How Race and College Intersected in the Election

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A stark divide separated how white people voted in this presidential election: whether or not they had earned a college degree.

Two-thirds of white working-class voters backed Donald J. Trump. Among white voters with college degrees, his support dropped by 18 percentage points, a gap more than twice as large as those seen in election results for his two immediate Republican predecessors.

To be clear, Mr. Trump’s share of this part of the electorate was not far off the marks set by the two previous Republican presidential candidates: Fifty-six percent of white college graduates voted for Mitt Romney in 2012; four years earlier, 51 percent did so for John McCain. For Mr. Trump, it was 49 percent, a narrow edge over the 45 percent who supported his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Where Mr. Trump overperformed was among white voters who didn’t graduate from college.

The intersection of race and education level raises questions: What explains the educational gap among white voters? How do colleges moderate or harden white students’ views on race, class, and identity? And what are the hazards for academe going forward?

Economic concerns were clearly part of why white voters without college degrees supported Mr. Trump. So was race.

Voters’ perception of race tended to reflect their levels of exposure to people of different backgrounds, and was refracted through categories like education level, party affiliation, class, religion, and gender.

Mr. Trump won because his message galvanized a particular bloc of voters, says Robert P. Jones, a scholar of religion and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute. Mr. Jones analyzes this bloc in his book The End of White Christian America and finds that many of them came to feel left behind, not just economically but also culturally.

A scholar of religion, Mr. Jones and his organization have studied how categories like party affiliation, race, and religion can overlap — and harden. “Party is welded onto racial and religious identity,” he said, “and these things together feel like a single tribal identity.”

First Exposure

Higher education can both disrupt and exacerbate these tribal identities.

In recent days, commentators have emphasized the latter. Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, took to the pages of The New York Times to decry what he called “identity liberalism,” which encourages students to focus narrowly on themselves and administrators to prioritize issues related to diversity. This emphasis, he and others argue, eventually invites public scorn for academe. Stories about, say, students’ preferred gender pronouns become grist for a narrative of “campus craziness” that, Mr. Lilla writes, “only plays into the hands of populist demagogues who want to delegitimize learning in the eyes of those who have never set foot on a campus.”

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Education research suggests that, for many white students, college actually has the opposite effect, by moderating tribal identity.

“It’s not happenstance and it’s not an indoctrination process,” said Jennifer M. Domagal-Goldman, national manager for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ American Democracy Project. “People vote and act on their own experiences.”

For white students, college can be an important part of their experience of race. College may be the first time they have had meaningful contact with people from different backgrounds. Elementary and secondary schools are increasingly segregated; one analysis found that the typical white student attends schools where the enrollment is three-quarters white. Most black or Hispanic students attend institutions where the majority of the population is nonwhite.

College can increase white students’ comfort with racial differences in a few different ways, says Alyssa N. Rockenbach, a professor of higher education at North Carolina State University. The experience might be informal, like a discussion in a residence hall between students from different backgrounds. Or contact can happen more formally, in an intergroup dialogue facilitated by trained staff.

“The quality of the interactions is critical,” Ms. Rockenbach said in an email to The Chronicle. She analyzed education research on the subject for the new edition of How College Affects Students, which synthesizes decades of scholarship on the impact of college on students. “When students experience positive interracial encounters,” she said, “they become more culturally aware, respectful of difference, open-minded, and comfortable interacting across race.”

White students who took two diversity-themed courses showed substantial gains in their comfort with racial difference, according analyses by Nicholas A. Bowman, an associate professor of higher education and student affairs at the University of Iowa. A single course may be the first time a white student learns that his or her experience as part of majority culture isn’t universal. “One course is enough to shake someone,” he said, “but not enough for all the marbles to settle. This is why we see this benefit of a second diversity course.”

If that first experience is a negative one, says Ms. Rockenbach, a white student might feel threatened, insulted, or uncomfortable. And they’ll shut down.

Productive Discomfort

But discomfort, if well-handled, can also prod change.

Intergroup dialogues are often sites where this discomfort is brought to the surface and guided. The skill of the facilitator in these sessions is critical, says Nolan L. Cabrera, an associate professor of educational-policy studies and practice at the University of Arizona. Students from different backgrounds will often hear honest and raw stories in these sessions. “You can’t disagree that this is someone’s reality,” he says. “The facilitator has to be really intentional about how the conversation unravels.”

Sometimes, the way it unravels ends up raising hackles. Terms like “white privilege” and “implicit bias,” for example, can set off a defensive reaction that one scholar calls “white fragility,” in which minimal racial stress becomes intolerable.

Mr. Cabrera, who identifies as white and Chicano, can sympathize with the reaction. “How are you going to go to working-class white people and say ‘You’re privileged?’,” he asks. Instead, he prefers to use the term “white immunity.” It suggests that a poor white student may have experienced hardship, but is probably less likely than a black or Hispanic peer to have his or her intelligence questioned, or to be frisked by the police.

The dialogue between white and minority students may not always be expertly handled. In one qualitative study, Mr. Cabrera conducted extensive interviews with 62 white male students. Some of them took classes that dealt directly with race, but the experience could exacerbate resentment. The white students avoided talking about race with Mr. Cabrera unless the subject involved what they saw as reverse racism.

As one student, “Ronald,” explained to Mr. Cabrera, “The whole class was just centered around, like the rich white man is responsible for all the world’s problems.”

Out of Touch

Ronald’s views echo those of many of the voters that Mr. Trump won so handily.

Nearly two-thirds of white working-class people told researchers from Mr. Jones’s institute that they thought discrimination against white people was as big a problem as discrimination against black people and other minorities. Among college-educated white people, that number dropped to 40 percent.

For many white working-class people, colleges aren’t there to help them; they’re one more institution that has let them down. College, they told the institute, was “a gamble that might not pay off.” Just 44 percent saw it as a smart investment, compared with 63 percent of white college-educated people who felt that way.

“It’s not seen to be a sure thing,” says Mr. Jones. “It’s a kind of fatalism that’s taken hold.”

Dan Berrett writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and educational quality. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.