Where College Students Stand

0:00:07.3 Aaron Powell: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:09.4 Trevor Burrus: And I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:11.3 Aaron Powell: Joining us today are Clay Routledge and John Bitzan. They’re professors at Challey Institute at North Dakota State University, and authors of the new report 2021 American College Student Freedom, Progress and Flourishing Survey. Welcome to the show, gentlemen.

0:00:26.7 Clay Routledge: Thank you, it’s great to be here.

0:00:28.0 John Bitzan: Yeah, thanks for having us.

0:00:29.6 Aaron Powell: Before we get into the results of this survey, can you tell us a bit about the methodology for it, how you conducted it?

0:00:37.5 Clay Routledge: Sure, I can do that. So we worked with an organization called College Pulse, which they collected all the data, but this is what they specialize in, surveying students. They’ve built up a large, I guess, database of student participants from universities all over the country. John and I designed the survey instrument, and they collected the data for us. It’s a thousand students representing, I believe, 71 different colleges, four-​year colleges and universities across the US, and it’s a pretty diverse and fairly representative sample of US students.

0:01:27.7 Trevor Burrus: What about in terms of, do we have enough granular within the types of universities? Because as we get into these conversations about, “Are the kids okay?” which everyone likes to talk about, especially on universities, there’s often the observation that there’s a significant difference between, say, Princeton undergrads and undergrads maybe at North Dakota State University, or liberal colleges up in the Northeast or Northwest versus more Midwest colleges. Is that in the data?

0:01:56.8 John Bitzan: Yeah, so we can identify the universities. We have… I believe it’s 62% of the students are at public universities, and then the rest are at private universities. We don’t do analysis by university, because we don’t have enough observations per university, but we can tell what universities they’re at.

0:02:18.5 Aaron Powell: And this survey covers a lot of ground, a lot of topics, but was there a core thing you were trying to get at or that motivated you in asking the questions that you did?

0:02:31.9 Clay Routledge: Yeah. As you all know, other people have done surveys on issues related to free speech and viewpoint diversity on campus. And so I think that was our starting point, but we wanted to expand beyond that and get… I wouldn’t say it’s complete by any means, but get a more complete or a fuller snapshot of the attitudes and opinions of college students, not just related to free speech, but other issues that we think certainly connect to viewpoint diversity and to issues of potential ideological bias on campus, and concerns like that. And so we focused on domains that are really important to us at our institute, which John can say more about our institute, but specifically relating to human progress and also free markets and business.

0:03:27.7 John Bitzan: Yeah. Just as an example, one of the things, there have been surveys that have been on to recent years that have shown that young people are attracted to socialism more and not as much attracted to capitalism, and so we wanted to dig deeper and see, well, is it really socialism that they’re attracted to, or is it hyper-​redistribution, or if they’re opposed to capitalism, is it really true capitalism that they’re opposed to, free market capitalism, or are they opposed to cronyism? So we wanted to just get a little bit more insight into those types of things. And then also as Clay mentioned on human progress. I think that there’s anecdotal evidence, anyway, that a lot of students are looking at, the last few years, they’re not really aware of history, and how much progress we’ve made in… I mean, in a lot of America coming out today, it seems like a lot of people aren’t aware of the progress that we’ve made, and so we wanted to get some more insight into the those types of things as well.

0:04:27.8 Trevor Burrus: And to get into to the kind of where it starts off, we have this narrative of fear at voicing controversial opinions, and you asked it that way. Now, is it important when you ask the question… So there’s two things you do. One, you asked them to self-​identify their politics, and then when you… Controversially, you don’t define it, you let them have their own definition of controversial. That could be anything. Does that kind of muddy it up a little bit, or is it sufficient that they just think it’s controversial wherever they’re coming from?

0:05:02.2 Clay Routledge: Yeah, that was a decision that we had to make, and certainly you can imagine people criticizing that, “Well, what does that mean?” But that was actually… I see that as a strength. That was by design, because as soon as we start picking specific issues, of course, to some people that might be controversial and to others that might not be controversial. And so then we’re running the risk, I think, of starting to impose our own views of what is and what isn’t. So in my mind, at least, it’s a good idea to let them say, well, using your own subjective experience, essentially, let them kind of fill that in themselves which, of course, means people could be thinking of different things, but to us, the point really is how do people want to respond to controversy? Do they feel like they can manage it themselves, or do they feel like they need to involve authority? And so regardless of what they bring to mind, to me, that’s what’s interesting is the extent to which students feel like they need to involve administrators to deal with that.

