A UK study bills itself as offering the most robust evidence to date to challenge the theory that going to university makes people more liberal, and to counter claims on the right that universities are “indoctrinating” students into left-wing thinking.
The paper, published in The British Journal of Sociology, analyses data on siblings to conclude that the link between higher education and political values formation often made by academics and journalists is “largely spurious”.
Elizabeth Simon, author of the paper, a PhD student in the University of Southampton’s department of social statistics and demography, said of her findings: “It’s not uni that’s making us liberal. It’s that liberal people choose to go to university more often.”
