Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

You are right on conix. For years she has posted myths about unis, and doesn't matter what she is given she ignores it. It's little more than a right-wing talking point she latches onto like a pup pulls a carpet.

You mentioned nobody cares how students or profs vote, i'd guess that's right, The real question, if there is one, is how much does any uni. education actually affect an individual's values or political positions. I'd guess, in general not all that significantly.

This overseas study i'd guess would be mirrored, at least roughly, in the States. I'm not 100% what it's conclusions are. These sorts of efforts take time to study to really digest. Anyway:

June 2022, 102471
Electoral Studies

Does university make you more liberal? Estimating the within-individual effects of higher education on political values

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2022.102471

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Abstract

An individual's level of education is increasingly significant in explaining their political attitudes and behaviour, with higher education proposed as a new political cleavage. However, there is limited evidence on the causal effect of university on political attitudes, due to self-selection into educational pathways. Addressing this gap, this article estimates the change in political values that occurs within individuals who graduate from university by applying longitudinal modelling techniques to data from the 1970 British Cohort Study, overcoming the selection problem by accounting for time-invariant confounding. It provides the first causal estimate of higher education specifically, finding that achieving a degree reduces authoritarianism and racial prejudice and increases economic right-wing attitudes. This has important implications for the study of politics: as populations become more highly educated on average, we should expect continuing aggregate value change towards lower levels of authoritarianism and racial prejudice, with significant consequences for political behaviour.

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Keywords
Political values
Prejudice
Authoritarianism
Education
University
Selection effects
Longitudinal
Panel estimation
Two-way fixed effects
Linear mixed effects modelling

1. Introduction

Within established democracies, an individual's level of education is increasingly significant in explaining their political attitudes and behaviour (Norris and Inglehart, 2019), with some suggesting that higher education in particular could represent a new political cleavage in Western Europe (Ford and Jennings, 2020). One potential explanation for this observed effect of higher education is through changes to political values. Studies have shown that these values are valid consistent constructs that vary by education level (Evans et al., 1996) and are more often influential on party identification than the other way around (Evans and Neundorf, 2018). This analysis focuses on three such values: racial prejudice, understood as hostility towards racial out-groups (Kinder and Kam, 2010, p. 8); authoritarianism, or support for social order over individual liberty (for example, the death penalty or harsh sentences for criminals); and economic Left-Right values which captures views on inequality and the role of the state in the economy (Evans et al., 1996).

Competing explanations are given for the particular effect of higher education on these different values, whether it is the graduate premium leading to higher earnings, and so lower support for redistribution (Surridge, 2016); the liberalising influence of faculty and university culture (Dey, 1996); the impact of peer socialisation in what remain relatively elite institutions (Mendelberg et al., 2017); or the effects of increased cognitive sophistication (Gelepithis and Giani, 2022). However, given self-selection into educational pathways (Persson, 2015), an important first step is to determine whether this difference is causally attributable to university. Previous studies have attempted to address this selection problem by leveraging exogeneous changes in educational participation attributable to variation in policy regimes (Bullock, 2021; Cavaille and Marshall, 2019; Marshall, 2016) or randomised encouragement designs (Sondheimer and Green, 2010). However, these well-identified studies do not estimate the specific effect of higher education, instead tending to focus on the effect of increased years of secondary education.

It is this gap that this article addresses, adopting a longitudinal approach to estimate the change in values that occurs within individuals who graduate from university. Specifically, it applies two-way fixed effects and linear mixed effects models to data from the 1970 British Cohort Study to account for all time-invariant confounding, finding that achieving a university degree reduces an individual's authoritarianism and racial prejudice and makes an individual more economically right-wing. In so doing, it makes three main contributions. Firstly, it provides the first causal estimate of the effect of university specifically on these values. Second, it does so for a validated multi-item scale for authoritarianism for the first time, which matters given the growing significance of this ‘second’ dimension for contemporary politics. Third, it extends the previous causal literature in this area by providing an estimate of the effect of higher education among a more nationally representative sample, therefore allowing us to be more confident in drawing general conclusions. The findings have important implications for the study of public opinion and political attitudes, as it suggests that as the population becomes more highly educated on average, we should expect current trends of aggregate value change towards lower levels of authoritarianism and racial prejudice to continue, with significant consequences for political behaviour.

2. The significance of political values

From an initial position of scepticism about the existence of underlying, consistent attitudes among much of the voting public (Converse, 2006), there is now broad acceptance within political science that many individuals hold essentially consistent underlying positions in terms of racial prejudice, left-right economic and liberal-authoritarian social values throughout their adult lives (Evans et al., 1996; Sears and Levy, 2013). In part, this change in perspective can be attributed to the difference between searching for stability in individual survey items, which do demonstrate inconsistency partly attributable to measurement error, and stability in the latent constructs which selections of these items are designed to estimate (Ansolabehere et al., 2008).

[...]

To take the hypotheses in turn and start with racial prejudice: the results indicate that achieving a degree has a moderate and statistically significant negative relationship with this outcome, meaning that graduates become less prejudiced on average, accounting for the effects of selection. The results are remarkably consistent across the three estimators, suggesting that graduating from university results in a small reduction in prejudice, of around 0.15 of a SD. We can therefore accept hypothesis 1. Moving on to review the results for authoritarianism, we can see that higher education demonstrates its strongest effect here. The results show a significant reduction of around 0.3 of a SD among those who achieve a degree. This effect is corroborated with greater precision by the multiple imputation estimates. This provides strong support for hypothesis 2.

Finally, the results indicate that achieving a degree renders an individual significantly more economically right-wing, although the estimators differ in the exact magnitude of the effect. Those using the complete case sample estimate a similarly-sized effect to that on racial prejudice, of just over 0.15 SD – yet the REWB model applied to the multiply imputed data suggests a much larger effect, of around 0.35 SD. This larger effect may be attributable to differential attrition affecting those in the control condition, where cohort members from more disadvantaged backgrounds (and who therefore would be less likely to achieve a degree and more likely to hold economically left-wing views) were less likely to continue with the study. This result provides evidence in support of hypothesis 3, and is in line with previous literature, where authors have attributed this change both to peer socialisation and to economic allocation effects.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379422000312