Higher education reduces ethnic prejudice while increasing ideological prejudice. But it is still prejudice.

From Education is Related to Greater Ideological Prejudice by P J Henry and Jaime L Napier. From the abstract:

Decades of research have shown that education reduces individuals’ prejudices toward people who belong to different groups, but this research has focused predominantly on prejudice toward ethnic/racial groups, immigrant groups, and general nonconformists. However, it is not clear whether education reduces other prejudices against groups along different dimensions, including ideological identification. An analysis of American National Election Studies data from 1964 to 2012 shows that education is related to decreases in interethnic/interracial prejudice, but also to increases in ideological (liberal vs. conservative) prejudice. This finding could not be explained simply by the greater polarization of the American electorate in the past twenty years. The results require rethinking how and why education is associated with reduced prejudice for certain groups but not others.

Can't get to the underlying paper, methodology and data but it should be reasonably robust if they are using the AMNES for forty-eight years.

Let's stipulate that the methodology is robust for the time being. My first question is about the effect size and whether the percent increases in ideological prejudice is equivalent to the percent decrease in interethnic/interracial prejudice. Another question is with regard to consequence. If the decrease in racial prejudice is 10% and that affects a population of 45 million and the increase in ideological prejudice affects a population of 100 million with strong ideological positions, then, even though the size of change is the same, the practical consequence is that prejudicial behavior has become much worse.

Those questions can't be answered at the moment without the underlying data but it is still an interesting finding that higher education does not reduce prejudice, it just retargets that prejudice. That perhaps sheds some light on disenchantment of the voting public with the clerisy. The clerisy view themselves as morally enlightened because, with their education, their demonstrate lower racial prejudice. The general populace, with lower levels of education attainment, might be seeing moral authority of the clerisy as, instead, simply hypocritical sanctimony because the clerisy are as prejudiced (hateful) as everyone else, they just target their prejudice elsewhere.

Pure speculation without the data.