Podcast

Politics and College Choice with Grant De Roo

We recently conducted a nationwide survey to understand how college-bound students factor politics into their decision. We packaged it all up into a report, Politics and College Choice: How Students’ Political Views Influence Where They Enroll—and our results were informative and surprising. Today, Jarrett sits down with our research partner, Grant De Roo, to share three insights from the research they found most interesting.

Download the full report: https://echodelta.co/politics/

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Transcript

Jarrett Smith:
You are listening to the Higher Ed Marketing Lab. I’m your host, Jarrett Smith. Welcome to the Higher Ed Marketing Lab. I’m Jarrett Smith, SVP of Strategy at Echo Delta. Thanks for being here. Today’s show is all about politics. Specifically, we’ll be discussing a new report from Echo Delta and ADV Market Research that explores the political views of college-bound high school students, the extent to which they’re concerned about the political climate of college or state, and how they prioritize those concerns against other more traditional factors like cost and reputation when choosing a college. Joining me in the conversation is Grant De Roo, principal and founder of ADV Market Research and my co-author on the report. We discuss some of the more surprising and interesting findings of the report, including the proportion of students who say they would not attend college in a state that differs from their own political views, the material concerns students have about campus and state politics, and some of the interesting insights we discovered on how students gauge the political climate of an individual college.

If you’d like to see a copy of our full report, you can head over to echodelta.co/politics where you can download it for free. And just as a quick reminder as always, this episode is brought to you by Echo Delta, a full-service enrollment marketing firm for higher education. One of the things I love most about Echo Delta are the close collaborative relationships we have with our clients. Just the other day, one of our clients sent us what probably felt like a 50-pound box of cookies right to the office. And it was a thank you for helping them launch an inquiry gen campaign for a brand new program they were launching and doing it on very short notice.

Obviously the cookies were completely unnecessary but delicious. But I think it’s such a good example of the kind of mutual respect and appreciation we have with our clients. So if you find yourself in the market to work with an agency, I encourage you to head over to echodelta.co, where you can check out our work, meet some of the people behind it, and if you like what you see, reach out. We’d love to hear from you. Now without further ado, here’s my conversation with Grant De Roo. Grant, welcome to the show.

Grant De Roo:
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Jarrett Smith:
Yeah, I’m excited to have you here and I’m really excited to talk about our latest research project together. So to get things started, I just wanted to give listeners a little, just a smidge of background on this project that you and I worked on together. And I’m going to start with how we arrived at the topic and then I’ll turn it over to you to talk a little bit about the formal methodology of the research that we did. But let me start with where this came from. So last year, my colleague at Echo Delta, Jeff Kallay, and I think a lot of folks know him for campus visit. He runs our campus visit consulting practice and spends probably more time on campus than any other person I know. And he came in from some client visits saying, “Hey, you know what, clients are saying that they think either the state or maybe the campuses sort of prevailing political climate was starting to be a factor in where students were starting to enroll.”

And for some clients, this was maybe I would call it just sort of a hunch, maybe based on a few anecdotes or a little hearsay or just some observations, nothing they could really pin it to. But we had at least one client that really leapt out and they had something like 50 students that explicitly said, “Hey, I like your college, but I’m not going there because of your state’s politics. I just can’t stomach it. Sorry.” So when Jeff brought that to us, we thought, wow, okay, this is super interesting. And there was a little bit of research done at the time on the topic, but not a lot of folks are really looking into. And so we really thought, hey, this is an interesting area. And really the goal of our research was just to begin to quantify how widespread is this phenomenon really? Is this just a one-off edge case, or is this something that’s more widespread and what’s behind it? And then ultimately, is there anything we could learn that might inform what colleges do? That was really the thinking and inspiration behind it. Of course, Grant, when I realized, hey, we’re going to do a survey around this, I thought of you. You and I have collaborated, Echo Delta and your firm, ADV Market Research, done a number of client projects together, and I thought I’m going to reach out to Grant and see if he wants to help us build a survey around that. So just so we cross our T’s, dot our I’s. Sorry folks. I’m coming back from vacation. I’ve got vacation brain. Good luck. But just so we cross our T’s and dot our I’s, maybe you could give us a little background on the technical aspects, the methodology of the survey before we jump in.

