 84% of Democrats said they had gotten the vaccine and 4% said they they didn't intend to; among Republicans it 56% said they had and 29% that they didn't intend to.  So there was a gap from the beginning, but it grew during 2020 and grew even more after the vaccine became available.  Of course, there's no way to be sure why it grew, but it's reasonable to think that it was because many leading Republican politicians played along with anti-vaccine sentiment.  

The partisan difference in vaccination rates was widely noticed at the time, but hasn't gotten much attention in the five-year retrospectives on Covid.  For example, this  interview with Stephen Macedo, Professor of Politics at Princeton and co-author of a new book on the response to Covid, spends time on school closures, "lockdowns," and dismissal of the lab leak hypothesis, criticizes Democratic governors for following blindly following "elite institutions" and the "laptop class", and praises Ron DeSantis as an example of political leadership: "he got himself informed, and I think he made a sound decision. I don’t know of others who did the same in such a high-profile way."  What about vaccinations?  Macedo acknowledges that "Morbidity from COVID trended upward in Republican states as compared with Democratic states only after vaccines became widely available."  But this point is made in passing and there's no discussion of whether anyone has any responsibility for the trend.  The language is also oddly abstract:  "morbidity trended upward" rather than "more people died" (the language in the rest of the interview was generally clear and straightforward).  

At the moment, it seems like liberals are inclined to think about what their side has done wrong, while conservatives are inclined to think about what the other side (ie liberals) has done wrong.  I don't think this tendency is universal, but the result of a combination of historical circumstances, the most recent being Trump's re-election.  But whatever the source, it has led to a strange blind spot in histories of Covid.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Which way is up?

 A few days ago, the New York Times printed a discussion among David Brooks, Ross Douthat, David French and Bret Stephens.  The moderator, Patrick Healy, started off by saying "more registered voters think America is on the right track than at any point since 2004, according to a new NBC News poll."  It's not actually the highest since 2004 (I think NBC News was just counting their own polls), but it's definitely above average.  In the latest NBC News poll, 44% said the country was going in the right direction and 54% said it was on the wrong track.  I have  recorded results from about 100 surveys that asked that question between 1971 and 2022 and the median was about 35% right direction and 59% wrong track.  The figure below shows results from 2024-2025:

Blue dots are before the election, red dots are after the election but before Trump's inauguration, and green dots are after the inauguration.  There was little or no trend before the election and not much change after the election, but since January 11 the "right direction" numbers have been high--what's more, they seem to be rising.  Trump's approval ratings, in contrast, have been declining.  

How to you reconcile these different patterns?  The New York Times columnists didn't really try--they seemed to assume that "right direction" was equivalent to strong approval and went on to talk about why Trump has a lot of dedicated supporters.  But if you look at the whole period since 1971, the correlation between presidential approval and "right direction" isn't very strong:  for example, Obama had higher approval ratings than Trump, a lot of enthusiastic supporters, but averaged  only 36%-58% in the right direction/wrong track question.   I can think of two possibilities.  One is that "right direction" is a combination of presidential approval and beliefs about social and economic conditions, and that Republican beliefs about social and economic conditions are more influenced by partisanship than Democratic beliefs are (as Paul Krugman has claimed).  That is, the plus factor of Republicans turning around and thinking conditions are good is bigger than the minus factor of Democrats turning and thinking conditions are bad.  The other is that there's a third factor, which is the extent to which a president is able to implement his agenda.  That is, if the president is meeting a lot of opposition, someone who approves of the president might say that the country is on the wrong track.  This account might help to explain why the "right track" is not just relatively high but rising--Trump has been able to get things done.   That is, almost everyone who approves of Trump will be happy with the direction of the country.  In contrast, under Obama or Trump I, there were more people who approved of the president but were frustrated because he wasn't getting his way.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Where the ducks are?

Since the 2024 election, a lot of people have said that the way for the Democrats to win is to move towards the center.   A few days ago, Thomas Edsall had a column in which said it would be hard to do that, and they might not gain many votes even if they did.   I think he made a strong case on the first point, but not on the second.  Edsall started by observing that in the 1990s, 55% of Democrats had not attended college and 21% were college graduates, and now the numbers have reversed:  25% no college and 45% college graduates.  He then said "These widely recognized changes in levels of educational attainment have coincided with an ideological shift."  In 1994, 25% of Democrats said they were conservative, 48% said they were moderate, and 25% said they were liberal; in 2024, it was 9%, 34%, and 55%.  

It's true that the educational shift "coincided" with an ideological shift, but the way he puts it suggests that the educational shift caused the ideological shift.  Here is the correlation between party (strong Democrat.... Strong Republican), and ideology (extremely liberal....extremely conservative) in the GSS:

It's consistently higher among college graduates, so the change in educational composition has made some difference.  But it's increased in all educational groups:  the correlation among people with no college today is about as large as the correlation among college graduates was in the 1970s.  But this just involves what people call themselves:  what if we look at opinions?  The GSS also has a question that starts "Some people think that the government in Washington is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and private businesses. Others disagree and think that the government should do even more to solve our country's problems" and asks people to put themselves on a five-point scale.  This is a pretty good measure of conservative vs. liberal principles.  

It/s also increased for all educational groups, but the increase is generally slower than the party/ideology correlation.

Finally, here's the correlation between self-rated ideology and views on the scope of government:

Again, an upward trend for all educational groups, but even smaller (especially for people without college degrees).  

So it seems that some of the "ideological shift" is just a matter of people learning the correct ideological label for their party.  The rising association between ideology and party also has implications for Republicans and independents as well as Democrats.  According to the GSS, in the 1970s 20% of Republicans described themselves as liberals, 35% moderates, and 46% conservatives; in the Trump era (2018-22) it was 5%, 27%, and 68%.  But as Democrats became more liberal and Republicans became more conservative, independents became more moderate:  they went from 28/45/27 in the 1970s to 16/64/20 in the Trump era.  Another way to look at it is that moderate independents went from 6% of the population in the 1970s to 10% in the Obama era (2008-16) to 14% in the Trump era.  This suggests that the gains to moderation might actually be larger than before--there are more people who are completely up for grabs.