A badge and a baccalaureate: Policies, hypotheses, and further evidence

Arguments for and against measures intended to raise the educational levels of police officers turn partly on the hypothesized relationships between college education and officers' attitudes and behavior. The purpose of this analysis is to provide additional empirical evidence concerning these hypotheses. The results suggest that college education is weakly related to some attitudes and unrelated to others. The results also show that officers' performance in police-citizen encounters, measured in terms of citizens' evaluations, is largely unrelated to officers' educational backgrounds.