It is commonly hypothesized that education promotes more “enlightened” beliefs about racial inequality, and many prior studies document that white Americans with higher levels of education are more likely to agree with structural rather than individualist explanations for black disadvantages. Nevertheless, an alternative perspective contends that the ostensibly liberalizing effects of education are highly superficial, while yet another perspective cautions that any association observed between education and racial attitudes may be due to unobserved confounding. This study evaluates these perspectives by estimating the effects of education on beliefs about racial inequality from a set of cross-sectional, sibling, and panel models. Consistent with prior research, results from cross-sectional models fit to the General Social Survey (GSS) suggest that education promotes a genuine belief in structural over individualist explanations for racial inequality. However, results from sibling and individual fixed-effects models fit, respectively, to the 1994 Study of American Families and to the 2006–2010 GSS three-wave panels suggest that these effects may be superficial and are likely inflated by unobserved confounding.

中文翻译：

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教育对种族不平等信念的影响

通常认为，教育促进了关于种族不平等的更多“开明”信念，许多先前的研究表明，受过较高教育水平的美国白人更倾向于接受结构性而非个人主义的黑人劣势解释。然而，另一种观点认为，表面上自由化的教育效果是高度肤浅的，而另一种观点则警告说，在教育与种族态度之间观察到的任何关联都可能是由于未观察到的混淆所致。这项研究通过评估教育对种族不平等信念的影响，从一组横截面，同级和小组模型中评估了这些观点。与先前的研究一致，符合一般社会调查（GSS）的横断面模型得出的结果表明，教育提倡对种族不平等的结构化而非个人主义解释的真正信念。但是，同级模型和个体固定效应模型的结果分别适合于1994年的《美国家庭研究》和2006-2010年的GSS三波研究小组，表明这些效应可能是肤浅的，并且可能由于未观察到的混淆而被夸大。