Higher education and the importance of values: evidence from the World Values Survey

Abstract

The collection of data on values through instruments such as the World Values Survey has focused attention on two opposing but inter-related trends, namely the combination of substantial cultural change in many countries and the persistence of distinctive traditional values. This reflects the interplay between social changes associated with modernisation and globalisation—including increased global trade and the rise of global popular culture—with traditional values country-specific systems. In this paper, we introduce a focus on another potentially important source of change, that of widening higher education participation and attainment, and the extent to which self-reported values differ between university graduates and non-graduates. We investigated this question using data from the most recent collection of the World Values Survey (2017–2020) for six core values—family, friends, leisure, work, politics, and religion—and tested for the influence of higher education attainment on the perceived “importance” of each value and the extent to which this influence differs across values and in gender, generation and country grouping sub-samples. We find evidence for consistent effects in most contexts, with no statistical differences between graduates on non-graduates in relation to the propensity to view family and work as important, statistically significant positive effects on the propensity of graduates to view friends, leisure, and politics as important, and a significant negative effect in relation to religion.

The Importance of Family, Leisure, Work, and Friends

“…However, this is different by gender in that the importance of friends decreases more strongly for men than for women in old age (Kalmijn, 2012). Moreover, education and marital status are relevant: Higher educational attainment significantly affects the propensity to view friends and leisure as important, whereas no substantial differences were found between graduates and non-graduates regarding the tendency to view family and work as important (Koshy et al, 2023).…”

“…An observed change in the value of life course domains that potentially conflicts with family formation might give evidence for a change in priorities at the individual level. Depending on the purpose and field of study, there is a great diversity and breadth in the definition of life domains (Koshy et al, 2023;Matei & Abrudan, 2018). In the scope of this research, we focus on four main aspects of life domains; namely, family, leisure, work, and friends.…”

“…Notably, older cohorts are less likely to consider work as important as younger ones. Research on elderly people in the US has shown that health and family life are most important, followed by friendships and spare time, whereas work is least important (Hsieh, 2005;Koshy et al, 2023). With increasing age, the role of friendships decreases.…”

Values, Competences and Sustainability in Public Security and IT Higher Education

“…Each society has its own set of values and all individuals should adopt those values [75] (p. 23). With the use of six broad values: family, friends, leisure, work, politics, and religion, defined by Matei and Abrudan [76], Koshy et al [6] examined trends in assessment of their importance. They found that over the multiyear collection horizon for the World Values Survey, changes in the respondents' views on values at the national level occurred more quickly in countries undergoing major sustained changes, principally economic ones.…”

“…The values of a university represent its unique platform and mode of operation, and at the same time, they are both a distinct inspirational and limitative factor of the entire effort of modern higher education [6][7][8][9][10]. Values are the first phenomena researched in the paper.…”