What Students Are Willing to Trade for a Politically Aligned Campus

by Raphaelle Aulagnon, Nina Nikiforova

Imagine you are eighteen, finishing high school in France. You have to pick which university to apply to. Two are open to you. They offer the same field of study. One is forty minutes from home, free of tuition fees, moderately selective, and its main student associations include a left-wing political collective and a cooking club. The other is two hours away, charges modest fees, equally selective, and its student associations are a photography club and a chess group. Which would you choose?

We asked 1,040 final-year French high-school students versions of this question, six times each, and watched what they did. The choices we showed them were hypothetical, pairs of universities we constructed for the experiment, and they varied in four attributes: how academically selective the university was, how far from home it was, how much it cost, and what its main student associations looked like. The associations gave us a way to signal each university’s campus political climate (left-leaning, right-leaning, or politically neutral) in a more discrete way. Around two-thirds of the time the first listed association was political, and the rest of the time it was not.

This is a conjoint experiment, a method economists borrow from marketing research. Each choice forces the student to weigh attributes against each other in concrete tradeoffs, and we recover, from the pattern of choices across many people and many scenarios, how much each attribute weighs in the average decision. Because the attributes vary independently of one another by design, what we estimate is not a correlation between political alignment and where students apply to, but a causal effect of political alignment on the choice itself.

The experiment delivered three results.

First, students place real weight on political alignment.

The penalty they apply to a politically misaligned campus is roughly the same magnitude as the penalty for an extra hour of distance between home and university.

Second, this preference is not a marginal one.

Seventy-two percent of respondents told us, in a separate direct question, that a strongly misaligned campus political atmosphere would make them hesitate to enrol at all.

Third, it seems that students are avoiding disagreement rather than politics itself.

We can decompose the political penalty into two pieces: a penalty against politicization itself (universities where political activism is visible, regardless of direction), and a penalty against misalignment (universities whose political colour differs from the student’s own). While about one-third of the average penalty is for politicization itself, the remaining two-thirds is for being on the wrong side.

The conjoint tells us what students say they would do when forced to choose among hypothetical pairs. Whether those stated preferences match the choices they actually make in real life is a separate question. To answer it, we paired the experiment with administrative records on the universe of Parcoursup applicants. We find the same direction in the real data: students apply more often to universities whose campus political climate matches the political leaning of their home neighbourhood, although the magnitude is smaller.

Why does this matter?

Universities have always been imagined as places of encounter, where young adults from different backgrounds, faiths, and political traditions meet, argue, disagree, and learn from one another. Research has shown that adults increasingly choose homes, marriages, and workplaces among the like-minded. What we document is that this sorting begins earlier, at the application stage, before any peer or roommate or university curriculum can take effect. And what students are revealing they want, when forced to choose, is not exposure to difference but distance from it.

Raphaelle Aulagnon

Raphaelle Aulagnon is a PhD candidate in Economics at Bocconi University, specializing in designing and evaluating technology-driven interventions in education and labor markets. 2025-2026 EoF Academy Fellow.