0:06:13.1 Trevor Burrus: I personally thought it’s the first response. It’s 57% total of college students feel safe airing controversial opinions on sensitive subjects. That seems… I mean, it’s over half, but it’s not high enough. I don’t think it’s nearly high enough.

0:06:33.7 John Bitzan: I agree. We both agree on that. It’s just kind of a disturbing number, just disturbingly low number, because… ‘Cause you’d hope that all students feel comfortable sharing their opinions. And so I think that definitely suggests that there’s some kind of a problem that we’re identifying here.

0:06:56.7 Aaron Powell: Is it… I mean, this is where, I guess, the question of what counts as controversial feels like, feels relevant. Because there are… As a libertarian at the Cato Institute, I hold a lot of opinions that are controversial in terms of the Overton window of American politics. And I can imagine, I express them, and I get jumped on on Twitter by people on the left and the right. But… And I can say like, “Actually, you should listen to this, and these ideas aren’t as important as you think.” But on the other hand, there are certainly opinions that are controversial where it seems like it is a sign of social progress that people feel uncomfortable expressing them. Like racist views or anti-​Semitic views or those sorts of things that it would be… If it’s… We wouldn’t even want 57% of people feeling comfortable expressing those views, because those views should be condemned. And so is there a way to interpret the data in light of that? Particularly I’m thinking because you got very different numbers from liberals and conservatives on campus.

0:08:10.3 Clay Routledge: Yeah. I think, I hear what you’re saying, but I would also add that if you look at the question, do you feel comfortable sharing your opinion on a controversial or a sensitive topic being discussed in class? And so to me part of it is if this is fair game for a classroom discussion, then it shouldn’t be. And again, we’re talking about college campuses, so it’s… In that cultural sphere, I guess, somebody could have really, really beyond the pale opinions that they want to yell out in the middle of the classroom. But it seems to me that that’s probably not what’s happening. And then if you look at some… I don’t want to jump ahead, but if you look at some of the other items, I think you get a more… Perhaps a more complete picture, both good and bad.

0:09:07.0 Clay Routledge: Certainly you see some higher numbers in some of the questions about whether or not they feel like their professors are creating the right type of climate. But then when you look at the willingness to report on, not just professors, but the willingness to report other students for saying the wrong thing, so to speak, I think that’s when you maybe start to see where some of the fear and anxiety comes from, is it’s… I don’t think it’s so much that we have a bunch of students that just have horrible views that no one would support as much as it is the case that students are worried that maybe even their just regular or mildly conservative views would be considered beyond the pale and then they would get reported for that.

0:09:53.9 John Bitzan: Yeah. And just adding to that, just if you look at the number, 43%, I don’t think… That’s a really big number if we’re talking about people expressing the types of views that you’re talking about. I definitely don’t think that that’s what we’re capturing here. I think it’s people just feeling like they have an opinion that’s not popular, or maybe that contradicts the narrative.

0:10:19.9 Aaron Powell: To give this context, can you… What does this reporting look like? Because it’s been 20-​some odd years since I was in college, and I don’t recall reporting on each other, narcing on each other and so on. What does this actually look like on undergraduate campuses right now?

0:10:39.2 Clay Routledge: Yeah. Well, I think FIRE has done a good job of documenting the growth of these reporting systems. And so colleges… I don’t know what percentage, but a large percentage of colleges have these biased response teams. And I know some of them even have apps on your phone or web portals or places to where you can file a complaint or report against somebody for things ranging from actual things that we would be concerned about, harassment, threats, but to like micro-​aggressions or other things. And so I think there is more of a surveillance and reporting apparatus in place in colleges than there used to be and just more involved in it. Well, there’s more administrators involved and there’s more ad… There’s just more administrators that that’s their job is to kind of regulate campus social life. And so I think that’s definitely… Like you, I haven’t been in college… I was in college… I was a college student over 20 years ago, and the landscape has definitely changed.

0:11:48.5 Aaron Powell: Do we know if over time this is a change in the attitude of the students, like students are, say, more inclined to run to authority to solve their problems or settle their differences than they used to be, or is this more that when we were in college, the surveillance and reporting apparatus didn’t exist, and so we naturally just didn’t use it, ’cause it wasn’t there, but we probably would have otherwise? So I guess, is this reporting culture the fault of the students or is it the fault of administrations in colleges that have essentially given them these very enticing tools to use against each other?

