The Great Divide!

No not the Republican/Democrat divide.
No not the conservative/liberal divide.
And definitely not the Coke/Pepsi divide.
But the education divide!

Mapped: Share of College Graduates in Each U.S. State
Visual Capitalist
By Pallavi Rao
December 15, 2024

Mapped: Share of College Graduates in Each U.S. State
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Education pays, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found out in data published earlier this year. For every level of education completed, Americans earn more and face a lower risk of unemployment.

So where have Americans got this figured out?

[…]

The highest share of college graduates are clustered in the Northeast, with D.C., Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut all ranking near the top.

These states also have a greater share of top-ranked universities in the country.

You might remember Trump’s threat to tax college endowments? The Yale Daily News reported,

Before Trump’s first presidential term, university endowments were untaxed as a result of their nonprofit status. But in 2017, Trump signed a bill that imposed a 1.4 percent tax on the endowments of most private colleges. In 2023, Vice President-elect JD Vance LAW ’13 introduced a bill to the Senate that proposed dramatically increasing that tax to 35 percent, although the effort was ultimately blocked by Senate Democrats.

The Visual Capitalist goes on...

Meanwhile the South is a cluster of lower shares of residents with university degrees, with West Virginia at the bottom of the ranking (24%).

States with higher percentages of college graduates often correlate with higher-paying job markets and vice-versa.

[…]

Meanwhile the South is a cluster of lower shares of residents with university degrees, with West Virginia at the bottom of the ranking (24%).

You know colleges are bastions of liberalism! And the Republican have contempt them, this is from Atlantic from 2019.

At the beginning of the 2010s, 58 percent of Republicans believed that colleges and universities had a positive impact on the course of the country, according to the Pew Research Center. As the decade nears its close, that number has fallen precipitously: It now sits at 33 percent, with the majority of the drop occurring from 2015 to 2017.

According to Pew, there seems to be little disagreement between political parties on the notion that a diploma helps one succeed in the world or that the cost of attaining one is too high. The complaints particular to Republicans, though, are ideological in nature: They are far more likely than Democrats to believe that higher education is shaping America for the worse because too many professors impose their politics on students and because colleges go too far in shielding students from things that might offend them.

Now look at Trump he wants to tax liberal non-profit colleges like Yale and Harvard. The Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility writes… “introduced legislation in the Senate to raise the tax on wealthy universities’ endowment income from 1.4 percent to 35 percent.”

Pew Research found that,

...only half of American adults think colleges and universities are having a positive effect on the way things are going in the country these days. About four-in-ten (38%) say they are having a negative impact – up from 26% in 2012.

The share of Americans saying colleges and universities have a negative effect has increased by 12 percentage points since 2012. The increase in negative views has come almost entirely from Republicans and independents who lean Republican. From 2015 to 2019, the share saying colleges have a negative effect on the country went from 37% to 59% among this group. Over that same period, the views of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic have remained largely stable and overwhelmingly positive.

The Republican are pushing the education divide… “the elite liberals” that is probably why the Democrats lost the working class voters. An editorial in the New York Times wrote,

This new partisan conflict has led to very different electoral coalitions.

In 2016, Trump made enormous gains among white voters without a college degree, including in northern states, where Republicans had not been able to sustain breakthroughs. Since then, he has made even larger gains among young, Black, Hispanic and Asian voters — and did so by representing everything Democrats thought these groups opposed.

[...]

In place of the old class conflict, there’s a new educational divide. Before Trump, people voted about the same way with or without a degree. Now, the gap between voters with or without a degree is as large as the income gap was back in 2012 — and all the way back to the dawn of survey research.

Now you know why the Republicans are trying to kill public education.

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There is a lot of anger out there out there, I read comments on Yahoo to gauge the public, and what I see out there are very, very, hateful comments about college education and also liberal celebrities.