A recent Gallup poll gives greater detail to a back and forth UD and her buddy Rita had not long ago about whether college applicants might begin avoiding schools in states with medieval abortion laws. Looks as though they well might.
“The fact that 74% of Republican unenrolled adults say, ‘I would consider enrolling [in] a state that had greater access’ is, I think, a really impressive number,” [an official at the Lumina Foundation, which cosponsored the poll,] said.
And, you know, it ain’t just abortion. Some representatives in zero-abortion, lock ‘er up, execute her, states are now moving on to trying to ban non-standard sexual practices, contraception… And what sort of … emotional reality do you suppose pertains in campus health clinics in the nation’s Junior Anti-Sex League territories? Many students show up with an STD now and then – or maybe anxiety about an STD – and I wonder how comfy they’ll be discussing such matters with whatever medical crew hasn’t yet run off to New York? With a crew that thinks zygotes have voting rights and unmarried women who aren’t virgins are sinners? This isn’t about abortion only; it’s about sex, sexual ethics, sexual ethos, sexual conversation, sexual atmosphere. “[T]he University of Idaho [has warned] employees that promoting abortion while on the job could be viewed as a felony offense.”
“If you go to a state that doesn’t allow you to have autonomy over your body, then that is not only not appealing, that is offensive to many women,” [the Lumina official] said.
UD ain’t denying that there’s a minority of women who’d revel in the repression of their bodily autonomy, who’d get off on lectures from campus doctors about the importance of keeping their legs clenched. But she thinks it’s a very small minority.
[C]ollege applicants are looking closely at the cultural climate of places where they could spend four—or likely more—years studying and exploring their lives as young adults. Red states were already having a tough time attracting talent among students and professors alike, and veering to the right on abortion is only going to make retaining their rankings and prestige more difficult.
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[An] exodus of college students from states with abortion bans could join a string of other consequences that abortion bans have brought, amid reports the laws have also driven physicians out of states where they face the threat of felony charges for providing care, impacted recruitment and training at medical schools and caused employees to seek transfers to different states.
April 23rd, 2023 at 6:44AM
Of course, there’s a significant amount of privilege baked into this question. Most students will continue to choose their own state’s universities because they cannot afford to do otherwise. The kid planning to attend Jacksonville State in Alabama isn’t suddenly going to pick up and go to SUNY Oswego regardless of her views on abortion. (I suppose tuition reciprocity between border states *could* be a factor, but most red states border other red states. Maybe a very small handful of Missourians will opt for, say, SIU-Edwardsville over UMSL, but I kind of doubt it.)
As for the privileged, well, they’re privileged. Any kid who chooses Vanderbilt over Northwestern is probably pretty confident that they can hop a plane to LaGuardia or O’Hare should they ever they need to. Even the out-of-state students drawn to the big public flagships by promises of winning football and public intoxication almost certainly have the means to arrange a brief mid-semester “family vacation” to L.A.
Now, as you suggest, if states actually start banning contraception, that’s a whole ‘nother matter. And it’s probably true that a few admissions officers at elite publics and privates in the south and midwest are following the mifepristone case closely. But at least for now, I doubt that we’ll see enough of an effect to matter. Public opinion polls are typically far better at monitoring feelings than predicting behavior.
April 23rd, 2023 at 10:22AM
TAFKAU: On your first point: Provincial locations will remain successfully provincial, yes; but recall that Bama and some other regional locations have been making noise for some time about national (global?) ambitions for their incoming classes. These ambitious regionals tend to have super-powerhouse, way high-profile sports programs, a “fun” campus experience, a reasonably good faculty for students interested in that sort of thing, scholarship money, etc. I think the new abortion laws – and the very public doubling down on ye olde Bama ways — see also of course their gun laws/gun massacres — will remind students and their families just how deep the deep south really is. For normal people who grow up outside that yall and shut ma mouth land it’s just getting too weird.
If you’re smart and privileged and can choose among say three excellent schools (to your second point), you’re unlikely to want to factor in serious life disruptions, like fleeing to civilization when problems arise. And remember – it ain’t just abortion access. It’s the whole sick regressive culture, which maybe a few years ago you could laugh at, but now with its fourteen million open carry guns, and doctors afraid to perform not just abortions but miscarriage care, contraception counseling, etc., the place can seriously frighten/kill you.
And don’t forget: States like Miss, LA, and Bama have always been laughingstocks, and they’re even more so now. It’s increasingly simply embarrassing to be associated w/ these places, their firearms, and their schools.
I agree that the polls are picking up on emergent trends rather than immediate phenomena. But they strengthen my sense that the belligerent backwaters these locations have actually always been (I mean to include embarrassing Fla, with its DisneySlayer gov, and superbloody Texas in this) will eventually repel normal applicants and their families.
