The effect of college education on intolerance: evidence from Google search data

ABSTRACT

This article explores the causal relationship between college education within a region and that region’s interest in hate-related topics. I utilize Google Trends search data for intolerance-related terms to measure regional interest in intolerance, and an instrumental variable based on the historical assignment of land grant colleges to obtain exogenous variation in cross-regional college-educated population shares. I find that there is a negative correlation between a region’s college-educated population share and that region’s search activity for intolerance-related terms. This correlation does not translate to a causal relationship, however, as the instrumental variables estimates are found to be small and statistically insignificant. This finding suggests that improving access to college-level education may not be an effective policy tool to combat hateful attitudes and behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Land grant colleges
• intolerance
• google trends
• attitudes

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I20
• J15

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ See Rothwell and Diego-Rosell (2016).

² Jefferson and Pryor (1999), for example, show that counties that are more highly educated are less likely to have hate groups.

³ There is at least one land grant college per state.

⁴ I utilize a long period because Google Trends bottom-codes data from DMAs for which search volume is sufficiently low. I therefore utilize as many years as possible to ensure that all 209 DMAs are present.

⁵ ‘kkk’, an acronym for the Ku Klux Klan, is a hate group classified by the SPLC for its anti-minority and immigrant views, among other things. Hitler is an icon amongst white supremacists; for example, after a rally by white supremacist Richard Spencer, on 21 October 2017, three men opened fire on anti-racist protestors while shouting ‘Heil Hitler’.

⁶ For a more in-depth discussion of the plausibly exogenous nature of land grant college assignment to areas, see Moretti (2004) or Liu (2015).