17 Comments

Have you any idea why so many students identify as other than heterosexual? Is it simply fashionable to claim to be in a sexual minority? Do we have any behavioural data about whether their self-identification matches their actual sexual behaviour?

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Sounds right, but the use of the term "flyover states" makes me distrust the reporting.

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Oct 3, 2022·edited Oct 3, 2022

The self-identified wave of LGBTQ reminds me of what has happened with tattoos, except less permanent for those who avoid hormonal and surgical interventions. Tattoos are so ubiquitous now that those who have no tattoos are the truly unique and independent thinkers. Perhaps someday it will be the same for those who embrace their biological sex.

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I would look at the Hillel statistics regarding Jewish students

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I know that these types of study are a means to our best informed view of "the whole" but there are ~19m university and college students in the USA and this sample size is 57k. It would be helpful to know as well what qualifies as an "elite university" so that we could then determine the denominator and see what percentage this sample represents. Sometimes questionnaires are all we have but the map is not the territory. I think there's a there there but I'm cautious about the inference to such macro trends from this data.

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Just curious why you single out “Jews” as a demographic in your summary? Are you an anti-Semite? You don’t bother to mention the relevant number of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, et al.

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The table under "appendix" has different data than the link. Are they from two different years?

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"IVD represents the Index of Viewpoint Diversity, which is calculated based on the absolute value of %Democrat-%Republican plus %Liberal-%Conservative times 10,000 (interpret 300 as lower than 2.300, again for coding reasons). You can also sort by the percentage of the student body identifying with a partisan or ideological label."

What's going on with the 300 > 2.3 thing? I'm looking at the raw data and I can't tell how you created the IVD.

Any explanation would be much appreciated!

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Interested to know how many of those who ID as LGBTQ actually have gay sex.

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I don't think the last chart listing all the schools is correct, or I'm not understanding it. It's the last two columns, lib/cons and dem/rep. If I'm reading it right, it's saying U of Arkansas has 4 liberals for every 1 conservative while Smith has 1.9? Maybe it's just that the heading is misleading.

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