April 23rd, 2023 at 11:02AM
I think the obvious place to look for confirmation of this question is the actual enrollment rates of schools in restrictive states, especially selective schools like the ones I mentioned earlier – Vanderbilt, Rice, Emory, Tulane. Because as TAFKAU says, most people at most state schools are in-state and not leaving, regardless of what these schools’ hyperbolic stated ambitions may be. Every school bloviates like about being a national player, but very few state schools achieve the national status of Michigan or Berkeley, so it’s just talk, and you won’t know if abortion bans have any impact on their actual enrollments unless you look at their enrollments realistically, not through their improbable future ambitions.
A poll of the hypothetical preferences of currently-enrolled students and people who are 57 years old and not in college is also not going to be that indicative. If you’re currently enrolled at an elite school like Vanderbilt, transferring is more disruptive to your life than taking a roadtrip to North Carolina or Virginia for a long weekend. If you’re enrolled at my mostly-commuter institution, transferring is easy but there’s nowhere to go except nearby. And if you’re a middle-aged non-college graduate, why would you even be part of this poll?
The deadline for Fall 2023 enrollment decisions at most selective schools is May 1. Just wait a week and you’ll see preliminary results, and in a year, probably more solid long-term trends. So far, applications numbers seem not to have been much affected. We’ll see about enrollments.
April 23rd, 2023 at 10:31PM
By the way, another comparison about the priorities of college students that occurs to me is with UChicago and Yale. Despite all the horrors of the South that you describe, all these nice schools you mention like Vanderbilt, Duke, Rice, etc. are quite insulated. They are in the nicest parts of town, with very low crime and disorder.
By contrast, Yale and Chicago are in actual high-crime areas, where students are regularly victims of this crime. By the time I finished Chicago, probably 3/4 of the people I knew had been variously mugged, burglarized, robbed, and, if they were female, flashed by some creeper in the neighborhood. And this was *before* the current era of shootings in Hyde Park that actually left students dead. We just had shootings that killed other people.
Wouldn’t you say these facts are *way more salient* to the average incoming student than abortion availability? Surely students and their parents would take something so basic as “chance of being mugged at gunpoint” into account when choosing a school? And yet, both these schools are among the most competitive in the world and Chicago has actually been increasingly exponentially in desirability as neighborhood safety has declined. So I’m just not persuaded that college decision-making really happens in the elastic way you suggest.
April 24th, 2023 at 8:25AM
Rita: A couple of thoughts, basically under the heading can’t fight city hall.
Abortion law is something you can do absolutely nothing about – I mean in the short term, as a private citizen. If you’re in want of an abortion in a state that disallows them, you have zero options. You must slink far away, a guilty thing.
The notorious problem of crime on certain campuses is absolutely something you can do a lot about, and city hall, the state, private enterprise… HUGE resources are out there to help you. As an individual you can also do something to decrease the chance that you will be victimized. In no way does this mean that the problem of crime has been solved in these awful neighborhoods; but if I were choosing between attending a school where I’d be absolutely trapped by a series of anti-choice laws, with the possibility of further repressive, anti-intellectual, legislation (anti contraception, anti gay, anti tenure, book banning, mandated Christian biblical verses in public settings, etc etc) in the near future, and a school where everyone is pulling together to make an unsafe area as safe as possible, I would choose the latter.
Again my point is that states like SC, currently seriously considering legislation that would allow for the execution of women who have abortions, don’t JUST confront a college applicant with lethal antiabortion laws; they confront her with a raft of madness that no self-respecting citizen of a democracy would let herself get anywhere near. And that is why Rice (campus carry, baby!), Duke, and others should indeed be quaking in their boots.
April 24th, 2023 at 10:38AM
This strikes me as a really circuitous way to explain something that is quite straightforward. Rice and the U of C have equally little control of the circumstances in question. Rice can lobby the state gov’t, but it can’t change state abortion laws on its own. UChicago can hire a raft of private cops and it can lobby the city and state gov’ts, but it can’t evict the neighborhood or change the state’s criminal code or make the city re-fund the police. In fact, given the recent mayoral result, the opposite is likely to happen. And there is zero “pulling together” of the community there – the students are ideologically opposed to policing and protest every safety measure the admin takes.
Yes, you can take individual measures to limit your chances of victimization, but they are fairly oppressive, like not leaving your dorm after dark. That’s not less onerous than possibly having to buy a weekend flight out of state to get an abortion once (assuming not every college girl gets knocked up and those who do don’t get knocked up regularly). And if you’re really averse to that, the means of individual control over pregnancy are much more effective than those of avoiding criminal victimization. If you’re smart enough to get into a school like Rice or Chicago, I should hope you’re smart enough to know how to contracept, or avoid sex.