Grant De Roo:
Absolutely. Yeah. So once we had an idea of what we wanted to learn from this research, then the question became, well, who do we reach and how many do we reach and how specific should we be? And so we all agreed that we were best served by focusing on prospective students rather than say the general population or even parents of prospective students, really trying to reach the target consumer. And so we surveyed 1044 prospective students. We had a goal of reaching at least a thousand, and these were prospective students from all throughout the country, ages 16 to 18. And they had to indicate that they were intending on enrolling in a four-year college or university at some point in the next three years. And the reason we wanted to specify four-year is that we wanted to reach students who had some level of the privilege of choice, if you will, to be able to say, well, I want to go to school in this state or not that state, or to say that politics impact my decision to some degree or not at all. Now, for students going to a two-year college, we know the factors there are really more cost and convenience and more local options. So we wanted those students who are actually weighing the tradeoffs between college A and college B and to see how much politics was a factor in that. So with that sample, we have a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. So Jarrett and I are going to
be throwing out a few different percentages as we go through these results. Know that within the margin of error, that means plus or minus three percentage points from those figures that we’re sharing.

Jarrett Smith:
Good deal. So yeah, I’m super excited to dive in. I have to say before we get started, there is no way we’re going to cover all the interesting stuff in this report. I think the finished copy, let me look at it, it’s on my desk right now. It’s something like 50, yeah, right at 50 pages along. There’s a lot in here. So if you’re listening to this and you’re intrigued by some of the findings, but you want to read the whole thing, you can go to echodelta.co/politics and that’ll send you to a landing page where you can pick up a copy of the report and see everything that we found.
But basically the way this episode is going to work is, Grant and I have gone through our finished report and each pulled out three findings that we want to highlight, something that we thought was significant or interesting in the report, and we’re just going to alternate back and forth with hopefully a little color commentary and some interesting rabbit trails along the way. We’ll see. So with that, Grant, you are my guest today. I’m going to let you go first. What’s your first finding that jumped out to you?

Grant De Roo:
So as we’ve said, one of the first things that we wanted to learn in this research is just how important politics is in student choice. And we asked this question in a couple of different ways, but one of the first that we asked was how a differing political climate from the student’s own views would impact their decision. And we asked it in two ways. First, we wanted to know if the political climate of the college differed significantly from your own, how would this impact your decision? And then secondly, if the political climate of this state where the college is differed significantly from your own, how would this impact your decision to attend? And it’s really more that second question that I wanted to focus on because it’s such an interesting idea that just the regional landscape of where a college is located could impact student choice. And what we found is that 12% of respondents, 12% said that it would have a major impact, i.e., they would not attend that college if the state where the college is located had of political climate that differed from their own views. And it’s pretty remarkable because even though 12% isn’t a big figure, it equates to about one in eight students. And so if you are a private college in a red state that draws heavily from say, California, maybe New York, typically blue leaning states, this is going to impact how many students would realistically consider you in our college search process. And in fact, it’s exactly those observations that Jeff had on campus. It’s what we’ve seen in our own research. That this is legitimately impacting private colleges that draw from a wide geographic area and they happen to be located in a red state.

And often what we’re seeing over the past couple of years is that these red states have gotten redder, that their policies have been pushed a little bit more extreme, for lack of a better word, and that these things have increasingly impacted students’ perceptions of that state and the desirability of going to college there. And there’s a few different factors that go into that, but I think one of the biggest things is that students simply say that they don’t want to be part of that environment. And we’ll get into the details of what that means and the concerns that students have, but probably more simply than anything else, it’s that I don’t want to be part of that and that’s it, so yeah. Jarrett, did you have any thoughts or comments on that as well?

Jarrett Smith:
Yeah. The 12% number is low until you think about the current recruitment environment, you realize, I don’t know any schools that are competing for students that would be happy risking 10% of their class, 10% or 12%. That’s a sort of make or break figure there. Another question that is closely related to that, and I thought it was really interesting how you designed this question was, creating a series of buckets where students could sort of drop points in to say, “Hey, how much do you factor this into it?” So it included, the buckets included things like the reputation of the school, academic quality, the location of the school, student life, but it also included campus politics and state politics. That question combined, we found that campus and state politics for all students occupied somewhere around 20%, some groups a little bit more. So we did in our survey, one of the things we looked at was how politically active students were. And not surprisingly, students that were more politically active and engaged weighted that a little higher, their percentage was a little higher but not a lot higher. So I think my takeaway from that was it is a factor for most students, and it is a make or break factor for a few students for a relatively small percentage.

