PhD holders that vote Republican

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

People here don't realy understand who get's engineering PHD's these days when they say it's a republican leaning field. The hard truth is that 80% of Engineering PHD students are international students who for obvious reasons can't vote. The remainder are those who are motivated to pursue an academic careers at the expense of their earning potential.

Engineer PHD's aren't something you do for money; sure they pay is comfortable and you'll almost definitely get a job compared to humanities PHD's but there's zero monetary benefit compared to simply doing a masters. The kind of person who wants to sacrifice earning potenial for an academic careers is not going to be republican.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Agriculture & Life Sciences

I very much doubt this is true for life sciences. If any thing, you’d expect biology PhDs to be more Democratic than, say, physicists, because they’re much more female.

"Agriculture & Life Sciences" are collectively the degree programs you'd expect to only see at land-grant institutions.  For example:  

--Agricultural Economics
--Animal Science
--Crop Management
--Food Science & Technology
--Forestry
--Horticultural Sciences
--Nutrition
--Poultry Sciences
--Rangeland, Wildlife & Fisheries Management
--Recreation & Tourism Sciences
--Soil Sciences
--Veterinary Sciences

All these fields have in common that they're concerned with the management of land, plants and animals for human use (i.e., agriculture.)  In contrast to biology, they involve an inherently interdisciplinary approach and tend to overwhelmingly attract students from agricultural/rural backgrounds (hence why they'd be Republican-leaning.)    

I don't get the impression that PhD holders in any of these fields outright lean R, at least in the Pacific Northwest. Then again I don't perceive Computer Science to be a particularly R field either.

When I was out campaigning at A&M, one the people who also volunttered was an agricultural economics proffesor.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

I think a much more interesting question (with several more examples) might be which graduate degree holders by industry/major/whatever vote Republican.

I think ultimately gender and racial divides among students in the field are the main thing that determine whether something leans right or left rather than the program itself. In my experience Female engineering graduate are as left-wing as their humanities counterparts but males are significantly more right which due to their overrepresentation probably leads to, their fields being more republican leaning. 

If I had to rank engineering majors in terms of how republican/democrat, they are i'd say beyond the obvious Oil & Gas, Mining being republican and Environmental and Ocean engineering being liberal. The main factor determining the leaning of majors is just how many women and minorities are in it.



*note this is based on my experience at Texas A&M which is a very right-wing realtive to most universities