Is contraception or avoiding sex worse than avoiding going outside at night? The Chicago student who fears criminal victimization is much more “trapped” on a daily basis in a dangerous immediate environment than the Rice student who lives in a safe, verdant neighborhood threatened only by abstract political concerns. Yes, there is open carry at Rice. But look at the difference in number of shootings! Not b/c open carry prevents them, obviously, but simply b/c the South Side is the poorest, most dangerous area in Chicago and Rice is in the wealthiest and safest in Houston.
I think the cases are pretty analogous in terms of the universities’ lack of control over the source of their problems. And being personally afraid for your safety on a daily basis at places like Chicago, Yale, USC, etc. is probably more psychologically taxing than being abstractly concerned about abortion access, which is not a service most students will actually need during college. And yet, people are banging down the doors of the crime schools! We’re talking 3% acceptance rates! What’s up?
I think the answer is pretty obvious, and it’s not that somehow being mugged is fine while living in a state where abortion is illegal and the legislators say mean things about women is the greatest trauma a college student can suffer. You have to be totally blinded by partisanship to think that you would prefer to be assaulted at gunpoint than have to travel out of state for an abortion.
The reason is that Chicago and Yale are hyper prestigious schools, they promise you a life of wealth and status afterwards, and people will make huge sacrifices for those promises. They will make those sacrifices to get in, and they will make them to attend. There are many fewer schools in the South that can plausibly make these promises to their students, but those that can will not suffer from the legal dispensations of their states any more than Chicago is suffering from its crime-heavy location. (I’m sure there are some students who choose a different elite school over Chicago bc they’re freaked out by the crime, but we can see from the overall numbers that demand is effectively inelastic in elite college admissions at this point.) Prestige is simply the #1 priority for competitive college applicants and nothing else matters as much. After prestige, there are secondary concerns like imagined quality of dining hall food and bullshit like that. But if the substantial threat of being a victim of violent crime doesn’t deter you from attending a prestigious school, abortion restrictions certainly won’t.
April 24th, 2023 at 11:39AM
On being smart and avoiding pregnancy: Just among my friends, one got pregnant in college even though she had an IUD implanted; one got pregnant in college and tests showed the fetus had dreadful anomalies. Rape scandals of the Baylor and U Montana sort aren’t that unusual (read the entire Montana piece). And yes, some women get drunk and high and go to frat parties etc. What’s new in all this is that in quite a few American states all of these women basically become criminals if they want/need (pregnancy with an IUD in could cause hemorrhage) an abortion. It’s one thing to anticipate dealing with urban crime; it’s another to anticipate becoming a criminal oneself.
April 24th, 2023 at 4:12PM
I don’t really understand your position. Do you think that women are more personally responsible for preventing themselves from becoming the victims of crimes than for preventing themselves from becoming pregnant? Or that criminal victimization is easier to prevent than pregnancy if one takes appropriate measures? Or are you saying you personally would prefer to be mugged than to get pregnant in a state that restricts abortion?
Do you disagree that the primary motivator for college selection is prestige? Or do think the reason that students opt to go to places like Chicago and Yale is primarily their approval of the abortion laws in those states? All I’m trying to show by the comparison with crime is that if secondary concerns really mattered, people would be running away from Chicago and Yale, but they are running to them. You seem to be saying that this is perfectly rational because crime is fine and no real concern. But isn’t the far more obvious explanation for it that it’s not rational, crime is not fine and great, but people are willing to overlook the danger for the sake of a greater good for themselves – prestige?
April 24th, 2023 at 7:13PM
I guess I’m saying that the two forms of vulnerability/danger are very different, and we can therefore expect different motives/actions to be attached to them.
Hopkins, U Penn, Chicago, USC, Berkeley, Brown, Yale, U Mich, UCLA, Columbia… the list of very good/great schools on seriously dangerous campuses/neighborhoods is long. Over the years things have gotten so bad at some of these schools that they’ve made serious threats to leave, in response to which, often, local governments intervene to make things tolerably better.
But it’s an ongoing problem, and I have no trouble imagining, say, Hopkins deciding it’s had enough and packing its bags. I can also imagine steep declines in class sizes/quality, even at the super prestigious. Galludet is extremely dangerous, and its students are deaf! But all of these campuses currently soldier on, despite the vulnerability/danger.
I agree it’s quite irrational of all of us to flock to places like New Haven. But we all do. Not just because of prestige and world-class educations. Because the urban culture surrounding/close to many of these places, while perilous, is also irresistibly exciting and rich. We are not going to give up on the great cities of America and their great cultural offerings, and the idea of attending a college in the midst of the greatest forms of urbanism is for many many people – faculty as much as students – totally thrilling.