0:12:33.8 Clay Routledge: We can’t tell you from our survey, of course, ’cause this is our first one. And even looking at… I am aware of other surveys that even Cato’s done, I think, and FIRE’s done. But I don’t know how far back they go and if they’ve really looked at these trend lines. But I would say… If you think of like the coddling of the America… There are these other… There’s a broader literature out there about the changing and parenting. I guess I should back up and say, first of all, I wouldn’t blame the students, I wouldn’t blame the students to begin with, regardless of the explanation, because they didn’t build the culture that they were raised in.

0:13:15.5 Clay Routledge: But I don’t know whether… What the cause is, but there certainly has been a number of people like Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff and others who have documented that, well, even from a very early age, it’s not just starting in college where we’re encouraging reporting even from a very early age, more and more we’re encouraging young people to look to adults and to authority figures to regulate their anxieties and fears and concerns and things like that.

0:13:45.2 John Bitzan: Yes. Well, I agree. I think it’s probably a little of both as well, but I think the fact that there are these systems in place reflects the culture as well, that that’s kind of viewed as the way to take care of things, so we need to put these mechanisms in place to make sure that students can deal with it, I guess.

0:14:06.5 Trevor Burrus: What about the partisan differences here, because we have a pretty big set of 57%, but it seems to me that, at least in the story you hear on Fox News, that it’s the conservatives who can’t share even the most basic ideas, and they’re afraid to be on college campuses. So what do we see how it breaks down in terms of self-​identified partisan?

0:14:26.7 John Bitzan: Well, I guess the numbers support that story, that if you look, I mean, just in terms of our talking about this one question, it shows that the liberal-​leaning students are more willing to or feel more comfortable sharing their opinions than the conservative-​leaning students, so it does support that story.

0:14:51.2 Trevor Burrus: It was still 66%, only 66. And one of the questions, which is again, if you… You think you are a liberal, but 66% are… Only 66% are comfortable sharing those opinions, which is pretty crazy.

0:15:06.1 Clay Routledge: Yeah, I think so. And something else to consider, which we don’t have the ability in our survey to measure or I guess to report, but others have looked at this idea of, it’s actually a very… Liberal versus conservative is a very general way of thinking about it, but it’s actually a very small percentage of perhaps people on extremes, and on college campuses that… For that case, it would be more likely to be on the left than the right. In other domains, it might be more on the right, than it might be more in the populist right, but it doesn’t actually take very many people, it can be a small minority of very engaged and active people that can kind of take control over the environment, and so it could be even a certain percentage of liberal students feel like their views aren’t far enough to the left to feel comfortable sharing.

0:16:06.6 Clay Routledge: And we know that certainly among faculty and administrators, it’s well-​documented that it’s dis… It’s not even close how many more people there are on the left and there are on the right, so yeah, I actually am not that surprised that even a fair amount of liberals would be concerned.

0:16:30.5 John Bitzan: And an interesting thing, I know we’re talking about this one question, but an interesting thing related to that is that the students that feel more comfortable sharing their own opinions are also the ones that are willing to report other students, or more willing to report other students, which is very interesting, I think.

0:16:49.3 Trevor Burrus: On the point that Clay made, too, I found it interesting that overall 70% of students did not believe in disinviting speakers when they were, had controversial views, which goes to this theory that this whole wave of disinvitations as things like this was actually some really interested, smaller group of people and didn’t represent the general opinion.

0:17:13.8 Clay Routledge: Yeah, that’s right. I think there was some political science research that, I can’t remember that, was it like, maybe you guys know this, but it only takes like 15% or 20% of a of a group to really be in charge of… Just because… It’s like numbers multiplied times energy, like engagement. So if most people are just like, yeah, I’m just doing my own thing, and I’m a liberal, but I’m just minding my own business. They’re not the activists, they’re not the people that are most likely to be super engaged, and so it’s not just a story of numbers, I guess, is another way of thinking about it.

0:17:57.4 Aaron Powell: That’s interesting. In light of, I think it was a year or so ago, we had Warmke and Tosi come on to talk about their book Grandstanding, which was about social media, largely. But it was a very similar thing, like you just… This kind of incentive to be the loudest voices and to pile on. And so I wonder how much of this is that our culture is adjusting and that maybe we’ll get to a point where it’s not just that people get kind of tired of PC-​ness or whatever, but that they just get better at estimating the difference between sheer number of people versus loudness of the handful and get better at just ignoring the most shrill, which would then maybe make the most shrill tamper down a bit because they’re not rewarded as much. I mean, if you’re an undergrad and you manage to get another student punished, that’s like a power rush.

