NCoC: Appendix: Demography, Education

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Appendix: Demography, Education

Tale of Two Cities: Civic Health in Miami and Minneapolis-St. Paul

January 24, 2011

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Level of educational attainment has long been considered a strong predictor of civic engagement. In both Minneapolis-St. Paul and Miami, individuals are more likely to be civically engaged as level of educational attainment increases (Appendix Table 1). However, the overall effect of education on levels of civic engagement differs quite dramatically when comparing Minneapolis-St. Paul and Miami. Speciﬁcally, higher levels of education in Minneapolis-St. Paul are considerably more likely to boost civic engagement than in Miami. For example, a majority of the college educated in Minneapolis-St. Paul reported engaging in seven of the nine civic engagement activities (volunteering, donating to charity, non-electoral participation, group participation, attending to public affairs, voting, and being connected to a social network). In contrast, a majority of college educated in Miami reported being engaged in only four of the indicators (donating, attending to public affairs, voting, and being socially connected).

An additional means of demonstrating the more muted effects of education on civic engagement in Miami is to compare college educated in Miami with those individuals in Minneapolis-St. Paul who graduated high school but did not attend college. Across virtually all of the civic engagement indicators (the exceptions were attending to public affairs, donating to charity, and voting), an individual with a high school education in Minneapolis-St. Paul was about as likely to be engaged as an individual with a college education in Miami. That is, the difference in the percentage reporting to have participated in the activity was no more than ﬁve percentage points on six of the civic engagement indicators. This illustrates the more general point about the overall higher levels of civic engagement in Minneapolis-St. Paul (except for attending to public affairs), irrespective of the level of education an individual attained.

Given that education may overlap with the other demographic variables, especially income and race/ethnicity, it is important to determine whether the strong effects found for education hold up when we take into account other variables. In fact they do. In both Minneapolis-St. Paul and Miami, education exerted a statistically signiﬁcant effect on all of the civic engagement indicators even after controlling for the other demographic variables. However, again, there are important differences evident when comparing both cities. First, in Minneapolis-St. Paul, education had the largest effect of any of the variables on six of the nine civic indicators (volunteering, non-electoral participation, group participation, attending to public affairs, voting, and being connected to a social network). While education also had a statistically signiﬁcant effect on every civic engagement indicator in Miami, it only had the largest effect on three of the items (group participation, attending to public affairs, and being socially connected). And in two cases (group participation and attending to public affairs) education barely beat the second most important demographic variable.

Second, the net effect of education was much greater in Minneapolis-St. Paul than in Miami. The net effect is the difference in the predicted probability of engaging in each activity for an individual with the highest and lowest levels of education while all other variables are held constant at their mean values (see Appendix Figure 1). In other words, the net effect shows us how two individuals who are alike in every way, except for having different levels of educational attainment, differ in terms of their levels of civic engagement. For Minneapolis-St. Paul this net effect of education was smallest for working with neighbors to ﬁx problems in the neighborhood (a 13 percentage point difference between highest and lowest levels of education) and was largest for non-electoral participation (a 66 percentage point difference). Across all nine civic indicators, the average net effect is 31 percentage points. For Miami, the net effects of education were smallest for attending a public meeting and working with neighbors (3 percentage point difference) and highest for being connected to a social network (36 percentage point difference). For Miami, the average net effect of education across all nine indicators was 15 percentage points, and on only one item (being connected to a social network) was the effect of education greater in Miami than in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Appendix: The Demography of Civic Engagement in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Miami • Appendix: Demography, Income

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