What Happened to College?: How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It

by Neil Gross

“The book everyone with a college-age kid should read.” —Katie Couric * “Anyone who wants to understand the crisis in higher education—and help solve it—should read this book.” —Greg Lukianoff, author of The Coddling of the American Mind *

“Everyone has an opinion about higher education, but ironically few scholars actually study it in a systematic way. What Happened to College? brings data and rigorous thinking to bear on the question of how a university system that is in many ways the envy of the world has lost the confidence of such a large share of the country.” —Matthew Yglesias

A sociologist who has been tracking the polarization of higher ed reveals how things went off track, what students are saying, and where we can find hope.

The campus culture wars are raging, but what's really going on behind the headlines? A decade after his landmark book on faculty politics, Neil Gross launched a massive investigation into student life on campus, interviewing over a hundred faculty, students, and administrators across the country and polling thousands more. He looked at liberal arts colleges, state schools, faith-based institutions, and elite universities and combed through studies tracking everything from dating habits and dwindling enrolment in the humanities to the liberal bias embedded in course syllabi.

What he found was Undergraduates today are choosing their schools, their friends, their partners, their activities—even their majors—on the basis of their political beliefs to a degree unimaginable ten years ago, with the goal of interacting as little as possible with anyone whose views don’t line up with their own. Popular campus dating apps invite you to swipe left if you don’t like someone’s political profile—a metaphor for today’s college experience writ large. Instead of resisting this trend, faculty and administrators often encouraged it, creating a cloistered environment where students could avoid uncomfortable disagreement. It isn't so much that the faculty are indoctrinating students—no one likes to be told what to think. Students, if anything, are indoctrinating themselves.

What Happened to College? paints a picture of an educational system in crisis and ripe for change. Grounding his analysis in sorely needed data, deftly debunking overstated claims, Gross offers vivid, fly-on-the-wall insights into what it's like to be a student today at one of our nation's top colleges. While some students will cheat their way to easy As, he he found places where open debate, intellectual inquiry and friendship across political lines still thrive. What are these campus communities doing right and how can prospective students find them? Can we teach students to disagree better? At a time of growing political stridency, nothing could be more important or more necessary.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Politics, History

288 pages, Hardcover

Published August 25, 2026

Reviews

[Stetson · Rating 3 out of 5]

tl;dr Gross convincingly describes how affinity-based sorting dynamics have increasingly shaped and polarized campus life for students, cultivating a heavily left-wing social ecology and ultimately exacerbating affective polarization (cross-party hostility) and degrading broad-based trust in higher education. However, Gross fails to identify when and where the sorting equilibrium emerged, whether or not institutional power helped produce it, or why the resulting norms are so intensely asymmetric compared to less asymmetrically polarized student body.

Neil Gross has invested roughly two decades trying to investigate, using the tools of mainstream sociology, the polemical claims of the conservative critique of higher education, i.e. the charged argument that colleges function as left-wing indoctrination machines that derange the youth and cultivate social dysfunction. Reframing this claim, What Happened to College? is perhaps one of the academy's few fair scientific reckonings with the arguments raised by books like God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom', The Closing of the American Mind, The Hollow Men: Politics and Corruption in Higher Education or Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth. This book is also a follow-up to Gross' Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?, which argued that rather than conversion or persuasion the leftward shift in the academy throughout the close of the 20th century and beyond was driven mostly by ratcheting selection effects. This book makes a similar arguments about college students. Neither book really isolates the initial conditions for the phenomenon of interest and are merely describing active dynamics that reproduce or exaggerate the institutional and social advantages of the left inside the academy.

In What Happened to College?, Gross expands his ambit asking whether the political selection ratchet affecting faculty has become pervasive in higher education, shaping the student body and its social ecology. This seems like it would be obviously the case of course and the more important questions are the nature of the effect of professors on students and the institution of college itself of student's political beliefs and behavior. Instead of these deeper why questions, Gross focuses on how politics increasingly has organized student life and its consequences for institutions of higher learning and society writ large. This includes examining the influence of politics on college selection, roommate selection, friendship and dating dynamics, course of study, and almost any aspect of campus life you can imagine. Methodologically, he uses nationally representative surveys of four-year institutions and interviews with roughly 100 students and recent alumni from 18 institutions.

