The Effects of Education on Beliefs about Racial Inequality

It is commonly hypothesized that education promotes more “enlightened” beliefs about racial inequality, and many prior studies document that white Americans with higher levels of education are more likely to agree with structural rather than individualist explanations for black disadvantages. Nevertheless, an alternative perspective contends that the ostensibly liberalizing effects of education are highly superficial, while yet another perspective cautions that any association observed between education and racial attitudes may be due to unobserved confounding. This study evaluates these perspectives by estimating the effects of education on beliefs about racial inequality from a set of cross-sectional, sibling, and panel models. Consistent with prior research, results from cross-sectional models fit to the General Social Survey (GSS) suggest that education promotes a genuine belief in structural over individualist explanations for racial inequality. However, results from sibling and individual fixed-effe...