The victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election came as a surprise to many people in the United States.
Most political observers predicted Trump would lose the election to Hillary Clinton. But he won, in large part because of older male voters.
However, other groups did not share in that support. One of them was American college students, mostly female students.
In fact, a new study found that more first-year female students at U.S. colleges and universities now identify themselves as liberal than ever before. It also suggests the difference in the number of all first-year female and male students identifying as liberal is the biggest ever measured.
The study comes from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, the University of California in Los Angeles.
Researchers launched the study in 1966. They ask first-time, full-time students at four-year colleges and universities around the country about different subjects. Last year, the study gathered information from over 137,000 students at 184 different schools.
One of the subjects the study asks about is U.S. politics. The study asks college students to identify themselves politically in one of five groupings. They are liberal; extreme liberal or “far left”; conservative; extreme conservative or “far right”; and moderate or “middle of the road.” Since the beginning of the study, moderate students have always been, and still are, the largest group.
But in 2016, 41.1 percent of the female students in the study identified themselves as liberal or far left. This is the largest percentage of young women identifying as liberal in the over 50 year history of the study. By comparison, just 28.9 percent of males identified their political thinking as liberal or far left.
Around 27 percent of male students and about 18 percent of female students identified themselves as conservative or far right.
