According to an AI I consulted, and my own sense, education-levels in this country correlate closely with voting patterns: people with doctorates tend to vote Democratic much more than people who never graduated high school, and the four points polled in between those two extremes (did graduate high school, went to college but did not graduate, college grads, went to grad school but did not take a degree) increasingly voted Democratic at each gradation of education.
If you wish to dispute the AI on this, feel free (I have no reason to think it’s wrong), but assuming it’s right, I wonder what would result if we were able to poll sixty levels of education rather than just six. There are about sixty levels that can be marked (and probably more): each of the K-12 grades can be divided into “started” and “finished” (and divided by semester as well) as can college (which could be further subdivided by GPA, credits earned, etc.) . Grad school can be divided several different ways, each denoting a higher or lower level of completion, starting with the basic one of “got Masters degree” and “got doctorate.” And beyond doctorate, there are a few more levels, such as post-doctoral studies, multiple graduate degrees, etc.
My question is: assuming we could gather data at each of these levels of education, would they eventually show a smooth correlation between the sixty education-levels as there is between the six education-levels we now measure?
And if “yes” is the answer to that, how much data would be required at each level to eliminate glitches caused by small-sample size? I’m thinking we’d need more data at each level than the population actually holds. That is, are there enough people who’ve started fourth grade but did not finish it in the entire country to make for stable reliable polling results, even if you were able to poll each person who qualifies for incusion? I think not but am willing to be proven wrong.
It really depends on what you want. You’d need a lot more data to be confident that the relation was monotonic than say that a regression line was upward sloping. Also it depends on your model. If you could sample everyone – know how they voted and where their schooling ended, then it’s not a statistical question as you have the population data so their is no estimation whether the relation is monotonic; you’d now it (or not) for a fact.
Trying to mesaure the political views of a kindergarten student is pointless. And finding an adult with only a kindergarten education who votes is probably impossible. Pick a more appropriate age of politcal awareness and understanding for a baseline.
A very fine grained division may act to bring in confusing factors. If you add “started but not completed” into the mix there is a good chance that the reason someone didn’t finish becomes important, and that may dominate over the level of education.
Not completing a year at any level may have more to do with socio-economic forces, with more poor people starting but not completing a level of education. At higher levels dropping out becomes more common. The ABD (all but dissertation) PhD candidate is all too common. Sometimes life gets in the way.
My guess would be “No”.
Because at that detailed a level, so much data would contain so much differences that the ‘noise’ would overwhelm the data. For example, a couple of personal items:
At the one-room rural school I first attended, clearly un-ready students were advanced to the next grade automatically, when they should have been held back. The teacher knew this, but was forbidden from doing so by the school board (3 of the 5 were related, and greatly object to their kids, relatives kids, or neighbors kids being held back. But when they reached an age where they were fully useful on the farm, they were allowed to drop out. So that school would show a lot who left at 6th or 7th grade level, but educationally were really 4-5 years below that.)
And in the town high school, good athletes were kept in school until graduation, because our teams needed them. So they would show up as High School graduates in this research, but educationally were barely Jr High level.
Also, it was well known in town that the parochial school teachers were much tougher graders than at the public school, and tighter discipline (probably because they could expel or push out troublesome students).
I would expect such ‘special’ cases are common all over this country, and other countries, so that any completely ‘smooth correlation’ is unlikely.
But I do agree that the general trend of more education = more liberal social views is roughly true.