Santorum Opposes Higher Education, Says He Was Victimized for Right-Wing Views in College

A study released earlier this month found that conservatives are generally less intelligent than most people — a factor that may help explain why Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum went on the attack against higher education last week.

Santorum — who received an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania Penn State, an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh and a law degree from Dickinson School of Law — suggested both in interviews and on the stump that American colleges and universities are indoctrination mills that convert young people into liberals.

He said he knows this to be true because he was victimized at Penn State by students who ridiculed his retrograde political views.

On two occasions recently, Santorum has said that 62 percent of students who go to college lose their faith, a statistic that has proved to be false.

Santorum elaborated on his opposition to higher learning yesterday in an interview with George Stephanopolous on ABC’s “This Week:

STEPHANOPOULOS: All he said was he wants, quote, “every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training.” In your interview with Glenn Beck this week, you seemed to go further. You said I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college, because they are indoctrination mills. What did that mean?

SANTORUM: Well, of course. I mean, you look at the colleges and universities, George. This is not — this is not something that’s new for most Americans, is how liberal our colleges and universities are and how many children in fact are — look, I’ve gone through it. I went through it at Penn State. You talk to most kids who go to college who are conservatives, and you are singled out, you are ridiculed, you are — I can tell you personally, I know that, you know, we — I went through a process where I was docked for my conservative views. This is sort of a regular routine (ph). You know the statistic that at least I was familiar with from a few years ago — I don’t know if it still holds true but I suspect it may even be worse — that 62 percent of kids who enter college with some sort of faith commitment leave without it.

Talking Points Memo fact-checked that 62 percent figure and found, not surprisingly, that Santorum got it backwards:

[Multiple] studies have found that the opposite is true — including the one that Santorum has reportedly been referring to.

A study published 2007 in the journal Social Forces — which PBS reports that Santorum’s claim is based on, although his spokesman didn’t respond to TPM’s request for confirmation — finds that Americans who don’t go to college experience a steeper decline in their religiosity than those who do.

“Contrary to our own and others’ expectations, however, young adults who never enrolled in college are presently the least religious young Americans,” the journal concluded, noting that “64 percent of those currently enrolled in a traditional four-year institution have curbed their attendance habits. Yet, 76 percent of those who never enrolled in college report a decline in religious service attendance.”

Or Santorum may have been referring to a 2006 Harvard study in which 62 percent of college Republicans said “religion is losing its influence on American life.”

But that study negates Santorum’s larger point: It found that “a quarter of students (25 percent) say they have become more spiritual since entering college, as opposed to only seven percent (7 percent) who say they have become less spiritual.”

And there’s more evidence that Santorum has it backward. According to a 2011 study in the The Review of Religious Research, the impacts of education on religiosity are complicated, but on balance it concluded that “education positively affects religious participation, devotional activities, and emphasizing the importance of religion in daily life.”

So is Santorum bad-mouthing college in order to discourage his followers from educating their children in order to create a new generation of dumbasses who will become loyal Republicans?

That may be a bit too Machiavellian for Santorum, who was labeled the “Dumbest Member of Congress” when he served in the House in the 1990s — and about whom an aide to Sen. John McCain said in January, “For pure, blind stupidity, nobody beats Santorum. In my 20 years in the Senate, I never met a dumber member.”

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