While previous studies univocally showed that high education correlates with positive attitudes towards immigrants, the underlying mechanisms remain largely debated. On the one hand, education is argued to foster egalitarian values, which translate into positive attitudes toward immigrants. Additionally, higher educated individuals are assumed to oppose immigration to a lesser extent because they are less likely to face economic competition from immigrants. On the other hand, research on socialization shows that political attitudes develop very early in life. For instance, parents are known to pass their values onto their children. Thus, there may be self-selection into education: children from highly educated or tolerant parents are more likely both to go into high education and to express positive attitudes toward immigrants.
While there is reason to hypothesize both educational attainment and selection effects, their specific impact has not been addressed yet. Indeed, previous work relied exclusively on cross-sectional analyses, thus confounding the two mechanisms. If educational attainment affects attitudes, there should be changes in attitudes as people pass through educational levels. If, on the other hand, selection into education is an important explanation, the direct effect of getting an education should be much smaller.
Drawing on the Swiss Household Panel (1999-2011) and the German Socioeconomic Panel (1999-2011), we find that virtually all variation in education disappears when within-person variance is modeled. While we find large differences in attitudes toward immigrants between people with different levels of education, we do not observe changes in attitudes as people pass through education. The findings suggest that the effect of education on attitudes consists mainly of selection into higher education. In addition, we find evidence that parental background affects individuals’ attitudes. Overall, our results suggest that future research on education and attitude formation would benefit from addressing selection into education.
