Survey: LGBTQ Freshmen Outnumber Conservatives at Yale University

A new survey out of Yale University revealed that there are more LGBTQ freshmen than conservative freshmen.

An annual survey of incoming freshman conducted by the Yale University student newspaper yielded some interesting results. According to the survey results, the percentage of students who identify as LGBTQ vastly outnumbers the percentage of students who identify as conservative or right-leaning.

A whopping 75 percent of the incoming freshmen class said that they identify as “very liberal” or “somewhat liberal.” Nine percent of students said that they identify as “centrist.” While 22 percent of students identified as LGBTQ in the survey, while only 11 percent of students said that they were right-leaning. The report noted that the low number of conservative students is not new for Yale. Only 10 percent of last year’s incoming freshmen class at Yale said that they were right-leaning.

Nearly three-fourths of respondents identify as “very liberal” or “somewhat liberal.” While just over 16 percent said they were centrist, and almost 9 percent somewhat “conservative,” slightly less than 2 percent of respondents identified as “very conservative.”

These figures are consistent with previous News surveys. Roughly 75 percent of respondents from a survey profiling the class of 2021 described themselves as somewhat or very liberal. Sixteen percent identify as moderate, while only around 10 percent consider themselves somewhat or very conservative. These numbers also parallel those in a survey the News distributed to the entire student body in November 2016 in advance of the presidential election that fall.

The issue, of course, is not that there are too many LGTBQ students at Yale. The issue is that there are so few conservative students. Either Yale is less inclined to admit conservative students or the conservative message is not resonating with young people. Despite that Yale has cultivated an increasingly progressive student body over the past few decades, it is also possible that conservative students did not feel comfortable acknowledging their political beliefs on the survey.

Breitbart News reported in October 2017 that only nine percent of Yale professors are conservative. In October 2016, Breitbart News reported that “over 75 percent” of students at Yale agreed that their university “does not provide a welcoming environment for conservative students to share their opinions on political issues.”