Educated Preferences or Selection Effects? A Longitudinal Analysis of the Impact of Educational Attainment on Attitudes Towards Immigrants

While previous studies unequivocally show that education and attitudes towards immigrants correlate,
the underlying mechanisms remain debated. The liberalization effect claims that education fosters
egalitarian values and analytic skills, which translate into positive attitudes. Additionally, the higher
educated are less likely to face economic competition from immigrants. However, research on socialization
shows that political attitudes develop early in life. Thus, there may be self-selection into education.
While there is reason to expect both education and selection effects, previous work has relied
exclusively on cross-sectional analyses, thus confounding the two mechanisms. Drawing on the
Swiss Household Panel, we find that virtually all variation in education disappears when only withinindividual
variance is modelled. While we find strong differences in attitudes towards immigrants
between individuals, we observe little change in attitudes as individuals pass through education.
Furthermore, our findings show that when entering the labour market, higher educated individuals
also become more likely to oppose immigrants. This suggests that differences between educational
groups are mostly due to selection effects, and not to the alleged liberalizing effect of education.
We conclude that future research on attitudes towards immigrants would greatly benefit from addressing
selection into education.