Most conservatives are well aware that American institutions of higher learning tend to be hopelessly woke. They not only attract the kinds of students who have been indoctrinated into the cult but prefer them to the normal individuals who find blue hair and invented pronouns childish.

Conservatives may know that — but their leftist counterparts aren’t ready to accept it. (READ MORE from Aubrey Gulick: Indeed Jumps on the Woke Bandwagon)

That is why two researchers out of West Virginia University seem to have been surprised by the results of a study they recently conducted into the responses of college admissions counselors to emails from prospective students.

Emojis and Emoticons Proliferate

The goal was to discover whether non-binary individuals were more likely to be discriminated against in the college admissions process as compared to their straight or transgender counterparts by “explor[ing] the potential impact of gender identity on the admissions process.”

Ian Maupin and Bryan McCannon write that the “(potentially) surprising” result was that admissions counselors actually favor “progressively-minded individuals.” They were 4 percent more likely to respond to students with pronouns in their signature and were more likely to include exclamation marks, emoticons, and emojis in those responses. In other words, even if they weren’t consciously making the decision, admissions counselors were more likely to try to attract woke-infected students.

That result makes total sense given that the higher-education industry has spent years specifically attracting the woke students public schools have been busy indoctrinating. (READ MORE: Groff Gives Teacher a Second Chance Against the Pronoun Police)

Back in 2014, almost 10 years ago, the Hechinger Report noted that “[u]niversities are, in fact, welcoming the growing number of arriving students who feel comfortable being out as gay or transgender.” Those universities claimed it was a “business decision.” Genny Beemyn, director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Stonewall Center, told the magazine: “It’s a competitive advantage.… If you want to attract the best and brightest students, you don’t want competitors to get a leg up.”

To Remain the Victim

High school students using the Common Application — a college application that can be used to apply to multiple universities — are now able to select “X or another legal sex,” in addition to male or female. The company running the Common App is encouraging admissions officers across the country to do the same, suggesting that they “include optional questions on interest forms that ask the first name and pronouns that prospective students go by and their gender identity.”

The natural result has been more woke students at increasingly woke institutions of higher learning. According to a statistic published by U.S. News & World Report, a 2020 survey found that of 180,000 undergraduate and graduate students surveyed, almost 17 percent “identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, queer or questioning.” That same year, a Gallup poll found that a mere 5.6 percent of Americans placed themselves in the category of LGBT. In 2022, that number had risen to 7.1 percent. (READ MORE: Almost Everything Is in the Hands of Teachers)

If you wandered around most college campuses in the United States on any given day, you would be far more likely to come across someone with pronouns in his or her bio there than almost anywhere else in this country. That’s not an accident, and leftist researchers know it.

But they have to continue to act surprised because, if they weren’t, that would imply that LGBT high schoolers aren’t being discriminated against (and are actually favored candidates) — and the more that becomes true, the harder it is to argue they’re victims.