At a high-level his basic model is that polarization in broader America influences students sorting into higher education, including the enrollment decision into particular institutions and then further politically sorting in local social networks at those institutions. This reduces contact among students with different worldviews, precluding constructive dialogue and debate. This feeds forward into greater polarization, increasing hostility and then catalyzing more sorting. This model is reminiscent of the claims of The Big Sort and the broader literature on affective polarization (i.e. adopting a partisan team as an encompassing personal identity) and homophily.

Gross's sorting thesis challenges the conventional conservative narrative of faculty-led or institution-led indoctrination (though there is evidence that certain courses of study can shift students more to the left than others). It casts sorting as a mostly bottom-up or a demand-driven phenomenon. The students applying and enrolling in colleges are already overwhelming left-wing, and the more selective an institution, the more left-wing shifted the prospective class is, shifting from 2 or 3-to-1 to 3 or 4-to-1 mix. This social imbalance tilts the social ecology of campus so that after students arise the left-wing beliefs of arriving students are like to drift to further left due to the homogenous personal networks and social incentives they'll face in college. Gross points out that this "social polarization" is likely to move more student's beliefs than the faculty themselves.

My issue with Gross' model is that it underplays how the social signals and incentives actually work on campus and which political camp gets to set those incentives and why. He never investigates who the social models are? Who sets the norms and conventions? When did the left-wing social environments in prestigious institutions become entrenched? The history of this process appears essential to understanding this phenomenon. Further. t is evident that prestige is playing an incredible critical role. The leftwing mores and convention are filtering down from more prestigious institutions to less prestigious ones. Students are incentivized to mimic their more elite peers who appear to be more radical or revolutionary than they are. There is no influence flowing in the other direction. Sources of dissent, such as athletes and Greek life, are socially tarred as regressive and dumb (the chuds) and are institutionally targeted or marginalized. These bastions for more right-wing students (often mostly men) function with entirely distinct social ecologies despite their prior roles as essential parts of campus life. Gross even notes this in his work but fails to reckon with how important this is to his model.

Throughout, Gross is very attentive to a conceptual distinction between different kinds of polarization: social, ideological, and affective. Ideological polarization refers to disagreement over substantive policy positions, whereas affective polarization refers to the intensity of dislike or hostile feeling toward the opposing political camp. The former can be understood as useful for a college environment. The romantic conception of a liberal arts education is one in which students are confronted with a wide-range of disparate viewpoints and compelled to engage with these different ideas rigorously, developing one's own ideas. The latter, however, has few redeeming qualities. Affective polarization is more or less the same in-group versus out-group tribal dynamics that led to horrific forms of oppression and systematic violence, if left to run wild. Certainly, advanced affective polarization forecloses the possibility of intellectual discourse between opposed camps. There isn't a basis of trust or even shared epistemic to work from. The quotes from student interviews that Gross presents reinforce his points about the degree of sorting and its role it exacerbating affective polarization. He also presents counterexamples where students who do engage with the other side end up becoming less polarized, though this can come at a social penalty.

There are a lot of other potential explanatory variables that are largely excluded from Gross' analysis: rising tuition costs, ballooning administrative roles, plateauing college wage premium, declining humanities enrollments, increasing admission selectivity, etc. These choices are defensible given that their relationship with his model are probably complex and require expanding the analysis beyond higher education itself. He does touch on some of these issue, including a look at whether the humanities have been ravaged by student labor market concerns or economic insecurity among enrollees. There is something there but he rolls the results back into his model, arguing that humanities have shifted so far left in order to attract students and that without this pivot to "stay relevant" they would have even fewer students. Suffice to say, I did not find that argument persuasive.

There were places throughout the book where I felt that Gross was being disingenuous, feigning a naivety about the social ecology of college campuses. This raised my hackles about other claims made throughout the book, though I still read the book assuming good faith on Gross' part. He is open enough to admit that his perspective notably differs from conservatives. He is a liberal democrat, and this clearly informs some of his skepticism of the conservative narrative about higher education. Ultimately, my rejoinder is that even if we accept his selection model as the main explanation for the left-wing dominance of college campuses and faculty ranks, it doesn't really exclude or refute essential aspect of the conservative narrative. It simply qualifies them because he never identifies where the selection effects begin and whether college as an exposure variable itself has a socially meaningful impact on political attitudes independent of the selection phenonemon, which itself is still feeding polarization. The faculty and then student sorting model is completely compatible with a post-60s takeover of the professoriate by left-wing ideologues and activists. Gross rules out this "long march" or takeover model by providing an extremely superficial analysis of faculty hiring and political identification over this time period, but this refutation is not particularly rigorous as the institutions involved matter a lot especially if institutional prestige helps direct the sorting ratchet. A full refutation of the conservative critique requires identifying will the sorting ratchet gets started, something his analysis never comes close to doing.

