The educational divide over feelings about ethnic minorities: does more education really lead to less prejudice?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Virtually all studies on inter-ethnic attitudes in Western Europe and North America find that higher educated individuals report greater tolerance towards migrants and ethnic minorities. The overwhelming evidence on this link has even led scholars to call for educational expansion as a policy measure to increase social cohesion in today’s ever more diverse societies. But most of this evidence comes from cross-sectional correlations, and it is still unclear whether increasing education actually causes greater levels of tolerance. In this study, we follow a cohort of students aged 15 years over a period of 8 years from the German Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey (CILS4EU-DE). We focus on students who change from lower tracks into upper secondary and later tertiary education (the ‘treatment’ group) and compare them to a control group of similar students who stay in the lower track and leave school without entering university. Matching and fixed-effects panel regressions provide no evidence for a causal effect of changing into a higher educational track on subsequent prejudice towards ethnic minorities. We conclude that the descriptive difference between educational groups in their attitudes towards ethnic minorities is evident, but attending higher education per se does not seem to cause this difference.