The economic education gap collapsed; the cultural one held

Mean absolute education gap (college minus non-college, in standard-deviation units) on economic vs cultural attitudes, by year. Heavy dots mark the three-era averages.

Cultural attitudes (race, immigration, gay rights, abortion) Economic attitudes (jobs, spending, health insurance)

Read it as: the gold line — the education gap on economics — rises, peaks, then dives to near zero. The blue line — culture — barely moves. By the most recent era the cultural gap is about three times the economic one.

Standardized education gap = (weighted mean among college graduates − weighted mean among non-graduates) ÷ weighted standard deviation of the item, averaged across each family's items. Immigration and gay-adoption items enter the cultural family only from 1986/1988, which thins the earliest cultural points. Source: ANES Cumulative File, weighted;

In 2008–24, the degree barely touches economics and dominates culture

Signed education gap by item (standard-deviation units), pooled 2008–2024. Positive and negative reflect the item's own scale; the label notes which side college graduates lean toward.

Read it as: the three economic dots huddle against the zero line — a degree predicts almost nothing about redistribution attitudes. The four cultural dots fan out: graduates are markedly more for legal abortion and gay adoption, and markedly more against cutting immigration.

Dot position is the signed standardized college-minus-non-college gap, averaged over the years in the era. Gold = economic items, blue = cultural items. Source: ANES Cumulative File, weighted;