0:19:00.9 Clay Routledge: Right. And in addition, even if you somehow escape formal punishment, I mean, as a psychologist, as a social psychologist, I can tell you, there’s a lot of people’s unwillingness to do things, not because they’re necessarily afraid of formal punishment, but they’re afraid of being ostracized socially, and so there’s this concern of being stigmatized, and nobody wants to be stigmatized. This gets to your earlier point about ideas that we want people not to share or to be proud of. It’s a good thing that there’s a stigma associated with being a racist, right? It’s a good thing that people in their country, nearly, most everyone, except the most hardcore, maybe actual white supremacists, would not be proud to have any racist views. They would want to keep that stuff quiet.

0:19:54.3 Clay Routledge: So on the one hand, that’s a good thing, but the flip side of that is you have potentially ways that it gets weaponized, and so it’s not just, “Well, I’m gonna get kicked out of my university or lose some position,” it’s, “Well, even if nothing happens, people are gonna think that I’m a bad person,” and just, it’s just wired in our brain to be very, very sensitive to ostracism. In the ancient past, banishment would be the kiss of death. So, that’s the way our brains are wired. And so it’s really hard to, I think, push people past that, people aren’t as rational as like, “Oh, this is only 10% of people, so I’ll be fine.” I think their intuitions are, it’s just not worth saying, talking, because the cost could be too high and what’s the point? And that’s a problem on a college campus, and I think other parts of our survey maybe connect to that.

0:20:51.3 Trevor Burrus: Well, that’s getting into the progress part, which I think is a lot of the interesting things to think about in your survey is how these things might actually connect to the viewpoint diversity and things like this. But I found, not unexpected, but concerning that only about half of college students think the world has gotten better in the last 50 years. Now, we have a… Maybe it’s like a libertarian thing that we like to point out progress a lot and Cato runs a website called human​progress​.org that tries to point this out. But in my own, say, policy work I do on, say, firearms policy, I have to think I’m fighting against is that everyone pretty… Or about half of people believe that the world is much more violent now than it was 30 years ago. So, it’s very hard to do public policy if like everyone’s beliefs are incorrect about this, but I guess I’m asking that is concerning to you too, I bet, and any theory of why this is the way it is with this very little belief in progress?

0:21:53.8 John Bitzan: I think Clay maybe can answer the why part a little bit more. But just going off what you’re saying is that it’s also I think even a little bit more disturbing than just the numbers with the fact that we gave objective measures. Things like extreme poverty, which has gone from in the 19, early 1980, probably 40% of the world’s population was in extreme poverty. Today, it’s less than 9%. So we gave specific measures like poverty, literacy, life expectancy, things that somebody couldn’t just use their subjective ideas about what do we mean by the world’s getting better. So, these are just facts that you can just look up. So it’s not anybody’s opinion, and so that is disturbing and why that’s the case. I mean, obviously universities need to do a better job of educating students of these things, but maybe Clay has some more insights into why only half of people think the world’s gotten better.

0:22:54.1 Clay Routledge: Yeah, I do. So I think there could be a lot of reasons. One thing we tried to do, of course, this doesn’t make our case airtight by any means, but one thing we try to do to help reduce, I guess you could say the noise of other sources, is we did try to orient students towards thinking about college. So we worded the questions such that… A lot of our questions are worded such that, so like based on what you’ve learned in college, based on your college experience. So the idea was, we understand people are getting opinions from all sorts of sources. And these sources are probably not great. Like you were talking about the Human Progress that you run. I talked to your colleague, Marian Tupy, about this, and certainly there’s a lot of the “If it bleeds it leads” media idea. There’s a lot of negative media where people are just exposed to… And they’re not able to… They’re not good at recognizing statistics.

0:23:56.3 Clay Routledge: They just see anecdotes of, “Oh, look at this horrible shooting that happened, things must be getting way worse,” alright? So I do think outside of the college experience there’s probably all sorts of things, forces, pushing people to be pessimistic. But our thinking was, well, the idea of a college campus, is it’s supposed to be a place of critical thinking, and reasoning, and based on facts. And so college students should be, in our opinion, a group that is well-​positioned to have a more accurate view. And so that’s what we were trying to get at. So yeah, that’s a long way of saying it is kind of concerning because we would hope that one of the things people would walk away from college feeling like is like they understand the state of the world.