Another reason I'm quite skeptical of some of Gross' claims is that we can see how Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter/X reshaped the media landscape and incentives without any changes from a bottom-up or demand direction. Arguably, a hostile takeover of the trusteeship of all universities and curricular incentives to teach non-progressive or even conservative ideas could quickly reshape the political climates and polarization of college campuses.

Anyway, this is a serious argument about why college life has become so politically one-sided and thus why there have been some bizarre ongoing on college campuses, such as cancel culture, speaker deplatforming, post-10/7 tentifadas, etc. It is clearly an incomplete model and gestures at selection and sorting effects that most people aware of the basics of social network dynamics or most social phenomenon in general will not be surprised by. It fails to really isolate why things have gone so badly for college and doesn't identify a path forward for colleges to remedy this potentially existential issue.

For those that are curious, Gross does have recommendations for remedying the current problems in higher ed:

1) Make openness to reasoned debate a condition for admission.
2) Teach students constructive dialogue skills.
3) Increase political diversity among students.
4) Rethink first-year roommate assignments.
5) Have faculty reconsider how they teach in an age of polarization.
6) Increase political diversity among faculty.


These are a bit on the tepid side, especially given that he rejects more drastic solutions like banning DEI, ideological quotas, curricular intervention, or institutionally mandated viewpoint neutrality, and that there is little in the way of enforcement and we can expect most of these efforts to be rebuffed rather than embraced by institutions. There is also a funny tension between Gross' diagnosis and prescription. The former is supposedly a bottom-up problem but the solution is top-down. In other words, his own recommendations imply that the institution has enough causal power to alter political sorting.

Research that complicates Gross' Claims:

• Zachary Bleemer and Sarah Quincy's NBER paper, Decomposing Rising Regressivity in US Higher Education(2025), finds that since roughly 1995, higher-income students have increasingly moved toward high-return fields such as computer science and economics/finance, while lower-income students have remained disproportionately concentrated in lower-return humanities fields. They estimate that about 40% of the recent increase in major-based income stratification is attributable to higher-income students' increased CS enrollment and roughly 20% to the increasing concentration of lower-income students in lower-value humanities degrees. This is in tension with Gross' claim that Humanities' pivoted to woke curricula to attract already lefty students after e'08 economic concerns drove down Humanities enrollment. This is due to the fact that that students with wealthier backgrounds come from the more left-wing milieus who would be less sensitive to tuition price increases.

• Alex Tahk's 2026 survey of faculty at University of Wisconsin-Madison randomly assigned to evaluated hypothetical faculty candidates expressing clear political positions on their application demonstrated a 11-38% point penalty for prospective conservatives. This casts some doubt on whether selection/sorting effects alone explain the political skew of faculty. Further, if conservatives have sorted away from higher ed due to concerns about discrimination or hostility, then the sorting itself is comparable to institutional discrimination. The same patterns are called "institutional racism" or "structural racism" by many academics themselves.

• Heterodox Academy separately analyzed more than 10,000 faculty advertisements from the 2024–25 hiring cycle and found that 22.3% requested DEI statements or related materials. Diversity statements largely function as an ideological litmus test for faculty, screening out conservative applicants.

[Goatllama]

Hazarding a guess? Greed subsumed quality and good intentions, as it seems to do everywhere. You can blame it on politics, but politics are just a tool of tools.