Grant De Roo:
Exactly. Very well said. And what I thought was interesting as well is when we cut that data by political affiliation. So we segmented students by moderate, liberal, or conservative, and the numbers were more or less flat in response to that question across those three groups, meaning that this is really cutting the same way for liberals as it is conservatives.

Jarrett Smith:
Yeah. And we’ll get to this later. I know in some of the things that I pulled out of the report, I was
surprised at how in certain ways, certain results that we’ve got in our survey that political affiliation wasn’t as much of a factor as I thought or there are certain issues and things that were remarkably similar in ways that I did not expect. But we’ll get there.

Grant De Roo:
Yes.

Jarrett Smith:
All right. Well, cool. I love that finding, Grant. I think it’s a super important one that cuts to the heart of what we were hoping to find out in the report. I guess I’ll jump to mine. So my first finding was one of the questions that we asked or one of the things we wanted to understand, were there specific states where students had concerns about attending college? And surprise, surprise, we found there was already some existing research out there asking this question, but we still ask it anyways. We want to validate and explore it for ourselves. And yes, we did find that students do call out specific states noteworthy and concerning based on the state’s political climate. So not surprisingly, our conservative students really primarily called out California and New York as the states they were most concerned about. Our liberal leaning students, I would say pretty much anything below the Mason-Dixon line and a hodgepodge of states in the Midwest and also out West kind of more states, more everywhere. But I think if you open up the report and you look at them, it’s not necessarily super surprising the states that they’re calling out. What really surprised me though is when you start segmenting the data and you start breaking it into, segmenting students based on political affiliation, you really start to see some just drastic differences across states, how frequently students are citing a particular state as a state of concern.

The biggest one, the one that really blew my mind by far was Texas, where you had, when you look at students based on political affiliation, you see that 50% of liberal are saying, I am concerned about attending college in Texas. Florida and Alabama are not far behind. So just the sheer number. If it had been like 20%, 25% of liberal students, I would’ve thought, okay, that was where I was expecting that to fall out. But to have half of all of our liberal leaning students say that. The other thing that really leapt out to me was that it wasn’t just liberal students being concerned about red states, it was also moderate students. And I think in those states where they have a reputation for having more divisive politics like Texas, like Florida, like Alabama, you see that even moderate students are saying, “I am concerned about this state.” For Texas, it was 17% of moderate students and even 12% of conservative students. So I wish we could pull those folks out. I’d love to have a conversation with that 12% of conservative students that were concerned about Texas, but nonetheless it was there. So I think there’s a little bit of speculation on how to read this. From my part, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts, Grant, from my part, when I’m thinking about conservative and moderate students who may be concerned about a red state, I read that as partly that there may just be a slice of student who’s just tired of politics in general and just doesn’t want to be troubled by it. They don’t want that to be part of their college experience. And then I also wondered if when we think of a “conservative student,” if we sometimes paint a very broad brush about what… We make assumptions about what their political views might actually be and who they are. And in that there may be conservative students who say, “Well, yeah, on the whole I would describe myself as conservative, but there’s something that maybe is happening in Texas or Florida Alabama that personally I’m not okay. It may be something that is considered a conservative issue, but I don’t really align with that. And so I’m just not really that excited about going to college there.” How do you read that?

Grant De Roo:
Yes. I agree. I think trying to tune it out I think is exactly how I interpret that. Just to say, I’m tired of hearing about this. I’m tired of feeling like I need to deal with this in my college experience, and in Florida in particular, where the governor has been more heavy-handed in colleges and universities than pretty much elsewhere in the entire country. I can understand that one a little bit more in saying, I just don’t want this to be part of my experience. And so I think you’re exactly right. I think there’s this for some, there’s an exhaustion concerning politics and to say that this isn’t why I’m going to college, this isn’t what I expected from my experience and it’s not something that I want to be part of it.

