Higher education and environmental concern: a global perspective

The current research and literature strongly affirm that the planet and humans in turn, are severely impacted by global warming and climate change. There is a widespread belief in the literature that the more educated you are, the more environmentally aware you will be. Existing research on the subject shows that education is a factor in environmental awareness, but scholars so far have only looked at education's effect on environmental values, not on environmental action. Using the latest data from the World Values Survey that includes 57 countries and over 87,000 individuals, and integrating it with other sources of data, this thesis analyzes whether higher education has an impact on environmental values as well as on individual and collective level environmental action. I use Pearson’s correlation analysis, scatterplot analysis and multivariate regression analysis. I conclude that as educational level increases, the likelihood that people will value environmental protection increases but the likelihood that people will take environmental action or the likelihood that people will organize around environmental issues do not increase.