The politics of language enrollment in US higher education

Abstract This article examines enrollments in languages other than English in United States higher education from the perspective of geographical distribution. While the overall decline in language enrollments is well known, enrollments are also very unequal across states when accounting for population. By cross‐referencing MLA language enrollment data with demographic data, numerous predictors were tested for their efficacy in explaining inequality in Fall 2021 language enrollments. The only predictor found to affect language enrollments in a state was the state's political leanings as defined by voting in the 2020 U.S. presidential election: the more strongly a state voted for the Republican candidate, the lower its rate of language enrollment. An analysis of the changes in enrollment between 2016 and 2021 also showed a non‐significant trend whereby states that voted more strongly for the Republican candidate tended to have more enrollment decline than those that voted for the Democratic candidate.