The Impact of Academic Bias.

• Author: Fry, Blake
• Position: Letters - Letter to the editor

I greatly appreciated Cathy Young's decision to use data to examine the presence and impact of liberal bias on university campuses ("The Impact of Academic Bias," April). I would like to clarify and expand on a few of Young's points using data from the same Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) cited in her column.

Young states "no one has tried tracking changes in student political beliefs over the college years." Each year, hundreds of colleges and universities use the results of the HERI's College Student Survey (CSS) to track changes in students' political beliefs during their college years. The CSS is administered to seniors by universities and asks many of the same political questions that were asked of the same students three or four years earlier when they took the Cooperative Institutional Research Program's Freshman Survey. As mentioned by Young, these questions ask students to state their stances on numerous political issues and also ask students to describe their political ideology. Not surprisingly, during their college careers, students at public universities become, as a whole, more liberal in their ideology and stances on political issues. The increases in the number of seniors who describe themselves...