Jarrett Smith:
It really reminded me of a conversation that I had with an admission’s leader. After we got our initial results back, I went to out reach out to some clients and got their thoughts, “Hey, how do you read this? What do you think about it?” And one of the folks I spoke with said, “I think for most students, most of the time they may not be that politically engaged,” and to your point, “They just don’t want it to be a major part of their college experience.” Obviously, and our survey reveals this, you have some students, they’re highly engaged and would fall on either extreme of liberal or conservative in terms of their affiliation, but that doesn’t describe most students. Most students are moderate. And it seems most students are not that excited about having politics be a major factor in their college experience.
There was one thing that when I saw these results come through that really stood out to me and it had to do with Texas. Before we got the results of the survey back, I’d come across some work from Texas A&M and a couple of years ago, I think it was back in 2022, they launched this Where You Belong campaign, really well done series of videos. I mean, just really well-produced. Whoever was behind that, excellent work. But what really stood out to me was how explicitly they were trying to show that a wide range of students could come to Texas A&M and fit in and thrive. And so for instance, they had this really adorable video where they had students from the anime club coming in and they’re like in full anime gear, and it’s not what I would expect from Texas A&M. It’s not the sort of student. Now, it totally makes sense. It’s an enormous campus. They pull from all over. Of course you’re going to have a huge diversity of students from a lot of different backgrounds arriving there. So intellectually it makes sense, but my instinct was this wasn’t what I was expecting from this. And so my thought was, I don’t know anybody there, but my thought was that perhaps they too have been picking up on this trend and wanted to get ahead of it at the time and maybe deliberately go out of their way to proactively show, look at the variety of students that can come to our school and be successful here.

Grant De Roo:
Exactly. And for what it’s worth, I’ve seen it cut both ways as well. I was recently looking at the website for a very traditional liberal arts college, the liberal artsy of the most liberal arts colleges, and they were showing profiles of students. And yes, there was what you might suspect. There was a student with green hair and they were planning on going into a very niche social impact kind of field. It was all the things you expect, but they also had a very traditional presenting male student, presented as a prep school kind of kid, and he was going into finance and it was this subtle, maybe not so subtle message that there’s all kinds who come here and thrive. And it’s not just those on the far end of the extreme on progressive sort of ideology that you might suspect of a darker blue liberal arts college.

Jarrett Smith:
Yeah, interesting. So okay, Grant, finding number two, what was the second thing that leapt out to you?

Grant De Roo:
Yeah. So once we established that there was some level of importance and concern regarding politics and for some students in what they expected for their college experience, either based on the college’s politics or the politics of the state where the college is located. We then wanted to know, okay, well, what are their specific concerns? And this is something going back to the very beginning of our conversations, Jarrett, where you and I were talking about this idea and we’re like, well, we know that some students are going to have an issue with state politics, but what do they think that actually means for their experience? And what would that actually mean for how state politics or the political landscape of where the college is located would actually impact their college experience? And so we presented students with this list of potential concerns and we asked them to select all that were applied for their specific situation.

And some of the top that emerged are fear of discrimination or harassment. Concerned I wouldn’t feel like I belong, concerned about my personal safety, and concerned about impacts on my own mental health and well-being. And so what you’re hearing here in these top four are a mix of factors relating to physical safety and mental well-being, but also a sense of belonging at that college or in that area. And then there’s a few different concerns that relate more to specific identity or specific legislation. So for instance, one concern was about state policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Another was about concerns about having access to necessary healthcare such as abortion, gender-affirming care or something else. And then the third, was concerns about state policies on LGBTQ issues. So this is a second tier of concerns. And the way that I’m interpreting this is like a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. There’s physical safety and there’s mental well-being, and there’s a sense of belonging that I belong here.

Not just on this college campus, but that I belong more generally if I go into town. That I belong here, that I’m validated, that I’m appreciated in this broader community that I’m going to be a part of for four years. And so to me, looking at this list of concerns, this is almost as clear of a playbook so to speak, or a set of implications for what colleges need to address if they’re feeling a level of concern on the part of their prospective students about coming to their campus. So speaking directly to I guess at a high level sort of asserting a commitment to student safety and student well-being, I would draw a line around student comfort, right? Part of college is about feeling uncomfortable. We acknowledge that, but about student well-being and student health asserting that. And then also providing the very specific, very practical list of resources on and off campus, the list of support services on campus, and reporting mechanisms for if or when something were to happen. Those kinds of things can make students feel comfort or trust that the institution has thought ahead and has created the infrastructure for students to be able to find what they need to feel comfortable there. I think that can be comforting even if it’s not something that they intuit that they would need or want to take advantage of. Knowing that it’s there, knowing that there’s a process in place, it can be very reassuring.

