The Political Economy Effects of the Bologna Process

Using a staggered difference-in-difference design, we study the consequence ofthe largest ever market-oriented transformation in higher education – the ‘Bologna process’ –on the ideology and socioeconomic outcomes of European Millennials. We find that the reformpersistently and substantially elevated the students’ individualist concern for social status overtheir universalist concern for global justice, values conforming with ‘liquid modernity’ over ‘solidmodernity’ and the salience of economic over sociocultural goals. The ‘self-interest bias’ isorthogonal to the traditional left-right cleavage in attitudinal or behavioural metrics and emergesabsent any significant change in long-term income, wealth, unemployment, or occupationalprestige. Through a direct mechanism of political socialisation, the globalisation of Europeanhigher education increased the perceived importance of status without improving it, shifting theeducated class away from its presumed role in endorsing cosmopolitan causes. Institutionally-drivenstatus anxiety, not idiosyncratic generational morals, constructs the ‘student customer’.