For college students, a school’s state politics can matter as much as its academics

According to The 19th, state-level politics is increasingly shaping where young Americans choose to attend college. In a 2024 Gallup study, eighty-one percent of prospective and current students said gun policies influenced their enrollment decisions, while seventy-one percent said reproductive healthcare access mattered to their choice. Students across the political spectrum are sorting themselves — liberal students willing to pay over twenty-six hundred dollars more to avoid conservative classmates, while conservative students spend over twenty-two hundred dollars to escape liberal peers. The result is that colleges themselves have grown more politically polarized since the nineteen eighties, as students consciously gravitate toward schools in states where they expect to feel politically and personally safe.

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