Jarrett Smith:
One of the things that we looked at with this also was were there any meaningful differences across demographic factors like race or household income? And it was interesting where we did and didn’t see, did and did not see differences, but we did note that non-white students were the most likely to select none of the above when it came to these issues. And we also noted that students with a household income above $100,000 were the most likely to express concerns about the college’s political views, things like their DEI policies. And so one of the findings in the report is that sort of taken together these concerns about attending college in a state where you have a differing political climate could be described as something as a bit more of a concern for wealthy white and liberal students. One of the things that sparked in my own mind was that this notion of picking and choosing a college and where you’ll attend based on state politics is a luxury. And you mentioned earlier when we were talking about the methodology, to a certain extent we were intentionally targeting folks who would have the potential to have the agency and resources to be able to do that. But I think even within our sample, that doesn’t describe a lot of students. A lot of students do not have the economic resources to say, decide to leave their home state. They may be forced to stick in a state even if they have options within their state. So I think we can’t underestimate that impact and the fact that there are just students who do not have the luxury. There are many students who do not have the luxury of making drastically different choices based on politics alone.

Grant De Roo:
Exactly. Exactly. And you mentioned one way in which these results do differ in one huge way is by political affiliation. And we see that these concerns are felt much more acutely by liberal leaning students than by moderates or conservatives. In fact, moderates and conservatives were really more fell very similar in line with the frequency with which they selected these concerns, whereas liberal students were more of the outliers that were much more likely to select these things. And they’ve been given reason to, by and large, especially around these issues concerning DEI, LGBTQ issues, whatever it may be. They have been put more on that back foot to be aware, to be sensitive to these issues because by and large, they’ve been the target for some of these legislative actions in certain states.

Jarrett Smith:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. So let’s see. I will move on to my number two. One of the things that we were curious about was students’ views around free speech. I think this came up because I think that there’s been a lot of commentary in the media over the past few years around the culture of inquiry and dialogue and free speech on campus and the concerns about political correctness and how students feel about that and upcoming generation. So this is something that we explored along with a number of other issues related to whether students think colleges should remain neutral on political issues, some interesting stuff. But with regard to free speech, we came at this through a few different questions, some more direct than others. In one question we asked students what issues were the most important to them when considering a state’s political climate and a little more than half. So about 53% said that freedom of speech within that state was an important issue. In fact, it was one of the most consistently cited issues. And what was interesting to me was that this was more or less identical across political affiliations. So there really wasn’t one group more than another that cited this as a key issue. We also asked a very direct question. We asked students which statement they agreed with more.

And the statements were, it’s important for all voices to be heard, even if it offends others or it’s important to limit speech that might be offensive to others. And so we’re really trying to get at the political correctness idea here. What we found was that 77% of students said it’s important for all voices to be heard, even if it offends others. And that really did not differ significantly across political affiliation. I thought it would. I thought we would have some differences when we started to break out students based on affiliation. That was not the case. I think conservative students were three points higher, like 80%, but that’s still within that margin. So we don’t, mathematically speaking, they’re essentially the same. So I have to admit, when I heard that at first I was like, oh, students love free speech. And then I quickly had a more cynical reaction, which was something like, well, we’re asking this question in abstract in a survey. People can always agree with high-minded ideals in the abstract. Will they follow through with it when it’s in practice, when they’re across the table from someone who is legitimately saying something that they really disagree with and find highly offensive? And again, I was having a conversation with another admission’s leader at a client campus and they said, “Well, okay, that’s probably true, but isn’t that true for most of the adults you know?” And in fact, he said, I imagine that there are issues that I would just a lightning rod for me and that I would question the value of completely free speech based on that. When thinking about that in that light was kind of a, I’ll say it was a little bit of an unlock for me that underscored the importance of institutions, the role that they play in coaching and guiding young people in how to engage in productive dialogue and to engage with others across sometimes very significant differences. And looking at our broader political landscape just and the rhetoric and conversation that’s happening today. It was just was a healthy reminder of this is such an important part of what higher education is all about. And so desperately needed today.

