Monday, May 27, 2024

Anti-Israel protests more prevalent at elite US universities, study finds

A study published Friday suggests that pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests and encampments are more prevalent in elite and exclusive universities than in  institutions that cater to lower-income students.

The study by Washington Monthly set out to discover whether the protests against the war in Gaza that swept across US college campuses in the last seven months were exclusive to elite colleges.

Using data from Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks protests across the US, and news reports of protests and encampments at colleges, Washington Monthly discovered that in the majority of cases, less exclusive colleges that had a greater number of students with the Pell Grant for moderate- and low-income students did not have protests on their campuses.

The data was presented in scatter plots, but the universities in the graphs were not labeled. The graphs only showed whether or not colleges had protests or encampments on their campuses but did not specify what percentage of students participated in them.

The results showed that barring a few outliers, the majority of colleges that had protests or encampments were colleges where less than 40% of students were Pell Grant receivers, while colleges where 40%-60% were Pell Grant students had more protests than encampments. READ MORE