0:24:52.2 Clay Routledge: And we also think that that contributes to… It’s not just knowledge for the sake of knowledge, that contributes to a world view that makes progress continue. Because if you say, “Hey, things seem to be… Things aren’t perfect, but look at all these indicators that are getting better, which mean things can get better, which means there’s hope. Which makes me optimistic. Which inspires me to want to do something.” If you’ve ever been to a college graduation and you see the talk from the President or whoever is giving the speech, that’s what they’re saying, “Go out into the world, make a difference.” But it seems like, based on our survey, that they need that message pounded in them way earlier than the graduation date. Because not only do they not seem… A lot of people not seem to believe in progress, but the numbers get even worse if you look at their views about the future. So yeah, that it’s concerning.

0:25:51.4 John Bitzan: And by the way, it’s not… That does not vary among political ideology, that’s the same for students regardless of their political beliefs, I mean, nearly identical.

0:26:02.2 Clay Routledge: Yeah, that’s a good point. I think because if everything just varied by politics, I think you could imagine a story of like, well, something’s going on on campuses where conservatives aren’t getting… Either they’re not getting a good education or they have a bad attitude or whatever the case, but the fact that some things converged, after we got past the free speech part, that there was more convergence on these other views suggests that, that it’s not just a simple partisan story.

0:26:31.8 Aaron Powell: Just out of curiosity, when was this survey conducted? When were the students answering these questions?

0:26:38.3 John Bitzan: It is in April this year.

0:26:40.0 Aaron Powell: Okay.

0:26:41.7 John Bitzan: Yeah, so very recently.

0:26:44.0 Aaron Powell: I would be really interested to see what this looks like, those same results look like in a year or two, because it does… April of this year was not the grimmest time in the last 18 months, but still fairly grim, and that all of these students were living through the Trump administration, and the last… You would not be not unreasonable to look at the United States in the last, say, four or five years and say, “Boy, things aren’t as good as they were, the four or five years before that,” or even these college kids were all kind of born just before or around September 11th and so on. And so I wonder how much of this too is just 50 years is hard to think about, so you might just contextualize it into your own life and then… But do you think that just if you did this again in like another year or two, you’d see an improvement just as COVID is behind us and we’re seeing the growth and jobs opening and all of that?

0:27:51.7 John Bitzan: I think we might, yeah. As you alluded to, many of our questions are about optimism of students that they have for the future, and that very well may change and it’s not… If we do it again, we are going to do this again next year as well, so this is an annual survey, and so we’re very interested to see. That definitely could be part of it, but I still think, especially when we focus on this particular question about what the world… How the world has changed, again, whether they’re not thinking about 50 years, maybe that’s the case, but I don’t know how much that’s going to change, because that’s just basic knowledge, that’s not like, how do you feel about it? It’s like has the world gotten better or not, so.

0:28:33.9 Trevor Burrus: On this question about optimism, which is only… The question, based on what you’ve learned in college so far, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the world? And I saw that, and again, like you guys pointed out, it’s 27% of liberal-​leaning are optimistic, 23% of conservative are optimistic and 27% of independents, so it quite is similar. The mindful thought based on some recent survey stuff, and this is more true in Europe, is how much of this is actually global warming catastrophism operationalized, because there is… I know of a recent survey in Europe that had something like 50% of students did not believe the world would continue to exist after 2040 or something, I don’t know what date they chose, but it was a huge number.

0:29:25.2 Trevor Burrus: So if that’s the biggest thing and you’ve been told for a very long time that by some people, the world will end because of global warming or it will be a catastrophe of some huge point, then I can see a lot of that actually being explained by global warming. But I guess you guys don’t have enough granular data on that, correct?

0:29:40.7 Clay Routledge: That’s correct. But we did ask… So we did ask students to identify what they think the biggest problem is, which isn’t, we don’t have… We haven’t done an analysis on that yet, but this was… They could actually write in what they… I’m trying to find the… John, do you know the exact… I was trying to find the exact question we asked. And I can tell you just from scanning responses that climate change is the number one problem that they identify, and so that’s possible. And what I would say about that as well, which I think is concerning, and part of my motivation as a psychologist to do this survey, is that kind of catastrophe… The challenge with that is psychologically, if you feel… This is pretty well-​known in psychological science, if you feel hopeless or pessimistic, then that de-​motivates you.