[Brian Shevory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many thanks to Avid Reader Press and NetGalley for sending me an advanced copy of Neil Gross’s important and insightful new book What Happened To College?: How Politics Broke Higher Education and What We Can Do to Fix It. While most of us are assailed by bad faith assaults on higher education by bloviating modern Macbeths who are full of sound and fury but signify nothing (Chris Rufo), Neil Gross, a sociologist who teaches and is the chair of the department of Sociology at Coby College, has asked some interesting questions of the current research and engaged in his own inquiry of undergraduates, noting how their voices are often missing from the responses. As Gross untangles the research and pulls on surveys and statistics to investigate the question of “What Happened to College?”, we learn that there are many different factors across different domains that have contributed to more politicized, if not polarized, campuses in the US. However, it’s important to also pushback against the simplified and uninformed responses that proliferate on social media, conservative think tanks, and even from the government that try to implicate liberals with indoctrination and enforcing “ideological capture” in college classrooms. Thankfully, Gross’s deep dive into the research and his inclusion of student voices provides an antidote to the shallow thinking and bad faith arguments that continue to malign higher education. Nevertheless, Gross’s analysis uncovers issues and concerns, but he offers some reasonable and evidence-based ideas to improve teaching, communication, and socialization on campuses.
While Gross works in higher education and has observed changes through Colby’s campus, he notes that this campus, located in Maine, may not be representative of other campuses, and thus qualifies that much of the research and results we encounter about polarization and divisiveness on campuses should be viewed through the lens of the differences in schools. That is, students will perceive freedom to share and interact much differently on small, liberal arts campuses than they might on large, state school, research one, or elite college campuses. Another aspect of the book that appealed to me was Gross’s reminder that much of what we encounter in the news about incidents on college campuses reflect isolated events at some of America’s most elite and selective universities, yet the narrative that this is happening across all colleges is somehow perpetuated. My spouse also works at one of these universities that experienced significant disruption due to protests and encampments, and although Gross doesn’t mention it, it’s important to note that these incidents are disruptive to everyone on campus and, at times, involve members outside of the campus community. Yet, due to a lack of critical examination into these incidents, the blame is largely foisted onto administration, professors, and specific departments, and this blind acceptance of these scapegoats has real implications. People have lost their jobs, students have lost scholarships as schools continue to lose funding for research and scholarship. Gross’s research and analysis is an important reminder of the need for critical analysis of these incidents and to be a careful consumer of information we encounter on higher education.
In addition to being a professor, Gross also explains that his research was partly driven by his son’s recent college application process. While he notes that many students do not necessarily factor politics and institutional neutrality into their decisions, he notes that the framing of attention to political incidents on campus may affect how parents view college decisions. Thus, Gross’s book is a great read for parents whose children are planning to apply and attend college. He provides clear and well-researched information about the different types of universities and how their campus politicization has shifted over time. Furthermore, I thought that certain sections of this book would be a great read for first year students in introductory courses to not only explore the evolution of politics on campus, but to also gain a better understanding of how to support claims and ideas with research and how to analyze and evaluate existing research. Students would have an opportunity to examine survey and polling data, but also to question the methods, samples, and questions that researchers ask to raise further questions about the reliability and validity (as well as potential biases) that result from research methods. While this may seem highly technical and theoretical, Gross’s pedagogical skills make these methods accessible for a general audience and further help to promote the kind of critical thinking that is at the core of higher education.
What Happened to College? is organized around several areas of the campus- admissions, friends, hooking up/romance, politics in the classroom, cancel culture, and majors. Gross ends the book examining how education in general and higher education specifically is a progressive idea which ends up transmitting progressive ideas to students. He further explains how selective universities tend to be more progressive or liberal, which in turn attracts more progressive applicants. His research and analysis examines the traditions of higher education and demonstrate that it’s not ideological capture or indoctrination, but rather the progressive nature of education for all that tends to further influence people’s thinking. I found the chapter on majors to be particularly interesting, as Gross notes that some majors tend to have more conservative or moderate views, while others tend to lean more liberal, which kind creates this self-fulfilling prophecy. Students who tend to lean more conservatively or moderately are more likely to study fields like business, engineering, and sciences, where they encounter more students and professors with similar ideas and values. Conversely, students with more liberal learnings are more likely to select liberal arts, social sciences, and education as majors, where they also encounter others with similar values and beliefs. Other chapters that deal with teaching and cancel culture are also important to consider since students have expressed concerns about sharing their ideas in class. As Gross indicates, this is a documented concern for many students, but I also think that college classrooms have always experienced the challenges of getting students to share their ideas and experiences in a larger and sometimes unfamiliar setting. Part of this is developmental, as students are transitioning from a familiar high school setting to an unfamiliar classroom with changing classmates throughout their 4 years. Some classes may even be so large to limit any kind of dialogue. In my experience teaching in higher education, it can take some time to build trust and establish an environment where students feel comfortable sharing. I usually try to get students to use their own experiences as a frame of reference to make connections with the ideas and theories from readings. I also like to use small groups to help establish closer connections and develop more comfort with sharing with a small group before sharing with the entire class. Again, this can take some time and effort to establish the level of trust and comfort. Students in college are also, in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin, ideologically becoming, a kind of continuous process that is shaped by the interactions with the different people and values that surround them. As students move from their varying home experiences to college, they probably encounter a greater variety of values and backgrounds, some of which may counter what they believe. It’s important to remember that their development of their own ideologies are a continuous and ongoing process, and exposing students to a variety of different perspectives is not only healthy, but also important to their development. Gross notes the role that social media can play in students reticence. While social media can offer students immediate responses and attention to their ideas and thoughts, it’s not representative of the kind of dialogue and critical thinking that are an integral part of a college classroom. Furthermore, the exposure to echo chambers and divisive polarity that are often found on social media run counter to the kind of thoughtful dialogue and evidence based reasoning that are often found in college classrooms. Nevertheless, social media is something that professors and students have to contend with on today’s campuses, but as Gross’s research into the concerns about freedom of expression and careful consideration of ideas from students indicates, it’s all the more reason why college is so important for students today. Students need to learn to think and listen considerately to ideas, as well as to be critical consumers of the kind of information (and disinformation) they encounter online. College classrooms should play important roles in shaping this kind of critical thinking to question and counter the polarization present on social media. Gross’s conclusion recommends some practical applications that can be implemented to improve dialogue and interactions on campus to reduce polarization and create a better sense of understanding and appreciation. I really appreciated seeing the importance of teaching centers to help professors learn best practices for facilitating meaningful dialogue and engaging students in sound instructional methods to support deep learning. Furthermore, it was interesting to learn more about intentional rooming arrangements in some schools and other programs like those at Duke University that promote dialogue and discussion among students.
What Happened to College? is an important book to read, not just for professors and others who work in higher education, but for parents and students as well. Neil Gross’s thoughtful and critical analysis and evaluation of the research about the politicization and polarization in higher education helps to establish a more reasoned, impartial, and objective perspective on many of the issues that students and faculty face in higher education. This is especially important since the current narrative about ideological capture and indoctrination relies on spotlight fallacies and overgeneralizations that fail to document what is really happening on college campuses and classrooms. These logical fallacies and the media attention they have attracted have real world consequences on funding and opportunities in higher education that will ultimately result in a less-educated population. If anything, Gross’s research and analysis is an important reminder about the significance of a college education in raising more questions and interrogating the data and information we encounter. Highly recommended!

