Association between educational attainment and ethnic distance in young adults: Socialization by schools or parents?

Abstract

Time and again, studies have shown that higher educated individuals are less inclined to avoid social contact with ethnic minorities than are lower educated individuals. This has been interpreted as the liberalizing effect of education: the school is considered to be the most important socializing agent transmitting liberal values that reduce ethnic intolerance and ethnic prejudice. However, parents too are considered to be important socializing agents. We set out to compare the effects of educational attainment with various kinds of parental influence. We analysed data on 201 young adults and their parents from a Dutch panel study. The results show that the relative influence of parents is fairly small compared to the effect of education. Moreover, controlling for parental influences hardly reduces young adults' educational effect on ethnic distance: education is (still) the most important determinant for young adults' ethnic distance.