Not one of these great schools is located in an abortion ban state. Of those states, only Texas has a respectable public university system plus some impressive private colleges/universities. (Tenn. has Vanderbilt.) What I’m saying is that not only criminalized abortion, but virtually no gun laws, a theocratic legislature, ye olde American anti-intellectualism, and other markers of the opposite of urbanity — indeed a distinct hostility to cities and all they mean for the emergence of great universities — guarantees that, sadly, these states will fail to grow their own great schools. Not only will good students be repelled by the world in which they are situated; good faculty are unlikely to be attracted. There were signs, for awhile, that things might be different, that some of these states might recognize the value of education. But many of them are, as we speak, banning books.
So – to return to the Gallup poll – I only meant to register my non-surprise that, along with many other markers of civilization, reproductive rights really means a lot to many people, which is basically what the poll shows. And now that people can add the criminalization of those rights to several other anti-civilization markers in states where they might have applied to college, they will no longer – I anticipate – apply to those states’ schools.
April 24th, 2023 at 10:01PM
I asked an old acquaintance who is at UCLA about these issues. Her perspective aligns with @Rita and @TAFKAU: US power-brokers are coming from and will come from Harvard, Yale, and an ever shrinking number of private unis. If a student cannot gain admission there, what are the options?
She also pointed out that California was once very conservative but flipped. She sees no reason why other currently liberal states couldn’t go the other way. She’s watching Texas with interest not so much for the abortion stance but because the concept of tenure for professors may disappear there soon with possible knock-on effects for academe elsewhere.
She was bewildered by the UCLA neighborhood where she lives (known as Westwood) being considered “seriously dangerous.” The home prices do not reflect that: https://www.redfin.com/zipcode/90024
The adjacent areas of Brentwood and Bel Air are even more posh.
April 24th, 2023 at 10:46PM
I think only a few of the schools you list are really in immediate high-crime neighborhoods. Berkeley, UCLA, Brown, JHU, and Columbia are all in nice to so-so areas of larger cities with crime problems concentrated elsewhere, aren’t they? Ann Arbor is neither dangerous nor a city. In any case, I think these bad-neighborhood schools soldier on precisely because it is actually very difficult for a university to pack up its bags and move. Has any major university done that in the past?
Are they attractive for their urban amenities in addition to prestige? Certainly Columbia is, and UCLA and USC. Maybe Chicago is, until students get there and realize how far Hyde Park is from any amenities. But I really doubt many people would find the prospect of proximity to the urban core of Baltimore to be “thrilling.” And the only urban amenity New Haven boasts is a train to New York. So, sure, people might choose Columbia and USC for some combination of prestige and a fun city life. But I just do not buy at all the suggestion that people choose Yale or JHU or even UChicago for the thrill of urban life. They choose them because they perceive the internal goods of these schools (prestige, academic excellence) to simply outweigh the external risks.
I agree that there is overlap between some anti-abortion states and a history of uninterest in higher education that has resulted in generally shittier universities in these states, and that this overall shittiness certainly deters many potential applicants. Like I would never in a hundred years have applied to the University of Alabama. But I also would not consider the University of New Mexico then or now, even though its state permits abortion. These are just bad schools and good students above all do not want to attend bad schools. But I think what the willingness to tolerate high crime in exchange for high prestige at places like Yale shows is not that students just love urban life, but that good students will tolerate numerous secondary risks and aggravations in order to attend a school with a top reputation. And I suspect that for schools in anti-abortion states that have managed to gain such reputations (only a few for the reasons you name), abortion bans will be just another risk to accept on the road to wealth and status, like being mugged in Hyde Park.
But, we will see the evidence soon in enrollment #’s for the class of 2027.
April 25th, 2023 at 5:15AM
Rita, Dmitry: Aside from the obviously dangerous (U Penn), I went to the trouble of checking on each of these schools. Results/inputs can vary, etc., but all of the schools I listed are considered dangerous, including Mich and UCLA.
As for housing prices and poshness nearby, isn’t this a variant of the same Attractive Despite Nearby Danger we’ve more or less been talking about throughout this thread? Many of the best SF, LA, NY, etc., neighborhoods are remarkably close to treacherous ones. This is how you shop for groceries in one of the richest SF enclaves.
And on the pull of urban amenities – I do indeed think the great architecture, museums, city buzz, of a place like Chicago is meaningful. I also think that for seriously ambitious people cities are where it’s at, where the great law firms, investors, theaters, hospitals (though if you really don’t want cities but you want the best here, there’s always the Mayo Clinic) etc etc are located. They’re also where the seriously interesting people are. The new ideas. It’s not only a matter of the prestige of this or that school.