Ever since June of 2022, when Arizona became the first state to legalize universal school choice, the adoption of this K–12th grade education reform has accelerated well beyond even its boosters’ wildest dreams. Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia have all enacted policies which fund families to educate their kids, not just at the local public school, but at a private school, a homeschool, an online academy, or a parent-run microschool. And eight states with partial school choice programs — Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wyoming — are viewed as likely to expand them by the end of this year.
As school choice legislation proliferates, attention has naturally focused on associated K–12th grade issues. How, for example, can the growing number of families who want to homeschool their children, either by themselves or in neighborhood collaboratives, evaluate the effectiveness of various online curricula? How does one measure the academic quality of a church-run school? And to what extent should homeschooled children and those in small private schools have access to public school athletic and science facilities?
Yet many education experts believe that the changes which are currently taking place at the primary and secondary level have profound implications for higher education as well. Especially when it comes to loosening the grip of progressive thinking and its disturbing policy implications — restricted speech, anti-Semitism, race-based hiring, and segregated dormitories — on so many American colleges and universities.
For example, Foundation for Economic Freedom senior education fellow Kerry McDonald believes that the more today’s K-12th grade students are educated at schools which best match their learning styles, the more self-reliant they will be after graduation — and, as a result, less susceptible to campus indoctrination. Those who go on for a bachelor’s degree, she says, will be “far more willing to challenge the professors with whom they disagree” while others, having compared the cost of what they can expect from higher education to how else they could invest the money, “might not have much interest in going to college at all.”
University of Arkansas education researcher Albert Cheng agrees with McDonald that school choice is preparing future undergraduates to more effectively resist campus progressivism. He notes that families’ growing freedom to design their children’s educations has increased the demand for K-12th grade schools which use a so-called “classical curriculum” — one that combines a mastery of basic skills and the reading of great books with an emphasis on moral and spiritual values. Cheng says the number of private and parochial schools which have adopted this curriculum has spiked nearly 400 percent just since Covid.
Once more, this tendency to use choice to school one’s child in a more traditional setting even extends to what Sacred Heart University professor Christel Manning calls “marginally religious” and “religiously unaffiliated” parents. They themselves may have fallen away from their birth family’s church or simply never had any religious interest to begin with but nevertheless want to counter the moral relativism which has crept into so much of modern culture.
Of course, some colleges and universities have large enough endowments to keep promoting whatever ideology they want, regardless of how many fewer students apply to them or how effectively those who do enroll can contest what they are being taught. But the number of such institutions is much smaller than generally supposed. For example, New York University, which ranks 20 in College Raptor’s ranking of investable assets, has a portfolio worth only 10 percent of top ranked Harvard’s $41.8 billion.
Over time, most post-secondary institutions which continue to cling to a progressive outlook are almost certain to lose applicants to the small but growing number of colleges and universities which emphasize character development and independent thought. Most famously Hillsdale College, but also schools like Baylor University, Benedictine College (Kansas), Claremont College, the University of Dallas, Wheaton College, Wyoming Catholic, and the various “great books” colleges.
On the other hand, those left-wing institutions which do bring themselves to intellectually accommodate the coming generation of “school choice” graduates are likely to be further swayed by some pleasant surprises. For example, Western Carolina University Professor Angela Dills has shown that high school students in states where families are subsidized to choose their children’s K-12 placements are significantly less prone to suicide and other emotional problems after graduation. Her work suggests that admitting large numbers of students who have benefitted from school choice is an effective way for America’s colleges and universities to treat the growing epidemic of mental illness on their campuses.
Another study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sees school choice as an antidote to the stubbornly lopsided female-to-male enrollment balance (60 percent to 40 percent) which has developed in higher education. This has happened, experts believe, because most public schools require students to sit quietly for long periods, a practice which academically favors young girls, whose ability to concentrate develops much sooner than boys’. But when families are subsidized to pick the K-12th grade placement which best suits the learning style of their child, young males not only learn better and faster but are more qualified for financial assistance when they apply to college.
Finally, school choice will enable colleges and universities to realize their desire for a more diverse student body without having to covertly employ affirmative action policies. According to a 2021 study by Cheng and Paul Peterson at Harvard, minority students from lower-income households who have publicly funded access to alternative K–12th grade placements are 30 percent more likely to go onto college and, once admitted, 70 percent more likely to get a degree.
Kennesaw State University professor Eric Wearne is just one of a growing number of education experts who believe school choice will improve far more than primary and secondary education. “It is,” he says, “the first phase of a much broader realignment,” one which even the most progressive college and university campuses “will not be able to resist.”
