Baala Shakya, Staff Photographer

As debates over campus protests, taxing elite university endowments and institutional neutrality roil college campuses across the country, a new student-led survey from Yale offers a sweeping view into how young Americans are navigating these tensions — and how their views diverge from those of older generations.

The Yale Youth Poll, an undergraduate-led initiative affiliated with the Yale Institution for Social and Political Studies, surveyed 4,100 registered voters between April 1 and 3, including an oversample of 2,025 voters aged 18 to 29. The Spring 2025 poll examined public opinion on a wide range of topics — from foreign policy to gender identity — but three themes emerged with particular force: attitudes toward protest rights, views on the role of universities in national politics and taxing wealthy university endowments.

“The poll is focused on what topics are relevant to right now,” said Yale Youth Poll Director Milan Singh ’26, who is also an Opinion Editor at the News. “Questions on whether international students should be deported, or have their visa revoked. We wanted to gauge what people feel about federal funding cuts to universities, whether they should issue political statements or positions on social issues, whether people feel positively or negatively towards the Ivy League or other elite private universities.”

The poll reveals overwhelming youth opposition to deporting international student protesters, broad support for taxing large university endowments and greater comfort with universities taking political stances than older generations.

The novel findings reveal a generation skeptical of institutional neutrality and wealth but still invested in the moral and political roles of education, challenging assumptions about how Gen Z thinks and what they expect from the institutions that educate and govern them.

Students reject deportation of campus protesters

According to the poll, 78.7 percent of young voters opposed deporting international students who participated in campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. That figure stood at 62.4 percent among all voters. The survey questions were drafted in direct response to public figures — most prominently former President Donald Trump — who have called for revoking visas of student demonstrators.

“This is an issue that’s become highly visible, but it hasn’t been widely polled,” Singh told the News. “We wanted to measure just how unpopular this idea is, and it turns out, among young voters, it’s extremely unpopular.”

The poll found opposition to deportation extended across party lines within the under-30 demographic, with fewer than 10 percent of respondents saying they supported the policy or were unsure.

“It really shows how widespread the opposition is,” said Arjun Warrior ’26, a data scientist for the Yale Youth Poll. “Young voters are under-polled, but they’re also the next generation of long-term voters. Understanding where we stand on these issues matters for the future of politics.”

The result comes amid renewed scrutiny of universities’ handling of free speech and protest rights, with campuses across the Ivy League and beyond facing pressure from donors, lawmakers and activists to crack down on pro-Palestinian activism.

Mixed feelings on elite universities, but broad support for endowment tax

Even as elite institutions like Yale become focal points in the national culture war, the poll reveals a more complex picture of public sentiment toward higher education.

Among voters under 30, elite private universities such as the Ivy League received a net favorability rating of +7, with 42.6 percent expressing favorable views and 35.5 percent unfavorable. But among all voters, the rating was slightly negative, at -4.2.

“There’s a baseline of skepticism about elite universities, especially outside the youth cohort,” Singh said. “We see some real dissatisfaction — especially when it comes to how universities use their wealth.”

56.1 percent of young voters — and 55.8 percent of all voters — said they supported a 21 percent tax on annual profits from university endowments exceeding $10 billion. Such a policy would directly affect institutions like Yale, whose endowment currently stands above $40 billion.

“There’s a tension here,” said Jack Dozier ’27, deputy director for the Yale Youth Poll. “Young voters still believe in the value of higher education, but they’re increasingly skeptical about whether elite institutions are living up to their responsibilities.”

Disagreement on institutional neutrality

As universities grapple with whether — and how — to speak out on political issues, the Yale Youth Poll captures a sharp generational rift on the question of institutional neutrality.

While a majority of voters over 30 — by a 13-point margin — said that universities should not publish statements on political or social issues, young voters took the opposite stance: 48.9 percent supported universities taking public positions, while 42.9 percent opposed and 8.2 percent were unsure.

“We’ve seen this debate play out here at Yale with the news of the establishment of the President’s task force on addressing why people distrust Ivy League universities,” said Singh. “There’s a real disconnect between how young people and older Americans think about the role of the university.” 

Other notable findings

The Yale Youth Poll also explored a wide range of topics. Notably, respondents were split on foreign aid to Ukraine, with young voters nearly evenly divided between supporting continued aid — 42.7 percent — and ending it — 43.8 percent. On gender identity, young voters were more supportive of transition-related healthcare access for teenagers than the general public and more inclusive of transgender athletes in youth sports.

One of the poll’s experimental findings came from a messaging A/B test. When progressive homelessness policies were framed as “human rights,” support dropped by 22 percentage points — suggesting that values-based rhetoric may backfire among some voters. 

Another experiment found that when respondents were given basic facts about federal revenue and spending, they became slightly more willing to support cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and more open to increasing corporate and consumption taxes. 

The poll also probed attitudes toward the judiciary. While young voters were more likely to view the Supreme Court as politicized, 75.7 percent still said the president should be required to obey court rulings — outpacing support among the general population, which stood at 67.4 percent.

“That’s an interesting tension,” Singh said. “Even though young people are less likely to see the Supreme Court as a neutral institution, they’re more likely to believe the President must abide by court rulings.”

Youth divided within

Perhaps, most surprisingly, the poll revealed stark divides within the youth vote itself. While voters aged 22–29 favored Democrats in the 2026 congressional elections by 6.4 points, those aged 18–21 leaned Republican by 11.7 points — an 18-point swing within a single generational bracket.

The finding complicates the narrative of Gen Z as uniformly progressive.

“In a time where the world is changing at such a rapid pace, we hope to provide clear and unbiased survey information that answers some of the big policy questions that have been put out there since November of 2024,” said Dozier. “Especially in an era where politics have changed so much since our last poll, there’s not a lot of strong polling data about young Americans’ public opinion now.”

The Yale Youth Poll has a margin of error of ±1.9 percentage points for the full sample and ±1.8 for the youth subsample. Results were weighted to reflect U.S. demographics.

As the Yale Youth Poll prepares for hopefully their next round of data collection in fall 2025, the student researchers say they hope their work will help fill a void in public opinion research.

“Politicians often promise things to young voters and reach out to young voters, but they can’t do that if they don’t have an understanding of what young voters believe and where young voters are,” said Warrior. “That’s why polls like this are really important because they provide insight — albeit imperfect insight, but insight nonetheless — into what young voters believe.” 

The Yale Youth Poll was first conducted in Fall 2024.