Good morning, and welcome to Monday, December 9. Dan Berrett wrote the top of today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Rick Seltzer wrote the rest. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

The degree divide on Capitol Hill

As higher education increasingly becomes a political dividing line, our Declan Bradley examined the relationship new members of Congress have to the sector — by checking out where they went to college.

The results, visualized below and in much greater depth here, tell us a lot about the 119th Congress, which will be sworn in next month.

Congress is more highly educated than the general population. Ninety-six percent of the incoming Congress holds a bachelor’s degree or above, nearly 60 points higher than the rate among the general population.

And, yeah, there are a lot of lawyers. Roughly half of senators and a third of representatives hold law degrees.

But look more closely, and some interesting differences emerge — not necessarily in whether a member of Congress went to college, but where.

Democrats and Republicans cluster at different kinds of institutions. More than 70 percent of Senate Democrats hold degrees from private colleges, nearly double the share of Senate Republicans. On the flip side, almost half of Republican Senators earned their undergraduate degree in the state they represent, which is more than double the share of Senate Democrats who did so.

More Republicans (120) than Democrats (92) in both chambers graduated from institutions with more than 20,000 students.

Five institutions produced 20 percent of senators.

• Stanford University: 6
• Harvard University: 5
• Brigham Young University: 3
• University of Chicago: 3
• Dartmouth College: 3

Widen the lens a little further, and about a third of the Senate attended 10 institutions: the five listed above, plus Wesleyan, Georgetown, Yale, Duke, and Vanderbilt Universities.

These stats are revealing as higher ed is scrutinized as a gatekeeper and potential exacerbator of social and economic stratification. This fall a team of scholars exploring the educational backgrounds of exceptionally high achievers in fields like academe, business, government, and the media found a strong association “with ‘elite’ education.” Attending one of 34 colleges, the authors wrote in Nature, appeared to be “a critical and surprising factor that separated very high achievers from others in their fields.”

That might suggest a need to create more spots for low-income students at the nation’s most selective colleges. But some analysts think that focus is too narrow. Andy Smarick, writing for the Manhattan Institute in October, looked at the educational backgrounds of leaders at the state level as well as the top lawyers in each state. Far more of them graduated from state flagships, non-flagship publics, and non-Ivy League private colleges, he found.

To expand access to leadership positions, the focus should go beyond just a few highly exclusive, mostly private institutions, Smarick writes: “High-potential future leaders are found at an array of public and close-to-home schools.”

The bigger question: Educational attainment has loomed large in post mortems of the most recent election, in which voters with college degrees favored the Democratic ticket, while those without tended to vote for Republicans. How will the educational background of the next Congress inform the policies that lawmakers try to enact and the institutions on which they’ll focus?

📱 Read the full story in The Chronicle: The Colleges That Shape Congress

🕙 For more from our archives:

• Where 5 U.S. Presidents’ Inner Circles Went to College
• How Educated Are State Legislators?

