"76 percent of conservative Republicans said colleges affect the country negatively"

It's not just higher education. With their voucher system they want to send kids to Christian religious schools.

@someguy3 @ilovecomputers The entire modern right can be traced back to a desire for segregated schools. This is the core mission, everything else was a way of shifting a voting block to enable it. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/

"76 percent of conservative Republicans parrot whatever they're told by conservative media."

There, we just said the same thing.

They do crap like this and then bitch when we say republicans are uneducated. It's not elitist to want to read a book and learn, assholes.

I have to be honest this is honestly terrifying rather than being funny. It brings back memory of Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge and that regimes persecution of those perceived to be well-educated, from those who wore glasses to those who spoke foreign languages due them making an association with those things being a part of the Bourgeois.

these people are cancer.

If they were complaining about the runaway tuition fees crippling people with student debt, they might have had a point.

Surprise level holding steady at zero. Education is poison for Republicans.

Really? Why? What is there reasoning?

This is speculation but:

Higher education is typically liberal leaning. Liberals tend to be less religious and far more free thinking.

Conservatives are far more religious and illiterate/less educated. Conservatism as it is now is a minority to progressive ideologies (frequently outvoted in populist polls).

To get more power they need more religious and less educated voters to sway with propaganda/media talking heads. Higher ups are certainly pushing the narrative of private education (run by unlicensed teachers; teaching selective conservative values in textbooks) and it’s parroted by every republican voter and their mothers.

An uneducated voter base will equally vote against their own interest. They just don’t know any better. I’ve seen relatives (grandma with Native American heritage vote republican; anti women’s rights/anti Native American rights/anti social programs) vote to harm themselves because fox told them to. Insanity.
- Higher education is not liberal leaving a priori. It's just that acknowledging reality and facts, and even just some parts of scientific consensus, is completely incompatible with agreeing with anything the GOP does or says.
- I suspect fear and uncertainty plays into it a lot too.
  
  The world is changing quite quickly. Boomers got to live through the boom of the 70's, and younger people keep being told about some fictional utopia of the "good old days." Whatever they jobs they used to do are either automated or irrelevant now. The white cis male power dominance is eroding, and with it a lot of the social advantages they used to get for free are going away.
  
  So, things are getting worse, and they're scared and want to do something about it. The problem is, a lot of these people have a zero-sum mentality, where to improve their own standing, they must do so by harming someone else's standing. The idea that things can be better for everyone with no one losing out just doesn't exist there.
  
  Obviously that's not true, but if you try to convince them of that? Well, you're just trying to trick them so that you can take from them. It's an us vs. them mentality. And you surely don't want your kids to join the enemy's side, so you do your best to make sure they're raised the "right" way. And if your side wants to harm you? Well, as long as the others are getting hurt more, it's still a good thing, because now you're getting ahead of the others.
- But if they didn't vote Republican, how are they going to own the libs. Sure they're struggling to pay bills and sure they'll probably just die if they get sick, but what's more important is that trans people get harassed /s
- I don't think "higher education is typically liberal leaning" but rather as you learn more about the world, and how to think critically about it, you realize that most conservative ideals are not in the best interest of most people. They are actually in the interest of those already in power and/or with wealth.
  
  It's kind of like that saying that nothing removes prejudice faster than travel (or something like that, I'm paraphrasing from memory here).
- Higher education is typically liberal leaning.
  
  You can see why they would oppose it then.
- Thank you for the explanation. This doesn't really detail the reasoning as to why higher education is bad for America.

Conservatives just like their myths about America, Race, and Gender more than learning the realities as they don’t align with their beliefs.

stupid is as stupid does.

Ah yes, education. The great scourge of mankind.

To quote Carl Sagan: The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Yes of course they do. I imagine the stats would be similar in most countries. There are two types of conservatives:

The uneducated/ignorant, they choose conservative ideology because they are confused by different people and are afraid of any change they can see happening.
Those who have financial incentives. They know that their ideology is wrong and stupid, but they just don't care. They are only interested in gains for themselves and their family and cronies. Also known as the "fuck you I've got mine" types.

Everyone else is just some combination of the two.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that both of those types would be against higher education. The uneducated/stupid are afraid of educated/intelligent people, and are confused when someone they know comes back from college changed from how they were when they left. The ones with a financial incentive are smart enough to know that education generally results in people becoming more left-leaning, and they also know that enough left-leaning people in a population can cause genuine political change – change that might hurt the bottom line of the rich – naturally they want to avoid that.