0:30:43.4 Clay Routledge: So it becomes almost a self-​fulfilling prophecy where it’s like, “Well, we’ve only got 50 years,” or whatever their thinking is, it’s almost like an excuse to do nothing, and to say, “Well, I might as well enjoy life, and I might as well just do what I want to do.” So in a way, it removes a sense of responsibility, and we think potentially the type of entrepreneurial and innovative spirit that would be required to take on these big challenges. So part of our goal, I think, is to see, not just to capture this, but as a way to build future research and future interventions that are like, “Well, if these are issues you care about, like climate change, it takes the right mindset to take them on,” and a pessimistic, hopeless mindset is not the recipe for solving problems.

0:31:33.2 Trevor Burrus: I think it also… I think some of this, more than as I thought about it, but even the whether the world has gotten better could be explained partially by this too, because some versions of climate change catastrophism kinda subsume all issues to that, so it doesn’t… If we polluted the rivers more, if we put more CO2 in the atmosphere over the last 50 years, if all this stuff is worse, then crime, birth rate, all this stuff is kind of irrelevant to progress. So it could go both ways in terms of how pessimistic they are and how much progress they think we’ve made.

0:32:07.8 John Bitzan: We did find a point that Clay had mentioned previously, is that we think that knowledge of… And again, we were very specific in terms of how the world has gotten better, and we think that knowledge of progress fuels optimism as well. And we’ve done just a little bit of preliminary statistics where we looked at controlling for human flourishing, socioeconomic status, how the political ideology controlling for those things, we find that students that are more knowledgeable about the progress the world has made tend to be more optimistic as well.

0:32:47.7 Aaron Powell: You mentioned at the beginning the… Trying to tease out capitalism versus socialism and views on those, and then just mentioned that we need… This defeatism might get in the way of the entrepreneurial spirit we need to solve a lot of these problems, so maybe we can turn to that. What did you find about attitudes on capitalism versus socialism and entrepreneurship and so on?

0:33:07.7 John Bitzan: Well, so one of the things we initially asked students is, how do you define capitalism and then how do you define socialism? So we gave students two definitions of capitalism, a free market definition of capitalism saying that private, or property is privately owned and free exchange occurs, and the price system determines what goods are produced and how much are produced. Then we gave them a crony capitalist definition saying that capitalism is defined as a system where corporations seek favors that benefit them, like subsidies and tax breaks and things like that.

0:33:45.1 John Bitzan: And we found that just over half of the students defined capitalism as the free market form, where… Again, that was surprising, is I think it was 55% and 45% define capitalism as crony capitalism. So that could explain… In some, it does explain some of why some students are skeptical of capitalism is that they don’t… First of all, they don’t understand capitalism as free market capitalism, and then they don’t understand the progress that’s occurred in the world as a result of free market capitalism. So a lot of the lifting people out of extreme poverty has occurred in places where there’s been significant economic reforms like China and India because of those economic reforms ’cause the free market capitalism has lifted them out of poverty, so the students don’t understand that that’s happened, and then they have a skeptical view thinking that capitalism is just big corporations that are trying to use political tools to help them succeed, I guess.

0:34:52.6 John Bitzan: And then similarly, with socialism, we asked two definitions of socialism, and one definition is state control or command economy, essentially, central planning. And then the other definition of socialism is a hyper-​redistribution definition where you try to make everyone equal in terms of outcomes. And we found that most students or the majority of students define socialism as more hyper-​redistribution than those that defined it as a central planning. And again, that’s what’s attracting these students, I think, is the hyper-​redistribution not the central planning. So I think it gives some additional insights into the previous surveys that have been done for many years on showing attitudes towards capitalism and socialism.

0:35:46.6 Aaron Powell: This sounds like students are fans of the Nordic model, basically?

0:35:51.3 John Bitzan: I think so. And I think, though… It’s interesting, they’re fans of this, but I don’t think they’re thinking about, well, what happens when you redistribute income that much. Well, you eliminate the amount of wealth that’s available to redistribute. I mean, at some point, you eliminate wealth generation. And it’s also interesting, something that Clay and I have talked about, is that some of the policies that young people tend to be, seem to be in favor of are really kind of crony policies. They’re against crony capitalism, but they want to give subsidies to clean energy companies. We know what’s happened in the past when we’ve tried to do that, it hasn’t been very successful, or trying to benefit some favored group in the name of social justice or something like that. Again, that really is cronyism. You’re giving favoritism to certain groups. And so, I think just the misunderstanding has led to a misunderstanding of the implications of different types of economic policies as well.

