One of the questions that I keep returning to is how people at different educational levels view each other. One view, held by many critics of "meritocracy," is that educated people increasingly feel disdain for less educated people, and less educated people sense that and resent it. My view is that there's increasing social egalitarianism on the part of educated people--they don't want to be thought of as snobs or elitists--and not much change among less educated people--they just go about their lives and don't pay much attention to the fine points of social status. I keep an eye out for questions that bear on the issue, and I ran across another one recently. An Axios/IPSOS poll from last August asked what people thought about the statement "People without college degrees are looked down on in our society."
Critics of meritocracy hold that educated people don't openly announce their prejudices, but reveal them by behavior or off-the-cuff remarks (like the famous "basket of deplorables"). Thus, there should be substantial differences in agreement by educational level--more educated people will deny that people without college degrees are looked down on, while less educated people will agree that they are. The means by education (1=strongly agree, 2=somewhat agree, 3=neither agree nor disagree.... 5=strongly disagree).
No HS diploma 2.47
HS 2.67
Some college 2.57
Bachelor's 2.57
Master's 2.68
There's no pattern, and the p-value for differences between groups is 0.162. I looked for other demographic differences and found a couple of moderate size--blacks and younger people are more likely to agree.
Turning to politics, Democrats were most likely to agree (2.45) and Republicans most likely to disagree (2.82), with independents and "something else" in the middle. These differences were statistically significant. This seems reasonable, since generally Republicans are less likely to see injustices in American society.
But there is evidence of an interaction between party and education:
There are differences by educational level among Republicans, but no evidence of differences among Democrats and independents. If there is a causal association, it could go in either direction--beliefs could affect partisanship or partisanship could affect beliefs. That is, beliefs could have different effects at different educational levels. But another way the interaction could arise is if more educated people are more aware of and influenced by what their party elites say. With clearly partisan issues like abortion, you usually find bigger partisan differences among more educated people. But this isn't a clearly partisan issue--Republican elites often say that Democrats look down on less educated people, but it's not clear how that would translate to views of "our society."
The survey also asked about where people got most of their news, and gave a list to choose from. I show them from most to least agreement. Although the numbers in most categories are small, there seems to be a pattern.
MSNBC 2.30
NY Times/Wash Post 2.40
Public TV/radio 2.44
Online news 2.46
CNN 2.48
Social media 2.49
ABC/CBS/NBC 2.64
Other 2.76
None of them 2.81
Fox News 2.82
local newspaper 2.87
The ones with the strongest agreement tend to have liberal readers, and also more educated readers. Unfortunately, they didn't include the Wall Street Journal, which has a relatively conservative and well educated readership. But these results suggest that the belief that people without college degrees are looked down on is common among politically aware liberals.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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