Who Changes in College? Selection, and the Political Returns to Higher Education

Does higher education cause political change, or do graduates' choices reflect who was always going to enroll? This paper reframes the question as one of political returns, distinguishing engagement from partisan direction and asking how returns are distributed rather than estimating an average effect across the contrasting party systems of Germany and the United Kingdom. Attainment shifts graduates toward socially liberal and left-libertarian parties and away from the radical right. Political party systems, not the education systems, govern how this disposition reaches the ballot. Proportional representation converts left-libertarian support to a Greens vote in Germany, while first-past-the-post converts it into a Labour vote. These returns are unevenly distributed, concentrating among the most likely to attend in Germany and the least likely in the UK. Field-of-study differences divide graduates into STEM support for the center-right and HSS support for left-libertarians, exclusively among cohorts graduating after the financial crisis.