0:37:00.7 Clay Routledge: Yeah. And I think this could speak back to the education point of, not only are students not learning about human progress to the extent that they’re getting a biased education, the view of capitalism they may be learning in their college classes is like the worst case. It’s like this is the cronyism. And while at the same time, not getting… Not learning how the connection between that and their favored version of cronyism and understanding how that can… Regardless of whether or not it sounds intuitively like a policy that you would favor because it aligns with your ideology or your priorities that ways that this can go bad. So it seems to be that there’s room for improvement in learning, not just economics, but like the broader implications of these different systems.

0:38:00.9 Aaron Powell: Do you have a sense of how much of this is coming from the classroom versus views that they either came into college with, or are getting from peer groups? Because a little while back I looked in… I was reading up on the question of, there’s the narrative of like college professors are indoctrinating students into leftism, which is very popular among conservatives. And I looked into the survey data on it, and it looks like there’s very little evidence that professors seem to change students’ political views, and that the change that seems to happen tends to be more that students’ political views approach the average of their peer group as they get into college. So is this something like that just having professors teach better economic concepts would help, or do we need to change the youth culture that’s driving it?

0:38:57.6 Clay Routledge: I’d say, all of the above, but [chuckle] it’s gonna be hard enough for us to change the teaching. But I know of the research you’re talking about, and one thing I did think about is it is true, of course, that especially among young people, but we’re all vulnerable to this, that our peer groups matter a lot. It’s not just… It’s not just we listen to professors or scientists or experts or anything, we care a lot about the people we spend most of our time with and what they think. So I definitely think that that is part of the story, but on that point of the argument that people say, “Well, these professors aren’t doing a very good job of indoctrinating their students because their politics don’t really change.”

0:39:47.0 Clay Routledge: I think that at some level, it’s true that people’s maybe political affiliations or their self-​identified political labels are really, really hard to move around. But we’re talking about specific issues that… I think you should be able to frame these things as non-​political. You don’t have to be a Republican or a Democrat to see the value of free markets or to understand the pros and cons of different types of policies and regulations. And so I think one challenge is as far as changing the culture, changing the education, everything is moving, trying to move these things beyond just a simple left versus right issue. Because yeah, people don’t really change, it’s harder to get people to change their political affiliations. But there’s a ton of room within any affiliation to see specific policies and specific issues that we think are important for progress and flourishing and things that all Americans should get behind.

0:41:01.8 John Bitzan: And we also… In our survey, there is a little bit of evidence. We found that over half the students say their view of capitalism and socialism hasn’t changed from college. But we asked them specifically, have your classes and other activities in college changed your view of capitalism. And we found that 8% said yes, it’s made their view of capitalism more positive, 36% said yes, it’s made it more negative. So there is some influence, I think, from the college campus as well, and then socialism is the other way around. I don’t have the exact percentages, but more students say that the classes they’ve had in college and other activities have given them a more favorable view of socialism, than say that it’s given them a less favorable view of socialism. So there is some of that as well.

0:41:52.2 Trevor Burrus: I found it’s interesting on this, the way you… Defining capitalism and socialism before you ask them, which is important. But then you have the entrepreneur part, and you have 67% of people think that entrepreneurs are really important to solving problems in society. And you wonder if they’re separating out entrepreneurship and capitalism somehow, ’cause a lot of those kids probably hate Jeff Bezos since it’s so in vogue to hate Jeff Bezos. Is he not an entrepreneur anymore, was he only an entrepreneur for the first million and it’s sort of head scratching. I don’t know if you ever get in that with any of your survey, maybe figure out what’s going on there.

0:42:29.2 John Bitzan: Yeah. So that’s something that we found in a previous survey as well, and we’re very kind of… Not kind of, very intrigued by that. Because again, it seems very contradictory to be for entrepreneurs and against capitalism, but I think that some of that has to do with, again, the idea that capitalism is crony capitalism. So they’re viewing entrepreneurs as kind of the small business, I think, somebody starting their own business, and then they’re viewing capitalism as favoring these huge corporations that are just taking advantage of everyone else. That’s my view, I don’t know if Clay has something to add to that.

