Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

We examine the impact of a massive expansion of opportunities to attend college known as the graduation quota program on men’s political preference (being liberal or conservative) in South Korea. A 1979 military coup in South Korea mandated that all public and private colleges expand their college admission quotas by thirty percent in 1981 and fifty percent in 1982. These mandatory expansions lasted until 1985. It is interesting to note that the mandatory increases in these quotas happened quickly in a short timeframe and were not accompanied by additional funding to expand staffing or facilities at universities and colleges. We examine the political preference of birth cohorts of South Korean men who pre-dated the graduation quota program and compare them to birth cohorts of men who were directly impacted by the program. We use the birth cohorts that were exposed to this abrupt, exogenous policy change as an instrumental variable to identify the longer-term effects of college education on political preference. We find that the enrollment expansion caused those individuals who were induced to attend to college by the expanded graduation quota program to be more politically liberal. Our local average treatment effect estimates using the birth cohort IV are larger than the biased OLS estimates. This paper provides direct relevance for other developing countries that exert substantial control over their systems of higher education.