College Student Views On Free Expression And Campus Speech 2024

Washington, DC, July 30, 2024– Please visit http://kf.org for the full report.

2024 marks a crisis for free speech on college campuses as international conflicts, like the war in Gaza, and domestic strife come to a head, bringing urgent political and personal issues to center stage. With campuses cracking down on protests, political leaders casting a questioning eye on the decisions of university administrators, and emerging technology making disinformation easier and faster to produce, the position of higher education as a forum for open discussion has never been more crucial or imperiled.

“College Student Views on Free Expression and Campus Speech 2024” updates Knight Foundation’s long-running research series on free expression on campus, finding that while a decisive majority of students continue to see free speech as an essential right, increasing numbers of students believe free speech is under threat as they continue to grapple with the boundaries of speech on campus. Notably, data cited in this report was collected before the wave of campus protests in the spring of 2024, so results do not reflect students’ experiences around these events.

Free speech is fundamental to college students – a consensus that respondents have arrived at each year since Knight Foundation first began surveying college students on this question in 2019. Moreover, students want to be exposed to a wide range of viewpoints, even if offensive. However, this latest study finds that more students report feeling uncomfortable due to the speech of others. In addition, a large majority of students believe speech can do the same harm as physical violence. Many students report self-censoring in the classroom, despite feeling that self-censorship is hampering the educational value of college.

Of course, college students are not all the same. Identities, like partisanship, race, and ethnicity, influence how students experience the world, driving significant differences in where each group of students stands on debates around free speech. Gender, albeit to a lesser extent, also plays a role. Understanding how college students’ identities inform their experiences around speech on campus is crucial for college leaders as they foster their campus environments.

American society continues to be at a crossroads over how to apply First Amendment rights in the 21st century, particularly on college campuses. That is why it is essential that thought leaders, administrators, professors, and the public listen to the voices of college students as they grapple with issues of free speech in America and on campus. This report outlines college students’ views on speech and free expression, interpretations of the First Amendment, the climate surrounding campus speech, campus speech policies, student activism, self-censorship, and social media, with the goal to elevate student voices as critical inputs into the decision-making of campus leaders and the national dialogue overall.

Methodology

Ipsos conducted this poll March 7-28, 2024, using the Ipsos KnowledgePanel® and the YouthPulse Panel, on behalf of Knight Foundation. This poll is based on a representative sample of 1,678 currently enrolled college students between the ages of 18 and 24. The sample includes 418 students who attend two-year colleges and 1,246 students at four-year colleges.

In previous years, the samples were as follows:

• 2021: 18- to 24-year-olds who are current college students or enrolled in some post-high school education (n=1,023)
• 2019 (conducted by Gallup): Full-time undergraduate students (n=3,319)
• 2017 (conducted by Gallup): Full-time undergraduate students (n=3,014)
• 2016 (conducted by Gallup): Full-time undergraduate students (n=3,072)

The survey was conducted using KnowledgePanel, the largest and most well-established online probability-based panel that is representative of the adult U.S. population. Our recruitment process employs a scientifically developed address-based sampling methodology using the latest Delivery Sequence File of the U.S. Postal Service – a database with full coverage of all delivery points in the United States. Households invited to join the panel are randomly selected from all available households in the U.S. Those selected who do not have internet access are provided a tablet and internet connection at no cost to the panel member. Those who join the panel and who are selected to participate in a survey are sent a unique password-protected log-in used to complete surveys online. As a result of our recruitment and sampling methodologies, samples from KnowledgePanel cover all households regardless of their phone or internet status, and findings can be reported with a margin of sampling error and projected to the general population.

Within the KnowledgePanel, two sets of samples were selected:

• A direct route which involved sampling all the panelists aged 18 to 24 years.
• An indirect route which included sampling panel members who were 25 years or older and living with at least one household member aged 17 to 24 years.

The 17-24 age range was included to account for those who had just turned 18. Participants selected through this indirect route were terminated and did not complete the study if there were no age-eligible college students in their household. Additionally, in the direct route, an additional interview was permitted with another eligible respondent from the same household.

Regarding the YouthPulse Panel, all selected members were 18 to 24 years old.

The study was conducted in both English and Spanish. The data for the total sample of college students were weighted to adjust for age by gender, race/ethnicity, household income and Census region. The demographic benchmarks came from the 2022 American Community Survey (ACS). The weighting categories were as follows:

• Age (18–21, 22-24) by Gender (Male, Female, Other)
• Race/Hispanic Ethnicity (White Non-Hispanic, Black Non-Hispanic, Other or 2+ Races Non-Hispanic, Hispanic)
• Household Income (Under $25,000, $25,000-$49,999, $50,000-$74,999, $75,000-$99,999, $100,000-$149,999, $150,000+)
• Census Region (Northeast, Midwest, South, West)

The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.7 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, for results based on the entire sample of 18- to 24-year-olds. The margin of error takes into account the design effect, which was 1.29 for all 18- to 24-year-olds. For those attending 2-year colleges, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 5.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, and the design effect was 1.32. For those attending 4-year colleges, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, and the design effect was 1.27. In our reporting of the findings, percentage points are rounded off to the nearest whole number. As a result, percentages in a given table column may total slightly higher or lower than 100%. In questions that permit multiple responses, columns may total substantially more than 100%, depending on the number of different responses offered by each respondent.

Prior data cited from Knight-Gallup surveys from 2016, 2017, and 2019 represent college students enrolled in four-year institutions only, including oversamples among certain historically Black colleges and universities, and were conducted using a different sampling methodology.

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