Does University Make You Less Prejudiced?

• In Event: U.S. Education Systems and Anti-Black Racism

Abstract

An individual’s level of education is increasingly significant in explaining their political attitudes and behaviour: at the 2017 General Election in Britain, education demonstrated a stronger relationship with voter preferences than traditional characteristics such as social class (Fieldhouse et al., 2019), and analysis suggests this was again the case in the 2019 General Election (Cutts et al., 2020). Britain is not alone in this: a similar relationship has been found in recent elections in the United States, France, Italy, Sweden and Germany (Norris and Inglehart, 2019), and some have suggested that level of education could be a new cleavage in Western European democracies (Ford and Jennings, 2020). But why education should have this effect is not well understood.

One potential explanation for the influence that education has on political behaviour is through changes to political values: studies have shown that these values are valid consistent constructs that vary by education level (Evans, Heath and Lalljee, 1996) and are more often influential on party identification than the other way around (Evans and Neundorf, 2018). The empirical research on the relationship between education and political values has tended to draw three conclusions: a higher level of education is associated with lower levels of racial prejudice (Bynner et al., 2002; Bynner, Schuller and Feinstein, 2003; Kinder and Kam, 2010; Paterson, 2014); with being more economically right-wing, eg opposing redistributive policies (Houtman, 2001; Marshall, 2016; Surridge, 2016; Mendelberg, McCabe and Thal, 2017); and with being more socially liberal, eg opposing the death penalty (Weakliem, 2002; Van De Werfhorst and De Graaf, 2004; Paterson, 2009; Surridge, 2016).

This relationship has been observed alongside the growing significance of societal ethnic diversity for political behaviour. A meta-analysis of 171 studies reviewing the political consequences of increased ethnic diversity found that over 70 per cent of these showed a ‘threat’ response (Putnam, 2007) from the ethnic majority, whether that was increased opposition to immigration or voting for radical right parties (Kaufmann and Goodwin, 2018), albeit with variation in the magnitude of the effect according to the size of area studied. Further studies have shown that this response is moderated both by the levels of segregation in the area (Laurence et al., 2019) and by an individual’s pre-existing negative sentiments towards outgroups (Laurence, Schmid and Hewstone, 2019), underlining the importance of racial prejudice to contemporary politics.

Yet before ascribing causality to education itself it is important to test for the other possible drivers of the effect (Surridge, 2016), namely: selection effects, that the observed differences between graduates and non-graduates are confounded by pre-adult factors which influence individuals towards both higher education and these values, such as demographics, family background and pre-adult values themselves; and allocation effects, where the observed differences by education are attributable to the social position that it enables, whether economic (occupational class and income) or social (family structure).

This new analysis uses genetic matching (Sekhon, 2011) and sequential g-estimation (Acharya, Blackwell and Sen, 2016) to estimate the average controlled direct effect (ACDE) of participation in higher education on racial prejudice and two other political values scales, using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study. The use of matching reduces bias in the estimates compared with OLS by not resting on parametric assumptions and limiting model dependence (Ho et al., 2007). The analysis finds that attending university leads to significant reductions in racial prejudice and social authoritarianism, while the effects on economic attitudes are attributable to economic allocation.

This research further extends knowledge by examining the mechanism through which the change happens: whether this is attributable to cognitive change or educational socialisation, by modelling variation in educational experience. It finds that while the effect of university on an individual’s racial prejudice is in part attributable to the change in social networks that occurs as a result, the effect on social authoritarianism is more influenced by to the content of the subject studied, and therefore a change in psychological perspective. Given the impossibility of operating a randomised field experiment to assign individuals to different educational pathways, the methods employed in this study likely produce the best, most unbiased, estimate of the effect of university on racial prejudice and political values.

Author

• Ralph Scott, University of Manchester