Pierre Mouganie, American University of Beirut, will present the paper "The Impact of Religious Diversity on Students' Academic and Behavioral Outcomes".
In many countries, religion is a source of deep societal divisions, violent conflicts and political polarization. In such contexts, religiously diverse educational institutions may help break down cultural barriers through facilitating interactions between religious groups. However, evidence on how intergroup contact affects individuals' behavior is mixed, and studies focusing on contact between different religious groups are particularly sparse.
This paper provides the first causal evidence on how exposure to college peers from different religious high schools affects students' behavior and learning outcomes. We use data from the American University of Beirut (AUB), a secular 4-year college in Lebanon, where students are randomly assigned to different peer groups. Prior to enrolling in AUB, students attend either Secular, Christian or Islamic high schools. These schools differ in whether they provide religious education and the religious diversity of their student body---with secular schools being the most diverse and Islamic schools the most homogeneous.
We show that for students from Islamic schools, exposure to dissimilar peers improves their academic performance but makes them more likely to take classes with Muslim teachers. In contrast, exposure to dissimilar peers decreases academic performance for students coming from secular schools and has no impact on their instructor choice. Our results indicate that for individuals coming from religiously homogeneous backgrounds, intergroup contact strengthens within-group solidarity.
(Co-authors: Serena Canaan and Antoine Deeb)