Learning to love cosmopolitanism? Testing the socialisation effect of educational field of study on cosmopolitan attitudes in the Netherlands

Across Europe, those with higher education are consistently found to be more pro-cosmopolitan than those with less education. However, it remains an open question what aspects of education drive this relationship. One influential mechanism through which education is argued to affect cosmopolitan attitudes is by instilling tolerance inducing values and beliefs that continue to influence the thinking of students long after they have left the education system. Using the Dutch LISS panel between 2008 and 2019, we explore differences in the emphasis on tolerant values and beliefs across fields of study to assess the explanatory power of the socialisation model of education for cosmopolitan attitudes. By estimating between- and within subject panel regressions, we find that although there are cross-sectional differences between fields of study in cosmopolitan attitudes, these differences cannot conclusively be attributed to the socialisation influence of the specific field. Consequently, our results challenge the importance of the socialisation model to understand the current educational divide in cosmopolitanism.