[Amelia Kolb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neil Gross touches on the political climate of higher education today and how students are influenced by politics in their courses, social lives, and major/institutional decisions.

As someone who works in higher education and has been studying political engagement, the themes Gross compiles in the book align with the questions and issues students, faculty, staff, and administrators face in today’s political world. I found the information helpful and representative of my experiences.

Those who read this work may have a better understanding of political implications for college today.

The conclusion includes the following: “…We must help the next generation of Americans to become more skillful citizens who can lead our nation out of its current political morass. Rather than accommodate the logic of political polarization, colleges and universities must disrupt it…”

The conclusion then ends with 6 tips for college administrators to make this vision a reality. Ultimately, this book includes a great mix of research, anecdotal experience, and a comprehensive idea of what we are facing in higher education today.

[Martin Maenza · Rating 3 out of 5]

Avid Reader Press provided an early galley for review.

When I was in college in the mid-80's, politics was not on my radar at all. One of the things I relished about my college experience was meeting and interacting with people who were different with me, who held differing views and opinions. It was about exposure to ideas. I have heard the recent news stories about how at this point in the 21st Century that college campuses are fundamentally becoming more and more politically insular, so this seemed like a timely book to read.

Gross presents a lot of data in a very manageable manner. I appreciated how he supported the numbers with actual student experiences collected over interviews from all places in the cultural and politcal spectrums. Some of this I had heard; some of this was very new and eye-opening.

For those interested in college life in the US and do not have connections to students currently enrolled, this is a good look into the current state of that world.

[Ashlee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This truly was a fascinating read. I loved so much, that book was fair across the aisle. It was fact based, and not opinion (or political opinion) lead. There was an enormous amount of data and information, yet how author Neil Gross presented it, made sense and made the book easy to follow.

My only hiccup was I wish there were more students who were surveyed or interviewed. Just for a larger basis and pool. I’m very thankful I was able to read this. I’m hopeful our college system can begin to sway away from being so politically driven, and this book felt like it could be a blueprint of how to accomplish that.

Thank you NetGalley for this read. Great book!

[Rita Gibson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s a very good explanation of where we are and how higher education became what it is. The descriptions of how DEI is now imbedded in the system are very good. The last chapter is hopeful.