Clarifying the diploma divide: The growing importance of higher education for political identity.

Higher education is widely believed to have a liberalizing effect on students, yet empirical findings are mixed. In two studies (total N = 483,885), we investigated the "diploma divide" in the United States. In the past half-century, we found that adults with more education have consistently held more left-leaning views on social but not economic issues. Before the 2010s, however, there were no meaningful, educational differences in the degree to which people identified as liberal versus