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After Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Sweden changed its historic position of non-alignment and applied for membership in the NATO military alliance. This decision coincided with a shift in public opinion in favor of NATO membership, in what has been described as the largest and fastest shift in public opinion that has ever been measured in Swedish history. We examine two aspects of this “rally around the flag effect” to explain this change, the effect of the crisis event itself and the effect of political elite influence by analyzing within-individual changes of a Swedish university student population at three different time points. We find that after the Russian invasion but before the decision was made to join NATO, public opinion was still split with roughly 40% still opposed. However, after the decision was made to apply for membership to the alliance many people changed their position (32%), either making up their minds or switching position entirely. We show that these changes were likely in response to the decision to join, and that they were moderated by individuals’ previously established political preferences.

The link between educational attainment and attitudes towards out‐groups stands out as one of the most consistent statistical associations in the social and political sciences. However, a recent analysis of survey data from the United States finds that the relationship between higher education and out‐group prejudice depends on the content of education. In this Research Note, we replicate that study's analysis of tertiary‐level academic majors within a European context and extend it to include academic specializations below the tertiary level. Our analyses of European Social Survey (ESS) data, spanning 32 countries and over 120,000 respondents, reveal substantial variation in the association between field of study and anti‐immigrant prejudice. Specifically, we find that individuals with degrees in arts, humanities, and social sciences express more positive views towards immigrants than those with degrees in other fields. A similar, though less pronounced, pattern emerges among individuals with lower levels of educational attainment. These findings challenge simplistic and politicized notions of the impact of higher education, offering a more nuanced understanding of educational attainment and its so‐called “liberalizing effect.”

In this article, we analyse the level of and development in students’ academic stress due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We devote particular attention to students that first entered university in 2020, ‘the COVID cohort’, who had fewer opportunities to integrate in ways that theoretically should mitigate the impact of pandemic-induced disruption to their studies. Using four waves of data, collected 2020–2022, we find evidence of both pandemic and cohort effects among Swedish university students (N = 3138). During the pandemic’s first year academic stress due to COVID-19 increased regardless of pre-pandemic university experience. The stress, in turn, negatively impacted students’ life satisfaction, a factor theoretically linked to key student outcomes like persistence and academic performance but had limited effect on students’ long-term optimism. The COVID cohort expressed higher levels of academic stress and experienced a greater drop in life satisfaction compared to the most senior students (3 years or more), but largely overlapped with students with some university experience (1–2 years). These group differences persisted in spring 2022. Finally, we found that the higher levels of pandemic-induced academic stress in the COVID cohort were mitigated by experiences that foster academic and social integration, specifically by teacher support and social cohesion.

Despite a large literature consistently showing a relationship between higher levels of education and lower levels of ethnic prejudice, some points of contention remain. First, it remains unclear whether education has a causal effect on attitudes, mainly due to a lack of longitudinal studies. Second, due to the majority of studies on prejudice being conducted in Europe and North America, we do not know to what extent the inverse relationship between education and prejudice is generalizable beyond the “global North.” To answer these questions, I study attitudes toward immigrants in Chile in the years 2016–2022, using six waves of the Chilean Longitudinal Social Survey. Chile provides new variations in economic and cultural factors, with its stable albeit highly unequal economy, and increased immigration from culturally similar countries which shed light on possible scope conditions of the so-called liberalizing effect of education. I analyze whether attaining more education has an effect on reducing levels of perceived economic and cultural threat. The findings show that increases in education are associated with both lower levels of perceived economic and cultural threat, with education having a stronger effect on the latter.

Recent research shows that better educated and structurally integrated immigrants do not articulate more positive attitudes toward the ethnic majority than immigrants who have lower levels of educational attainment, described as evidence of an “integration paradox.” While these findings have important implications for theories of immigrant integration, they stand in contrast with theories of intergroup relations, e.g., intergrou pcontact theory. Importantly, these findings also challenge the strong theoretical expectation that higher levels of education generate more positive intergroup attitudes, that is, the universality of the educational effect. Using four waves from ‘New Immigrants Survey Netherlands’ (NIS2NL) survey, I investigate attitudinal differences toward both the ethnic majority and other ethnic minorities in the Netherlands for four recent immigrant groups by focusing on the highest level of education from their country of origin. First, I analyze whether the relationship between education andoutgroup attitudes differs toward the ethnic majority and toward ethnic minorities.Second, I look at how attitudes toward outgroups change over time. Findings indicate that immigrants with higher levels of educational attainment hold more positive attitudes toward other ethnic minority groups, and these attitudes are stable over time. Attitudes toward the ethnic majority, however, are initially very positive but become lessso over time, regardless of level of education. The findings shed new light on the universality of the educational effect on interethnic attitudes by showing that higher levels of education among immigrants have a potential “liberalizing” effect only toward minority groups, but not toward the ethnic majority.

