This week I have offered a series of posts reflecting on Gallup\u2019s stunning recent survey on approval ratings for the Obama presidency. The results are chock-full of bad news for Democrats, but not all of it is bad or unflattering. Democrats might be encouraged that young folks support Obama at a higher rate than older folks \u2014 a result I discussed here<\/a> \u2014 and that the more educated a person is, the more likely he or she is to approve of Obama\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n Those with only a high school degree, or less, approve of Obama at a rate of 42%. \u00a045% of those with some college experience approve, and 46% of those who finished a college degree. \u00a0Of those who have earned a post-graduate degree, however, 53% approve of Obama. \u00a053% is not a huge number, but there is a clear slope here, and it does require explanation. \u00a0What are we to make of this? \u00a0Does it mean that those who are most educated individuals in American society better understand Obama and appreciate his accomplishments? \u00a0Or does it reflect more on the ideology prevalent on American campuses?<\/p>\n There are several reasons to prefer the latter interpretation.<\/p>\n (1) Level of education does not, as we all know, perfectly correlate with level of intelligence. \u00a0Advanced degree programs also tend to reward certain kinds of intelligence instead of others. \u00a0What is interesting is that while Obama approval goes up <\/em>for the more educated, it goes down <\/em>for the more wealthy. \u00a0Now, those with degrees in law and business and medicine tend to be more wealthy, while those with advanced degrees in education, the humanities and even many of the social sciences tend to make less. \u00a0This would suggest that those with professional degrees, especially the most lucrative ones, have a lower approval rating for Obama than those with degrees in education and the humanities. \u00a0This raises the question: how many advanced degrees are awarded each year, and how many are in fields, such as education, law, humanities and the social sciences, strongly associated with liberal ideology on American campuses?<\/p>\n (2) Post-graduate degrees include master\u2019s degrees (including business degrees) and doctoral degrees, and what are called first-profession degrees such as law, medicine, pharmacy, and ministerial degrees. \u00a0In 2007-2008, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, 625,000 master\u2019s degrees and 63,700 doctoral degrees were awarded, and 91,300 first-profession degrees.<\/p>\n The most significant category by far, then, are master\u2019s degrees. \u00a0And in master\u2019s degrees, the largest percentage are education degrees \u2014 the kind of degrees that many teachers acquire before going into teaching, or in order to bolster their training and credentials mid-career. \u00a0Of the 625,000 master\u2019s degrees awarded in 2007-08, 175,000 were in education. \u00a0I don\u2019t have any statistics on hand for this, but Schools of Education are notoriously liberal. \u00a0Moreover, of the 175,000 master\u2019s degrees awarded in education that year, 77% went to women, who typically support Democratic candidates by rates around 55%. \u00a0This has to be balanced against roughly 156,000 master\u2019s degrees awarded in business, where there is less of a preference for liberalism, or (some argue) even a preference for conservatism, but then again the next largest category are master\u2019s degrees in health services (master\u2019s in nursing, etc.), of which 81% go to women, and 33,000 receive degrees in public administration and social services, 75% women. \u00a0Overall, 60.6% of all master\u2019s degrees go to women.<\/p>\n Amongst doctoral degrees it is difficult to discern much of a politically significant pattern, but amongst first-profession degrees the largest number by far (47%) are in the field of law. \u00a0Law schools too are famously liberal. \u00a0In a survey<\/a> of 2008 campaign contributions of 635 law professors, for instance, 95% of the money went to Obama and only 5% to McCain. \u00a0At many top law schools such as Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, Chicago, and Penn, 100% of the contributions went to Obama and other Democratic candidates. \u00a0This was not a rigorous study, but given the 90-point difference in this case it\u2019s hard to believe that the political affiliations of law professors would be anything but overwhelmingly Democratic and liberal.<\/p>\n (3) Apart from the political predilections of particular fields, the education industry in general has given overwhelmingly to Democrats; in 2008 and 2010<\/a>, money from the education industry went to Democrats over Republicans by about 5-to-1. \u00a0Employees of educational institutions, in fact, now consistently rank amongst the top supporters for Democrats and particularly Democratic presidential candidates, donating enormous sums of money to defeat Bush in 2004 and to install a Democrat (and their clear preference was for Obama) in 2008. \u00a0Even in these 2010 midterms<\/a>, significant and wildly disproportionate amounts of money are going toward Democrats. \u00a0According to campaignmoney.com<\/a>, when all political contributions from professors are added together from 1999 to the present, roughly 75% went to Democrats and only 10% to Republicans. \u00a0However these numbers fit together, the trend is abundantly clear.<\/p>\n It strains credulity to the limit to believe that students who spend some of their most intellectually formative years under the tutelage of an overwhelmingly liberal body of authority figures would not find their political views pushed toward the Left.<\/p>\n 4. \u00a0It\u2019s also worth mentioning that there are many more advanced degrees awarded today than there were, say, 10, 20, or 40 years ago, meaning that the number of those with post-graduate degrees will cluster toward the younger side of the age spectrum. \u00a0As already explained, the young tend to be more liberal and more likely to support Democrats.<\/p>\n IN CONCLUSION, the 53% approval rating amongst those with post-graduate degrees speaks less to intelligence or education per se, in my view, than to (1) the demographics of that group, which trend toward two groups already likely to trend liberal: young people and women, and (2) the years of exposure to authority figures who are overwhelmingly liberal in their politics.<\/p>\n So much for the Gallup poll and what it tells us about those who approve and those who disapprove of the performance of the Obama administration! \u00a0Tomorrow we turn to a new subject \u2013 the suicide of Tyler Clementi.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This week I have offered a series of posts reflecting on Gallup\u2019s stunning recent survey on approval ratings for the Obama presidency. The results are chock-full of bad news for Democrats, but not all of it is bad or unflattering. Democrats might be encouraged that young folks support Obama at a higher rate than older […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-electorate","category-the-obama-presidency"],"yoast_head":"\n