I have never seen Casablanca [embarrassing admission] but am resolved to watching it this week

The current administration's attacks on universities risk undermining engines of civic life, just as they harm innovation and prosperity. Places with colleges are more liberal, yes, but colleges also promote the types of social capital that we need.

These results contribute to a literature that understands universities as place-based institutions. We know that they profoundly affect the local economy, as economists (including my co-authors) have shown. This paper documents how universities contribute to the civic life of a community as well.

Are universities distinctive, or would any large public investment generate the same results in the long run? Using a subsample where the runner-up location got a "consolation prize" (eg a state capital or penitentiary), we find that universities are indeed distinctive on most of our outcomes.

There are also differences in contemporary public opinion: people living near colleges are more liberal on a range of issues. These attitudinal differences are not solely driven by the presence of students nor by differences in the average educational attainment in the community.

From Reconstruction through the end of the 20th century, there were minimal differences in voting patterns between places with a university and "runner-up" locations. Since 2000, though, a gap has emerged, with college counties becoming significantly more Democratic. In 2024 this gap was ~10pp.

The establishment of a college also leads to a county casting significantly more votes in presidential elections—an effect that's explained by a population growth channel rather than a turnout rate channel.

We find that places with colleges have significantly higher levels of social capital and trust today, relative to "runner-up" locations that were considered but not chosen.

How do universities shape the surrounding community? Building on meticulous archival work by my co-author Mike Andrews, we answer this question by focusing on cases where multiple locations were considered for a major university and the winning location was chosen for idiosyncratic reasons.

Decades of research documents differences (observational and sometimes causal) in turnout, volunteering rates, office-seeking, political preferences, etc., between those with and without college degrees. But universities are place-based institutions, the effects of which may extend beyond students.