It’s an old political adage that higher education causes people to become more left-wing.
Supporters of this idea point to recent elections. In the 2024 UK election, voters educated to a degree level or higher opted for labour by 24 percentage points over the conservatives.
Last November, voters with postgraduate degrees had a 21 percentage point lead for Harris over Trump in the US election.
The Green Party’s vote share was more than four times higher among those with higher education compared to those without in the German election last month.
Student perspectives also appeared to initially support this trend.
Fatima, a Law and Spanish student, said that the University’s “empty statements on Gaza” and “recent talk of budget cuts” made her question the “extent of performance that goes into politics”.
Fred, a Geography student, stated that the Edinburgh rental market was “extorting students” and “made [him] realise that selfish greed shouldn’t be rewarded politically.”
However, despite this apparent link between education and left-wing politics, studies find higher education to be much less influential in determining political beliefs than often assumed.
Its effects on economic and sociocultural beliefs are also different. Higher education has little to no impact on economic beliefs, but there does appear to be a correlation between higher education and more liberal sociocultural attitudes, characterised by support for sexual minorities, human rights and immigration.
Dr. Greenwood-Hau, a lecturer in political quantitative methods at Edinburgh, argued this was because University exposes you to “new people, ideas, norms and expectations”, but that it also attracted “a particular kind of person, predisposed to think in a [liberal] way.”
He went on to argue that this correlation between higher education and social liberalism appeared to mostly be “selection bias.”
This idea of selection bias was echoed by Lindsay Paterson, Professor Emeritus of Education Policy at Edinburgh. He stated that it was likely that “people who are already inclined to move in a liberal direction choose” higher education.
He also observed that “the effect varied according to the discipline of study,” with “social sciences [and] humanities making people more liberal … pure science [having] no effect … and technologies and business making people less liberal” in their sociocultural beliefs, but noted that there was no generalisable trend.
Higher education, therefore, only appears to have a small causal impact on your political beliefs. Most of the correlation with voting behaviour appears to be a form of selection bias from those choosing to go to University, and those choosing to not.
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