Grant De Roo:
Couldn’t agree more. And I would be willing to wager that we will see in this next decade, more colleges commit to that ideal than we have in the past. To say that we need to be a place that fosters legitimate discussion of ideas in a reasoned way where we don’t have to agree. And I think that should be one of the goals for just about any college in this country, is to teach students how to disagree without being disagreeable. And that’s such an important life skill. And it’s something that in my observation and in the work that we do with colleges, I would say has sort of fallen by the wayside as we’ve had more clustering socially and politically and within college as well, where students have flocked to places where they see themselves.

And part of the way that they see themselves is alignment with their ideas. And I think and I hope in the future that more colleges will foster legitimate disagreement on issues and do so in a respectful reasoned way because that’s the purpose of college. If you can’t do it in this very safe, very academic, respectable place, where else will you be able to do it the rest of your life?

Jarrett Smith:
Yeah, absolutely. Kind of reminds me of something. As I was doing background research for this report, someone on my team sent me a link to a webinar, and it was from a fellow, I think he’s a professor, his name escapes me, but he’d written a book called Belonging that came out recently and he was advocating for this idea that you need to prepare college students on the front end for the challenges that they’re going to face. And you need to normalize that. Specifically, now, what he was saying was that many students, especially in their first year, have periods where they feel very lonely, where they feel like they don’t have a strong social group, they may be missing home and experiencing just typical social challenges. And he said, “It’s important to early on, perhaps during orientation to tell students, ‘Hey, you are probably going to feel this. You are probably going to experience this. And number one, know that that is normal and you’re not alone and this is not unique to you. And then two, here’s some things you can do about that and to work through that.'” And that was specifically related to fitting in socially in college. But I think it also relates to what you’re saying about preparing for students to say, “Hey, this is not necessarily an environment where you are going to feel 100% comfortable at all times. In fact, if you feel perfectly comfortable in every situation, we’re probably not doing our job.” Now we need to distinguish between comfort and like you did earlier, safety and a supportive safe environment that is free from harassment, but also we’re going to push you to grow in these new ways. And this is part of what the experience is all about. It’s a feature, not a bug. So let’s see. Where are we, Grant? Are we up to number three for you?

Grant De Roo:
Number three, yes.

Jarrett Smith:
Okay. All right. Let us have it.

Grant De Roo:
We wanted to know where students felt like they were getting information about the political climate for both the colleges that they were considering as well as the states where colleges are located. And I’m going to focus more on that first question of where do you primarily get your information regarding the political climate of the colleges that you’re considering? And these results were pretty interesting. First, there’s no single one dominant source of information about that. It’s really more fragmented, but there are a few that were selected by between one third and one half of prospective students. At the very top was friends and family, sort of what we would suspect that it is a top source of information on anything. And so it’s no surprise then that friends and family would influence a prospective student’s view of the politics of a college. But right after that, second to that, 45% of students said college websites where it was a primary source of information regarding the political climate for a college. And that’s really interesting because what does that really say? What does that mean? What is it about a college website? What is it about what the college offers or how it’s presenting, what it is and who its students and faculty and administration are? What is it about that that is tipping students off about the politics of that institution? So closely behind that and highly related is visiting campus. That was selected by 39% of students. And so we have visiting campus and college websites being selected quite frequently, between 39% and 45% of students selected those two things. And we talked about this, Jarrett. I think a lot of this comes down to context clues around what a college offers and just simply the visual expression of who it is. These things are clues, sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle about what the college is and what the likely beliefs are of the people who go there. And so there are certain things about the speakers that you invite to campus, the academic programs thatyou offer. There are certain things that shouldn’t be politicized but are. Candidly, one of those is an academic major in something like women’s and gender studies. If you see that offered on a college’s list of majors, you’re suspecting something about the politics of that place that you wouldn’t suspect of a college that didn’t have that program. And the same is true of the visual expression, the types of students who are highlighted. To go back to our conversation earlier around Texas A&M, showing this whole variety of students, that’s fantastic. A lot of colleges don’t have that, right? It looks a little bit more typified. It looks like you could guess who goes there, who belongs there and what their political beliefs are, and therefore whether you as a prospective student would belong there as well. And so there’s a lot of things that students can pick up from both being on campus and just simply by looking at a website that can tell them about the politics of that place.

