A Liberal Education

An innovative and comprehensive account of the modern university's impact on social and political attitudes.

Enlisting a natural experiment, global surveys, and historical data, this book examines the modern university's evolution and its impact on social and political attitudes across the world. The authors conclude that university education has a profound liberalizing effect, greater than that registered by social class, gender, or age.Enlisting a natural experiment, global surveys, and historical data, this book examines the university's evolution and its contemporary impact. Its authors conduct an unprecedented big-data comparative study of the consequences of higher education on ideology, democratic citizenship, and more. They conclude that university education has a profound effect on social and political attitudes across the world, greater than that registered by social class, gender, or age. A university education enhances political trust and participation, reduces propensities to crime and corruption, and builds support for democracy. It generates more tolerant attitudes toward social deviance, enhances respect for rationalist inquiry and scientific authority, and usually encourages support for Leftist parties and movements. It does not nurture support for taxation, redistribution, or the welfare state, and may stimulate opposition to these policies. These effects are summarized by the co-authors as liberal, understood in its classic, nineteenth-century meaning.