A Liberal Education
A Liberal Education
Emanuel Coman , Trinity College, Dublin
John Gerring , University of Texas, Austin
Stephen Jessee , University of Texas, Austin
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Enlisting a natural experiment, global surveys, and historical data, this book examines the university's evolution and its contemporary impact. Its authors conduct an unprecedented big-data comparative study of the consequences of higher education on ideology, democratic citizenship, and more. They conclude that university education has a profound effect on social and political attitudes across the world, greater than that registered by social class, gender, or age. A university education enhances political trust and participation, reduces propensities to crime and corruption, and builds support for democracy. It generates more tolerant attitudes toward social deviance, enhances respect for rationalist inquiry and scientific authority, and usually encourages support for Leftist parties and movements. It does not nurture support for taxation, redistribution, or the welfare state, and may stimulate opposition to these policies. These effects are summarized by the co-authors as liberal, understood in its classic, nineteenth-century meaning.
- A concise and critical evaluation of extant research on the impacts of university education
- Offers the strongest evidence to date of the university's ideological evolution over the past several centuries
- Describes a global influence of the modern university
Product details
January 2024Paperback
9781009424738
358 pages
230 × 150 × 22 mm
0.569kg
Available
Table of Contents
- I. Background:
- 1. Introduction
- 2. Previous Work
- II. Foreground:
- 3. Methods
- 4. Findings
- III. Extensions:
- 5. Nuances
- 6. Mechanisms
- IV. History:
- 7. The Rise of a Liberal University
- 8. Disciplinary Differences
- 9. Explanations for the Liberal Shift
- V. Conclusions:
- 10. Synthesis
- Afterword: The American University
- Appendices
- References
- Index.