Jarrett Smith:
Yeah. I thought this was a super interesting finding. I know when we first reviewed the initial results, you had a little call-out that said context clues mark, and it was really thought-provoking. I was like, what are all the things you might find on a college website that might just be those subtle signals? And that may even fly under the radar consciously for a lot of students.

Grant De Roo:
Exactly.

Jarrett Smith:
That just may be more of an intuitive feeling that they might have about that. And you think especially if your school is known beforehand, let’s say it was already in a student’s consideration set, then they already are coming in with maybe some thoughts and ideas, accurate or maybe not about who can be successful at your campus. And so to me it absolutely underscores just what you were saying, which was the importance of showing who can be successful in illustrating that in a lot of different ways. This is corny. I did not add this in the report, because it was just too folksy to include, but I’ll share it here on the podcast. My dad used to have this saying when I was little, he said, “Only brush the teeth that you want to keep.” And I thought about that randomly, this is how my mind works, I’m sorry, when we were reviewing results. Only show the students that you want to attend and show how they can be successful. So there we go. Thanks, dad. Appreciate it.

Grant De Roo:
I love that. That’s fantastic. And if I could add just one other thing. I said a moment ago that this can come down to a matter of belonging and we saw that earlier in the results, but even on a smaller scale, maybe not necessarily belonging, but I think about what the student experience is like if you are an outlier politically amongst your friends. I think about the conversations that we have or just simply the comments that are made or the assumptions that might be made in casual around people’s political views or even their life experience. And I think what that experience feels like if you are the only one of your friends who has conservative views. I think that is what students are imagining when they think about being a political outlier at a college. If this is a highly political campus and their views by and large differ from my own, that’s going to be exhausting. It’s going to be uncomfortable and it’s going to be really tiring to go through that day after day, conversation after conversation. And I think that that would be pretty off-putting for a lot of prospective students who again are 17 and 18-year-olds who are just trying to maximize this 4-year experience that we say, that many people say the best 4 years of your life. And I think if those kinds of conversations can make you routinely feel uncomfortable and feel outcasted, then it’s just not going to make for a great experience.

Jarrett Smith:
Yeah. Okay. So we will jump into the third and final one on my end, which this was something that I was looking for in our survey results that I was curious about. So back in, I want to say probably somewhere around the January, February timeframe of this year, there were some headlines that came out talking about the growing gender divide on political affiliation. And I want to say it was based on some Gallup data, and it was showing that globally you have young men and young women really diverging significantly in their political views. And I was curious if we would see any echoes of that in our own survey. And the reason I was curious about it was because I saw those headlines with that initial analysis, but then I saw some other data nerd types diving in and saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold your horses. This may not be as extreme as people think.” And we’re making a counter argument to that. So I was just curious how would that play out in our own survey? So we did find something interesting, was when we looked at our most politically active liberal students and our most politically active conservative students, we did see some interesting gender differences, but it wasn’t quite what I expected. I expected that we would have, that our liberal students would be the most politically active liberal students would be heavily female. And that turned out actually to be the case, 71% were female, 29% were male. On the conservative side, I thought it would be sort of equal but tilted towards young men. And it was not. Actually, it was much closer. It was 56% male and 44% female. And so I started digging into that and trying to understand what is actually happening here. And the conclusion that I came based on my reading and additional research was that historically young women have been more politically engaged than young men as a group in general. But that right now there are so many more issues that are hitting closer to home for young women. And so really what you have is it’s not that young men are necessarily becoming more conservative.

That appears to be more or less stable over the last 20 years or so. What you have is that young women are becoming more liberal. And really from my reading of the Gallup data is that it’s really starting back in like 2016, 2017 timeframe. You think about what was happening in our political world at that point in that since then there’s this been increasing sort of liberalization of young women and that really there are a host of issues that are animating that reproductive rights probably top of that list. And I think that some of that, even, Grant, I know in our conversations earlier we think that some of that was directly impacting our survey results. I know that Alabama came up as a state that was specifically called out as being a state of concern by many, many students, particularly by liberal students. And at the time we ran our survey, they were also embroiled in controversy around their state’s own views on reproductive rights and that sort of thing. So it was just, I don’t know that I have a huge takeaway from that other than it was interesting to see how our own research intersected with the work that was happening from other research that was happening there and to see that reflected in our own, and echoed in our own results.

