Every year the popular website Inside Higher Ed adds a few new questions to its annual survey of college admissions officials. This year those questions were inspired by Donald Trump.

Officials were asked whether their schools had intensified efforts to recruit students from rural areas. Thirty-eight percent said yes. Thirty percent said that their schools were looking harder for, and at, students from poor white families. And 8 percent — a tiny group, but a contingent nonetheless — said likewise about politically conservative students.

Why would they be doing that?

For the same reason that the website wondered about it in the first place: their estrangement, made obvious by Trump’s ascent, from much of America.

“After the election I sensed, from talking to leaders of colleges, a lot of soul searching about the fact that college presidents and students assumed that one thing was going to happen on Election Day and it did not,” Scott Jaschik, the editor of Inside Higher Ed, told me. “Some people woke up the day after the election and realized that every surrounding county voted in a different way than the college did.”