What Your Classmates Actually Think: Inside the First Kellogg Student Census

By: Joe Moeller, Haley Harder, Claire Wiebe, Camille Scheyer and The Business & Politics Club Ask yourself a question. If a friend at another school asked you to describe the political makeup of the Kellogg student body, what would you say?

Most of us would hedge, then offer some version of what we have inferred from a handful of classmates and the louder voices in any group of 200 people. But this spring, the Business & Politics Club ran an anonymous census of the Kellogg community to replace that inference with data.

208 students responded across the Classes of 2026 and 2027. One caveat worth stating up front: the respondents who chose to complete a political survey are probably more politically engaged than the average student, so the results lean toward the views of those most willing to share them. We have always sensed that our peers hold diverse views, but we have never had the structure to know it, and we rarely discuss it openly. The point of the survey was to change that. 

The headline finding is that students’ assumptions about where their peers stand are, on average, wrong. When we asked respondents to place themselves on a seven-point political spectrum from far-left to far-right, the average answer was 3.25, just to the left of center. When we asked the same respondents to estimate where the average Kellogg student falls on that scale, their guesses clustered around 3.50, closer to the center than the data actually supports.

Where students place themselves (left) versus where they think the average classmate falls (right). The two distributions have similar means but tell a story about how we misread the room. 

Gender turns out to be the strongest demographic predictor of political identity in the entire survey, and it is also where the perception gap is most revealing. Men in our sample place themselves at an average of 3.75 on the scale, but estimate the average classmate at 3.16, meaning they think the campus is more liberal than they are. Women place themselves at an average of 2.53 but estimate the average classmate at 3.96, meaning they think the campus is more conservative than they are. Both groups see the room as further from themselves than it is. That mutual misread is, we suspect, the single most important finding of the entire census, because it explains why so many of us walk around campus quietly convinced that we are surrounded by people who think differently than we do. 

The gap between where each group sits and where they imagine the campus sits. Men and women miss in opposite directions. 

One thing that does not vary is the cohort. Despite very different gender compositions, the Classes of 2026 and 2027 place themselves at an identical average of 3.25, a sign that the politics of a Kellogg class are remarkably stable from year to year. 

The clearest cross-partisan view in the data is disapproval of the current administration. 83% of respondents disapprove of President Trump’s performance in office, with 71% registering the strongest possible disapproval. The pattern even holds within the Republican subsample, where the most common response is neutrality rather than approval. 

Approval of President Trump’s performance, broken out by party. Disapproval (red) dominates across all three groups. 

The issues that matter most diverge sharply by affiliation. The economy is a top concern for everyone, but Democrats rank social issues and the rule of law just as highly, while Republicans turn next to national security and immigration. Independents, notably, do not look like a simple average of the two, they share Democrats’ concern for the rule of law and Republicans’ concern for national security at once. 

The top four voting priorities for each party group. The economy is universal; the priorities just beneath it are where the parties part ways. 

A few other findings are worth a quick mention. Pre-MBA industry runs a close second to gender as a predictor of identity: Consulting and Tech anchor the center-left, while Finance is the only major industry genuinely split between the parties. And while international students hold policy positions almost identical to their American peers, they are far less willing to sort themselves into the American binary of Democrat and Republican at all, a reminder that the frame we used to ask these questions is itself a particularly American one. 

What strikes us most is the common ground in places we did not expect it. Students from across the political spectrum wrote, in different words, about wishing the conversations at Kellogg were more honest and more open to genuine disagreement. We are grateful for every piece of that feedback and will use it to sharpen future surveys. The data does not show a community divided about whether better conversations are needed; it shows one that already wants them. 

That gives the Business & Politics Club its mission. This year was the first time our club entered the common discourse at Kellogg in a real way, and this census is our first ever attempt to ground that conversation in data. We plan to repeat it every year, improving the instrument each time, and to use the findings to shape the speakers we invite and the debates we host. A full comprehensive version of the report, including methodology and all underlying data, is available from the club to anyone who would like to read it. Read More Kellogg Surveys: Data on Draft: KDA Turns TG into a Live Analytics Experiment