Abstract
Our study draws from research on person-environment fit to investigate how conservative and liberal students sort themselves into different academic environments, and to what extent they succeed in them. We hypothesize that the apparent influence of students’ conservatism on course choice and GPA is mediated by the nature of their ambition. Our data captured pre-college ambitions and political orientation, which were used to predict course-taking and grades over four years in a cohort of students entering a large American research university. Results show that student conservatism was related to higher endorsement of mainstream ambitions (material and career success), but lower ambitions concerning social justice, political influence, art, and science. Conservatism was also related to higher enrollment in business, engineering, and music, but lower enrollment in the arts. However, GPA in different academic disciplines did not necessarily vary as a function of student conservatism. A series of mediation models demonstrated that the statistical effects of conservatism on enrollment were mediated by students’ pre-college ambitions. Though less consistently, mediation effects emerged also for the effects of student conservatism on grades in various fields. Findings support that undergraduates’ political orientation and ambitions are linked to course-taking and college GPA. Implications for person-environment fit and the role of political orientation and ambitions in higher education are discussed along with suggestions for further research.
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Data availability
Data analyzed in this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.
Notes
Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner (2013) demonstrated that undergraduate students are disproportionately likely to leave science majors and mathematics-intensive fields (see also Daempfle 2003). Though business and economics do involve mathematics as well, they have the reputation of being easier and especially in business there are concentrations that are not mathematics-intensive.
These data were previously used by Kemmelmeier et al. (2005).
Conservatism was related to lower levels of scientific ambition (resulting in a negative coefficient see Table 2), and higher levels of scientific ambition were related to a lower likelihood of enrolling in economics (negative coefficient; Table 6). The sign of the indirect effect, reflecting the multiplication of these negative coefficients, is thus positive (see Table 8).
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Nesbitt, I.S., Kemmelmeier, M. Getting A’s in B-School?: Differential effects of ambitions on the course taking and academic performance of conservative and liberal college students. SN Soc Sci 1, 192 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-021-00196-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-021-00196-5