Grant De Roo:
Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. Couldn’t agree more. And we did cut the data by a number of different demographic factors. And I think to your point, we wanted to know how does this look for white students versus Hispanic Latino students? How does it look for Asian students, Black African-American students? And we looked at this through a variety of different lenses and in almost every case, Jarrett, correct me if I’m wrong, but what we saw in the survey results very much aligns with what we’re seeing demographically around the country for adults, students, what have you, the more conservatively for the Hispanic Latino population. Very much tying in these results with what we see going on nationally. The one that really stuck out to me was the share of liberal students who identify as LGBTQ, which was shockingly high to me. So this was just interesting. So amongst conservative leaning students, 9% identify as a member of the LGBTQ community. Among liberal leaning students, it was 52%. More than half.

Jarrett Smith:
And how important is that as a school to recognize how important that population is and how important it is to show in demonstrable ways how you’re providing the support and environment where this folks are going to feel welcome on campus. And yeah, it is a significant portion of young people today. And I think it’s also worth saying, not just liberal students, right?

Grant De Roo:
That’s right.

Jarrett Smith:
Although that is where they overindex, but it is not strictly just liberal students. So there is so much more we haven’t discussed. We haven’t touched on the impact of parents’ politics on where students choose to enroll. That was an interesting part of our survey. I think I mentioned this earlier. We talked about, one of the questions we asked was whether or not students feel like colleges should weigh in and take a stand on divisive political issues. We actually asked that in a couple of different ways, and I thought that was super interesting. So folks that are listening, if you want to grab a copy of this, read it for yourself. Again, I encourage you, go to echodelta.co/politics. You can download a copy and dig into that and a whole lot more. Grant, I think to wrap up our episode here, reflecting on everything that you learned in the survey, if you had one piece of advice for colleges today in their recruitment, what might it be?

Grant De Roo:
So one, I’ll back up for a moment and say, I think one of the challenges of this work is that because we are equally focused on the politics on campus as we are, or the politics in the region surrounding the campus, this problem can feel existential, beyond our control, and something that is just out of our hands and therefore there’s nothing we can do about it. I think the reality is it’s going to place a greater onus on the part of colleges and universities to demonstrate to their prospective students that you belong here in much the way that Texas A&M did in that example that you showed. And I know that’s so easy to say, and it’s nebulous advice to say, communicate to your students that they belong here. But I think what you have to do is do that in a very intentional way through both verbal and visual communication. I think you have to show students that they can be successful there, that they can be challenged, yes, but that they can be safe, that they can have good well-being on campus. And at the same time assert that, ultimately, your focus as a college or university is to ensure the education and well-being of your students. And I think asserting that and then providing the specific resources, supports, and other things like reporting mechanisms, having both that high level and that detail is going to be really important. And you don’t necessarily need to assume that every student needs to hear that, but I think that the more that you can proactively communicate this to your prospective students early on in the funnel, it is going to be important in ensuring that they don’t close the door off to you just simply because of where you’re located. Getting out ahead of this messaging as quickly as possible is going to be important. So you asked for one piece of advice, I gave two and a half. But really what this means is I think it is important to not only communicate an institution’s commitment to its students and the supports and resources that are available on campus, I think it’s important to show visually that all different types of students can belong here. And then third, to do it early, early and often in the communication. Because if you wait until, say the summer before student senior year, they might have already closed off that option mentally.

Jarrett Smith:
Yep. Well, Grant, I think that is a perfect note to end our podcast on. Thank you so much, man. It’s been a pleasure talking with you, and it was a real joy to work on this project with you, so thank you.

Grant De Roo:
Likewise. Thank you, Jarrett.

Jarrett Smith:
The higher Ed Marketing Lab is produced by Echo Delta, a full service enrollment marketing agency for colleges and universities of all sizes. To see some of the work we’ve done and how we’ve helped schools just like yours, visit echodelta.co. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. And as always, if you have a comment, questions, suggestion or episode idea, feel free to drop us a line at podcast@echodelta.co.

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Jarrett is our VP of Strategy and the torchbearer for all things digital. Since joining us in 2014, he’s made it his mission to help clients seize the power of smarter marketing strategies—and reap the rewards.

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