Attitudes on past-in-present educational discrimination. Insights from a representative factorial survey

In this paper, we provide evidence on attitudes on past-in-present educational discrimination, i.e. educational discrimination that occurred in the past but has present-time negative effects on the probability of success in fair-in-form employment selection processes. To do so, we use an original factorial survey experiment, and collect data from a representative sample of the US population. We find that a significant majority of respondents support the costly compensation of past-in-present educational discrimination. Moreover, we find that respondents are as sensitive to past-in-present educational discrimination than to present-time employment discrimination. We find that causal effects on attitudes are stronger for the intentionality of the discrimination than for its financial consequences on the discriminated group. Last, attitudes appear to be more driven by the respondents’ political perspective than by their own real-world identity.