Abstract

Can the expansion of higher education lead to political conflict? This paper examines whether the rapid expansion of higher education in 17th-century England produced a group of ‘alienated intellectuals’ who contributed to political conflict before the Civil War. We assemble new micro-data on approximately 800 grammar schools, around 80,000 Oxford and Cambridge students, clerical careers, and students’ full-text publications. Exploiting the quasi-random timing of founders’ deaths, we show that school foundations raised university enrolment, especially among poorer students. Yet career opportunities for graduates remained limited, with poorer students disproportionately pushed into insecure clerical posts and excluded from elite occupations. Using NLP techniques, we show that graduates with adverse labour-market outcomes were more likely to support Parliament during the Civil War and to hold Puritan views. To establish causality, we employ an instrumental variable approach exploiting variation from job openings in students’ home regions. Our findings establish a clear connection between educational expansion, frustrated educational elites, and political radicalisation.