Conservative first-year students are more likely to want to study economics while liberals are eyeing a degree in political science, data from The Herald’s First-Year Poll shows.
Among students who identify as very or somewhat conservative, 18% plan to concentrate in economics, compared to 6.5% of all first-year students surveyed. On the other hand, 7.6% of students who identify as very liberal intend to study political science, compared to 4.6% overall.
The poll found that economics is the most common primary concentration for first-year students who identify as conservative. Among first-year students who identify as very liberal, political science is the most popular intended concentration.
As an economics and political science concentrator, Nathaniel Rodden ’26 sees both ends of the spectrum.
“Students who are already inclined toward finance and business tend to gravitate to economics,” Rodden wrote in an email to The Herald.
The political science department tends to attract liberal students “who are especially politically engaged or outspoken,” he wrote. “Because of Brown’s liberal ‘campus climate,’” students “see political science as a platform for continuing those conversations.”
Napintakorn Kasemsri ’28, who is concentrating in economics, said that the concentration can prepare students for careers in finance, consulting and banking, which tend to be “ideologically conservative,” she said.
Kasemsri is also concentrating in international and political affairs on the security track. In her view, the security specialization also tends to attract more conservative students, which she attributed to the classes’ focus on war and political intervention.
Students who identify as very liberal are nearly twice as likely to study international and public affairs compared to the general student body, according to the poll, with 6% of “very liberal” first-year students planning to pursue the subject, compared with just 3.7% of those surveyed.
But some professors in these departments said that this disproportionate representation doesn’t clearly manifest in the classroom.
Visiting Professor of the Practice of Political Science Richard Arenberg said the students in his classes “reflect the overall Brown student body pretty well.” He added that his students, regardless of political ideology, demonstrate a high “level of interest in public policy and government.”
In general, he noted that “the Brown student body is clearly liberal, and it’s a liberal institution.” Around 70% of first-year students identified as very or somewhat liberal, according to data from The Herald’s First-Year Poll.
Arenberg said he noted a growing interest in civil service among students, describing them as “bent towards engagement.”
In an email to The Herald, Professor of Economics Kenneth Chay wrote that he has not noticed “any substantive changes in the demographic composition” of his courses, but he thinks the share of conservative students in his classes is comparable to institutions similar to Brown.
Chay also oversaw a senior thesis by Dylan Sciscoe ’25, who investigated how taking ECON 0110: “Principles of Economics” might differently impact students’ values when compared to other introductory courses.
By comparing introductory courses in economics and political science, Sciscoe found that “economics education might gradually shape students toward values more aligned with individualism and status-quo preservation — self-enhancement and conservation — and away from values associated with collective welfare and adaptability — self-transcendence and openness to change.”
But Chay said that the samples were “too small for the evidence to be considered conclusive in a statistical sense” and may have been biased by nonrandomness in who chose to respond to Sciscoe’s surveys.
According to Rodden, economics courses can have a “wider range of opinions,” which he attributed to the “relative absence of conservative perspectives in political science discussions.”
But he found that both the political science and economics departments were “open to diverse viewpoints.”