Quick hits

• Judge allows Naval Academy to continue considering race in admissions: Senior District Judge Richard D. Bennett turned down a challenge by Students for Fair Admissions on Friday, ruling the U.S. Naval Academy showed that a diverse officer corps is important for national security. It’s an early result in what’s expected to be a long legal struggle over military academies’ admissions policies after the Supreme Court exempted the institutions from its ban on race-conscious practices last year. SFFA vowed to appeal. (The Chronicle)
• Speech watchdog blasts accreditor for anti-DEI proposal: PEN America raised concerns that the Western Association of Schools and Colleges could be “complying with ideological restrictions before the government actually imposes them” with its recent proposal to delete diversity, equity, and inclusion from its standards. When it pitched the changes, WASC said it wanted to move “from broad concepts to specific actions that better enable institutions to demonstrate progress in supporting achievement across their entire student population.” The accreditor will consider all comments on the standards, its president, Jamienne S. Studley, said in a statement. (PEN America, The Chronicle, WASC)
• 2U jilts boot camps for microcredentials: The online-program contractor announced plans to “transition away from our traditional boot camp offerings” in favor of shorter microcredentials that mix live instruction with asynchronous work. The move reflects declining demand for entry-level technology workers, deeper pools of experienced employees, increased interest in specialized skills, and rising competition from low-cost courses. (2U)
• Connecticut union balks at overhaul proposal: Additional public funding in recent years “emboldened stakeholders” to assume the state would always provide more money to the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system, even in the face of declining enrollment, argues a consultant’s evaluation of the system. It suggests reorganizing administrative offices and managing staffing with an eye toward “realistic” enrollment estimates, which could mean layoffs or reassigning employees among campuses. Union members walked out of a board meeting last week as the report was presented, with one shouting “listen to the faculty not consultants.” (Connecticut Mirror, New Haven Register)
• Changes in Kentucky’s two-year system: The Kentucky Community and Technical College system is scheduled to pitch lawmakers this week on a range of changes, such as a completely outcomes-based funding model and making the system the state’s sole provider of dual-enrollment courses. The system also recommends considering mergers and governance-structure reforms, as well as evaluating transfer pathways to four-year colleges. The ideas are a response to lawmakers’ order that the 16-institution, 100,000-student system propose improvements. (Kentucky Lantern)
• Campus shooting prompts security checkpoints through graduation: A student was airlifted to the hospital from Mississippi Delta Community College’s Moorhead campus and one suspect was detained after a shooting at a residence hall on Thursday, the last day of fall classes. Officials locked down campus and said security checkpoints will remain in place through the end of this week, which is filled with final examinations and graduation ceremonies. (Mississippi Clarion-Ledger)

Quote of the day

“Higher ed has lost their way across the country.”

— Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican

The Utah governor supports lawmakers’ talk of cutting some public-university programs and investing in others that teach high-demand skills, Deseret News reported. “We’re really good at creating new programs in higher ed; we’re not good at getting rid of old programs that probably have outlived their useful life or should not been created in the first place,” Cox said during a budget talk last week.

Taxpayer-funded institutions should meet the needs and values of the state, Cox said. He argued higher ed has forgotten its core mission of seeking truth and said colleges are instead drifting into the “advocacy business.”

The bigger picture: Cox is articulating a vision for public higher education that could make it more responsive to a changing world — but that could also undermine long-valued protections shielding the sector from political influence.

Comings and goings

• Christopher Boone, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability, has been named dean of the University of Southern California’s Price School of Public Policy.
• Shannon B. Campbell, dean of fine and applied arts at Appalachian State University, in North Carolina, has been named provost, executive vice president, and chief academic officer at Columbus State University, in Georgia.
• Esther Nir, a professor of criminal justice at New Jersey City University, has been named interim dean of the College of Professional Studies.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com.

Footnote

‘Tis the season for music fans to devour their listening statistics, as tabulated by services like Spotify Wrapped and Apple Music Replay. Few people seem able to resist the allure of reviewing their personal soundtracks for the year, and then sharing the findings with others.

This year, try a higher-ed influenced twist on the process: Ask how often bands’ second albums — which are so often panned as disappointing — appear among listeners’ top tunes.

Sophomore albums might be more popular than the critics would have you think, according to researchers at the University of Florida and Leibniz University Hannover, in Germany. They compared critics’ and fans’ ratings for thousands of albums for a paper in the journal Psychology of Music. Both the critics and the fans thought album quality worsened as artists’ careers progressed, they found. But critics were uniquely down on bands’ second releases.

“If every music critic has heard of a sophomore slump and everyone knows it happens, they might be convinced to over-apply it in their reviews,” Gregory Webster, a University of Florida professor who co-authored the study, told Phys.org. “We suspect it’s a kind of social conformity, which we see in a lot of social groups.”

So don’t be afraid to tout your love of Rage Against the Machine’s “Evil Empire.” It’s just one more way you’re sticking it to the powers that be.