Many European countries pay for their citizens’ university education, and from experience I can confirm that there is none of the sort of indoctrination that you are concerned about.
If anything I’d say more college-educated citizens is a shield against tyranny, as it trains you to be more intellectually critical, and therefore (one would hope)c , inoculated somewhat against anti-factual biases.
In Europe far fewer people go to college vs the US (apart from Norway, UK, NL). Moreover, they have significantly more rigorous secondary educations, especially on the technical track.
Though note that the gap closes when you compare "equivalent to a 4-year degree or higher" rather than "equivalent to a 2-year degree or higher". Seems that 2/3 year degrees are much more common in the US for some reason. Wonder if that's 3-year bachelor's degrees vs. the more common 4-year in many European institutions.
E.g. US/UK/DE/FR, pct completed for 25-34 yr olds:
2 year: 47/49/30/45
4-year: 36/42/28/28
I'd be interested in further reading/analysis as this is a pretty rough eyeball of the tabular data on my part, and I'm not claiming to have understood this fully.
Do you have any examples? My university education, at a state university, was paid for by my state government. I have no idea what 'indoctrination' you're talking about. The only requirements that the state government gave my university were the requirements under their land-grant status.
Colleges in the US are very skewed ideologically, towards the far left. This has been a very clear and consistent pattern building up over a few decades, but it has become obvious only in the last 5-10 years, where that bias has been exercised much more openly to promote one worldview and suppress all others. I recommend following The College Fix (http://www.thecollegefix.com/) or FIRE (https://www.thefire.org/) to keep up with stories on this topic. There are also other publications like the Chronicle (https://www.chronicle.com/) or Inside Higher-ed (https://www.insidehighered.com/) that feature some of this content.
Here are several examples of political bias/indoctrination/monocultures on college campuses:
I could keep going but this is what I was able to find quickly through search. The reality is that there is no room for views that go against the prevailing culture on most campuses today. Those who share the prevailing views are now in the camp of using the power of their supermajority to suppress/censor/punish/ban anyone who disagrees with them. Honest debate and truth seeking cannot take place in such an environment - and if that is true, then it follows that university environments tell people WHAT to think, not HOW to think, and that constitutes indoctrination.
The question posed is not whether the political viewpoint of academicians lean in a particular direction. The question is regards to whether government-funded schools enact the biases of the government.
You evidence demonstrates that is not the case -- many of those left-leaning professors are employed by institutions funded by the governments of red states.
I misunderstood. Federal and state funding do make up a significant portion of public university budgets, but post-recession, federal funding makes up a greater share than state funding (https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...). Regardless, I don't feel universities enact the biases of governments, either at the state or federal level. I think there is a general bias in the academic community that crosses those lines.
I think that bias (perceived or real) is more of a factor of US higher-education tradition of than anything else. If you get a liberal arts degree, you'll take courses focused in nuanced discussions of arts, humanities, sociology, etc... and those courses are going to be taught by people who inherently thought those topics were important enough to dedicate their lives to.
Of course, it's completely reasonable for a sociology professor to think that social issues are important, just as much as we might expect a business or economics professor to believe that business or economics is important. And the things that people think are important influences a person's politics.
If you look at the academic disciplines that are interest groups that conservative politics align with, you'll find conservatives there: petroleum engineering, business, marketing, religious studies, etc. The thing is, there's just not that many academic focus areas that contemporary conservative politics prioritizes in their messaging.
In the end, I don't think the bias of individual professors at a university is a concern as much as institutional bias is. You can never really hire a professor who doesn't have an inherent interest in their own work. The important part is that we continue the western tradition of well-rounded study so that people are exposed to as many differing viewpoints as possible.
Your point about biases aligning with the field is interesting. I think it depends on how "generalized" a field is. "Economics" for example, allows exploration of both pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist perspectives. However, social science has been subdivided into many narrow fields like "gender studies", which include presupposed assumptions. If instead these same subjects fell under a single broader field called "social science", then there is room for academic exploration both in favor of and against such assumptions.
We probably both agree that individual bias cannot realistically be eliminated. However, I feel that despite biases, individuals shouldn't practice disingenuous academic behavior. As a quick example of this, I'll offer that sociologists regularly claim there is a significant gender pay gap without performing a multivariate study that controls for various confounding factors. If they exercised more rigor and held a sincere mentality of truth seeking, they would explore those obvious contradictions to their assumptions more readily, and also welcome the same explorations from their students and peers.
It has been nearly a decade for me, but I went to a large state school for undergraduate and an even larger state school for graduate. I too have no idea what you're talking about.
Rather than replying to my personal anecdote with a hostile "you don't know what you're talking about", I'm sure you'd find yourself with fewer downvotes if you instead provided your own personal anecdote, or some objective information supporting your argument.
I thought that this statement was sufficiently self-evident as to not require examples, anecdotal or otherwise. The comments and downvotes would suggest otherwise, so here goes a basic one.
Look at the voting registration or political donations among academics in the United States. They are skewed almost exclusively toward one party, despite the fact that the country itself is quite divided. Even arguing that it's common for a field to self-select and skew this way or that, there is an extreme political monoculture among the instructors at most U.S. universities.
Now, can one _prove_ that this leads to an insular intellectual culture there that presents one side of an issue? Probably not, that's a hard thing to prove because persuasion and beliefs are a very complex and multi-faceted topic. However, common sense would dictate that yes, when all of your instructions are aligned more or less with one part of the political spectrum the end result is a lopsided presentation of things that has the effect of indoctrinating students to the dominant political view of the instructors, even if that was never the explicit intent.
One example from my own experience. I had a public health professor who did a multi-part lecture on the evil of the U.S. embargo on Cuba. This took place over several classes resulting in about four hours of total lecture time, and included a fair amount of history. At no point during any lecture did she mention the Cuban missile crisis, i.e. the Cuban government allowing the Soviet Union to place nuclear weapons 90 miles off of the American coast, putting a large portion of the population at risk of nuclear destruction. Now I don't think this necessarily justifies the embargo, but to spend four days of class discussing the embargo on Cuban without a single mention the Cuban missile crisis is intellectually irresponsible at best, and a example of someone's personal bias worming its way into the instruction.
"There is none of the indoctrination you speak of"
Defunding an area of study because the ruling party doesn't like it sure looks like state propaganda to me. Funding coming from the government makes that easier.
Part of a solid academic education includes entertaining viewpoints that you might not necessarily agree with. Academics is the proper place to have those discussions. If your tax dollars don't support an unfettered academic discussion, they are by definition, supporting a biased agenda.
That's kind of the point I'm trying to make. When governments start dictating to institutions of learning is when voices independent of government are needed most.
Edit: I should add that, while most of the people who think college indoctrination is a problem would think it's propaganda to teach gender studies in the first place and defunding it is not, the very fact that an administration has to make that decision at all means that someone somewhere is going to feel the government is indoctrinating their children.
If anything I’d say more college-educated citizens is a shield against tyranny, as it trains you to be more intellectually critical, and therefore (one would hope)c , inoculated somewhat against anti-factual biases.