University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Tatishe Nteta (FRS ’14-’15) Quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the Correlation Between College Education and Political Beliefs

What is it about a college degree — especially when filtered by race and gender — that so starkly correlates with political beliefs? In the social sciences, a college degree is more than just a piece of paper, said Tatishe M. Nteta, an associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. It’s an indicator of a set of networks and worldviews provided by the campus and classroom experience. “People who have a college degree tend to be friends with, tend to work with, tend to live in neighborhoods with individuals who also have college degrees,” Nteta said. In a recent paper, Nteta and his colleagues studied voter samples from the 2016 election to analyze what had driven the so-called education gap among white voters.Read more here.