Quality of Higher Education and Sociopolitical Attitudes

Abstract

Attitude differences by quality of higher education experience were investigated on six sociopolitical issues for a national sample of adult Americans. Persons from high-ranked colleges were found to be consistently more liberal than those from low- and unranked institutions, differences which were significant on all but one item when region of birth and age were held constant. Most variance in attitudes by education lies between the three major educational strata (grade school, high school, and college), rather than within the collegeeducated group. But rising levels of higher education and greater differences among younger than older persons suggest a continuing stratification of opinion within the college-educated population. Studies of non-economic political policy preferences have generally found collegeeducated persons more liberal than non-college respondents. As the proportion of adults with some exposure to higher education approaches a third of the population, researchers can no longer safely assume that this category is internally homogeneous and undifferentiated in its political orientations. This study asks whether differences in institutional quality among the college-educated are related to significant differences in sociopolitical attitudes later in life. Our expectation is that persons who attended higher quality institutions will be more liberal in attitude even when rival factors associated with quality of higher education and attitudes are held constant. Part of the difference may be due to selectivity, with lower-ranked colleges tending to attract more conservative students. But we suspect that part of the difference is genuinely causal. The highly ranked major universities and liberal arts colleges have disproportionately liberal faculties (Lazarsfeld and Thielens). The diversity of the student body and a greater openness to the outside environment at highly ranked colleges should contribute to greater tolerance among students which will persist into later life. In effect, we postulate that quality of higher education is causally related to cosmopolitan-local orientations among students: high quality education expresses itself in liberal attitudes beyond the college experience. Although we cannot test, directly, the causal sequence of such an orientation, we can determine whether quality of higher education is significantly related to sociopolitical attitudes. Data used in the analysis come from the 1972 presidential election study conducted by the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan (n = 2,705).