In this article, we challenge the prevailing assumption about the impact of higher education on attitudes toward racial and ethnic minorities by examining whether educational effects are monolithic or manifold instead. Using data from the General Social Survey (1972-2021), we use a variety of measures of education (years, levels, sectors, and majors) to unpack the relationship between higher education and intergroup attitudes, specifically anti-immigration attitudes among native-born Americans and anti-Black attitudes among non-African Americans. Results show that some higher education graduates hold out-group attitudes that are not much different from those without any higher education. Narrowing our focus to respondents only with higher education, we find significant variation in out-group attitudes across educational sectors and academic majors. These results have implications for how we understand previous scholarship on prejudice and higher education, which may have overestimated the impact higher education has, in general, on prejudice.

Background: This dissertation looks at the effect of higher education on prejudice, in particular anti-immigrant sentiment. In studies of prejudice, higher education is constantly shown to correlate to lower levels of prejudice, the so-called “liberalizing effect of education,” yet we do not fully understand to what extent education matters for these attitudes. By using longitudinal data, this dissertation looks at the effect of education on out-group attitudes from different angles. It seeks to investigate whether attaining more education results in lower levels of prejudice; whether this educational effect is universal; to what extent levels of prejudice differ among academic majors, as well as theorizing about the possible mechanisms responsible for this robust relationship.

Methods: This dissertation relies on both longitudinal data and cross-sectional data and a mixture of multilevel, cross-classified, and OLS linear regression models. Data come from the Norwegian Citizen Panel (NCP) and Statistics Norway, the New Immigrant Survey Netherlands (NIS2NL), the General Social Survey (GSS), and the Chilean Longitudinal Social Survey (ELSOC).

Results: The four studies give insight into how and why education matters for ethnic out-group attitudes, by emphasizing different aspects of education. The main contributions from this dissertation are the following: education has the potential to reduce prejudice, albeit in cultural terms; education has an “inoculation effect” in situations that give rise to insecurity and uncertainty; the liberalizing effect of education is manifested toward ethnic minorities but not toward the ethnic majority; the content of education matters for attitudes, that is, higher education does not have a monolithic effect on attitudes; and education yields effects that are separate and/or different from other socio-economic indicators.

Conclusion: This dissertation makes empirical and theoretical contributions to the study of prejudice by finding longitudinal evidence of an inverse relationship of education and anti-immigrant sentiment over time, in both Western and non-Western contexts. In addition, it provides a foundation for future research on the possible theoretical mechanisms responsible for this relationship.

Previous research has consistently shown a negative correlation between education and anti-immigrant sentiment. This association is most pronounced when distinguishing between adults with higher education and those without a tertiary degree. Yet it remains unclear whether educational attainment actually matters for attitudes, mainly due to a lack of longitudinal studies. This article investigates the so-called liberalizing effect of education on adults' attitudes towards immigrants by taking into account individual, regional, and period effects. Using 12 waves of the Norwegian Citizen Panel (2013-2020) combined with contextual data from Statistics Norway, we assess the effects of: 1) educational attainment at the individual level; 2) the expansion of higher education at the regional level; and 3) higher education during a time of social upheaval. Results from multilevel cross-classified, repeated measurement models show that within-individual and within-county changes in educational attainment have a small but liberalizing effect on attitudes. Further, individuals with at least 3-4 years of university education do not react as strongly to the highly salient European migration crisis than those with lower levels of education. This finding suggests that higher education inhibits perceptions of threat that may manifest during "big events" such as a dramatic increase in asylum seeking. We interpret these novel results as evidence of an inoculating effect, in that higher education protects individuals against whatever instinct exists to react strongly during such crises.