Educating for Democracy? Going to College Increases Political Participation

Andreas Videbæk Jensen

British Journal of Political Science, 2025, vol. 55, -

Abstract: It is a long-standing view that educational institutions sustain democracy by building an engaged citizenry. However, recent scholarship has seriously questioned whether going to college increases political participation. While these studies have been ingenious in using natural experiments to credibly estimate the causal effect of college, most have produced estimates with high statistical uncertainty. I contend that college matters: I argue that, together, prior effect estimates are just as compatible with a positive effect as a null effect. Furthermore, analyzing two-panel datasets of $n \approx 10,000$ young US voters, using a well-powered difference-in-differences design, I find that attending college leads to a substantive increase in voter turnout. Importantly, these findings are consistent with the statistically uncertain but positive estimates in previous studies. This calls for updating our view of the education-participation relationship, suggesting that statistical uncertainty in prior studies may have concealed that college education has substantive civic returns.

Date: 2025
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