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There are more graduates in the UK, and the way they vote and think is becoming a dominant force in politics
In the past, if I wanted to guess how you might vote, there’s a bunch of questions I could have asked to find out.
“How much do you earn?” would be an easy winner, closely followed by “what job do you do?”, “what did your parents do”?, and “where do you live?”
These days there is one question that trumps all of those - “what’s your highest level of education?” This has a frankly astonishing level of discrimination - if you answer that you left school at 16 you are much more likely to vote Conservative (and have voted leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum) - if you are a graduate I would feel safe in guessing you voted Labour and Remain.
Ten years ago, your answer to this question would have told me almost nothing about your political leanings.
The 2016 referendum isn’t an accidental reference - it represents pretty much the exact moment that this widely accepted seismic shift in the political landscape occurred.
Robert Ford, Hannah Bunting, Ralph Scott, and Maria Sobolewska’s report for the Social Market Foundation - Degrees of Separation: The education divide in British politics - is not the first piece of research to detail this new geological feature, but it may well be the most exhaustive and the most dramatic in scope.
At heart, this phenomenon is about identity as much as education. Graduates, it seems, see their graduateness as central to their identity, as they do their profession. For those who left school at 16 where they live (and perhaps their ethnicity) are key.
Your education, these days, is a strong predictor of class identity. With a professional occupation being so closely linked to a higher education qualification this is perhaps unsurprising - though a regression analysis (based on a very health sample size) finds:
Yet, remarkably, past educational experience has just as large an impact on class allegiances as the jobs people do and the incomes they earn. Graduates are more likely than school leavers to identify as middle class, and to reject a working class identity, while school leavers hold the opposite pattern of allegiances. Being middle class is now as much about having a degree as it is about having a high income or a professional job.
That - if you stop to think about it - is a remarkable finding. Doubly so if you consider the growth in the graduate population (we will outnumber, somehow, non-graduates at some point in the next decade) and the likely repercussions of parties on both sides of the political spectrum trying to double down on what will be the dominant set of socio-cultural views.
Graduates are more likely to be concerned about the environment, and less likely to be concerned about immigration. The differences in opinion are reinforced by differences in salience - graduates aren’t just less keen on measures to limit immigration, they are less likely to cite the issue of immigration as one that is important. Likewise, graduates are more likely to be in favour of policies to address environmental issues, and more likely to cite such issues among the most important problems facing the nation.
The new graduate liberalism is on the social rather than the economic end of liberalism, and like much of the future is unlikely to be evenly distributed. It will skew young, and it will be inherently localised (the phenomenon of graduate accretion in inner cities and university towns is already well established.
What Ford et al are tracing here is the backdrop to the next few elections - and the impetus behind a likely shift in the political climate. But they are keen to remind us that changes like this are seldom permanent. Though there will be unquestionably be more graduates in the short to medium term, we should not rely on the patterns that are sketched here remaining. As they conclude:
The education divide that has opened up over the last decade is therefore very likely to change once again in the decade to come, as the relentless process of demographic change continues to reshape the electoral map. Before 2011, neither party could afford to alienate school leavers if it aspired to government – this was the dominant group almost everywhere. After 2031, a hostile graduate electorate will become similarly fatal to electoral prospects. That change is certain to come. The only question is how quickly the political parties get the message and respond.