0:43:07.5 Clay Routledge: Yeah. Exactly, I wanted to… I’m glad you raised that, ’cause I wanted to bring that up as well, that if you look at some of our other questions. And as John pointed out, we’ve kinda done some of this, not necessarily with college students, but we’ve done surveys on this in the past. There does seem to be a disconnect on specific things that seem popular, like, “Oh, it’s really popular to be an entrepreneur,” people like that. But capitalism has been, unfortunately, I think, successfully labeled as this evil bad thing, and they’re not seeing the connection, which potentially speaks to the education pieces like, why don’t more people understand that, well, entrepreneurship is not gonna be a viable path [chuckle] if it’s not a free market system.

0:43:58.3 Clay Routledge: And so yeah, I think that… And I think that’s another nice thing about… As you know, we have a lot of questions in the survey. But I think that’s another nice thing about asking things slightly different and having these different types of questions is no one question can tell us everything about the inner workings of people’s minds on these issues, but it can help us develop future research as well, they’re trying to tease apart, well, what is it that they don’t understand, or what is it that they have a negative or positive view of and why. And is it because they are accurately assessing it and then saying, “I don’t like that,” or is it because they have a misconception based on something that they’ve heard or learned.

0:44:43.8 Trevor Burrus: So in all this, with all the survey we’ve talked about concerns and optimisms and pessimisms, and things that are going in the right direction or not going in the right direction. It seems to me that maybe you were surprised at how bad some of these situations were, like 57% will share controversial opinions, no one understands that the world is progressing. But on the other hand, if the problem is an educational one, like Clay said, that we just have to make sure they know what capitalism is, or that they know the facts about the world, then maybe it’s not as concerning as it looks to be at the beginning. I’m not sure what you took away from it for both of you.

0:45:23.3 John Bitzan: I would say that, although it does definitely highlight some problems and some concerns, I think there’s… I have optimism, I guess, talking about my own optimism [chuckle] is that I think these are things that we can address, and that’s what we’re trying to do at the Challey Institute. We think that it’s very important for students to be challenged on their ideas, to be exposed to a variety of ideas. Not just for… We want to develop critical thinking skills in students, so they need to be presented with opposing views to what they have in order to develop their critical thinking skills and, again, to help them be successful in society, but we also want students to think about these big issues and to understand what has generated human progress in the past, and then be able to have an optimistic view of the future and be able to understand then what’s gonna generate future progress.

0:46:24.1 Clay Routledge: And so those are all the things, kinds of things that we’re aiming to create more of within our university. And so I’m excited about our opportunity to change these kinds of things and improve things.

0:46:39.9 John Bitzan: Yeah, I agree with that totally. I mean, that’s… We wanted to get a snapshot at first of what… Before you have any kind of intervention or try to do something, you want to know, well, what’s the… What are people… What are these students thinking. And again, taking a step back as a psychologist, I think young people are generally very energetic, idealistic, they want to… All of us want to have meaning, but they’re really motivated to figure out what their purpose in life is, and so I think that there’s… Even looking at these numbers, there should be hope to channel the youthful energy, and going back to the issue you brought up about topics like climate change, I think one challenge may be the… For these students or for young people in general, is if they don’t see a path to solving these problems, then they’re not gonna know how to direct that youthful energy.

0:47:42.3 John Bitzan: And so you could say, well, look, this is something you really, really care about, like you’re really passionate about this topic, so then you really need to have an evidence-​based reality of what can you do and how can you make a difference, and understanding how we’ve progressed in the past, I think, is one way to do that, and then building that kind of optimism and understanding of how to do that in the free market system is also important. So we’re doing a lot of activities here. We run like, we’re running a human progress and flourishing workshop series, where John can say some more about some of our other activities, we’re doing a film screening, so we’re trying to bring… We’re not just here doing a survey to say, hey, look, how bad things are, our goal is to say, hey, we want to add to… We want to add to what students are learning on campus to advance the cause of progress, and we think that the survey is just helping us… Helping us move in that direction, I think.

0:48:50.3 Clay Routledge: Yeah, exactly, that gets back at your first question you asked at the beginning of the interview, what was our motivation for doing this, and that’s really what the motivation is, is that we want to figure out how can we improve the educational experience for students.

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0:49:18.3 Aaron Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.