Can We Trust Education for Fostering Trust? Quasi-experimental Evidence on the Effect of Education and Tracking on Social Trust

Abstract

Education is one of the most commonly proposed determinants of social trust (generalized trust). Nevertheless, the empirical evidence of a causal relationship between education and social trust is inconclusive. This study contributes to this discussion in two ways. First, its design provides strong grounds for causal inference across multiple countries by exploiting numerous European compulsory schooling reforms. Second, it considers how the structure of education, specifically between-school tracking, impacts the relationship between education and social trust. The article argues that less tracking is positive for social trust because it entails intergroup contacts between children with different social backgrounds. The results do not give support for a general positive effect of education on social trust as the effect of reforms that extend compulsory education is positive but small and not statistically significant. However, reforms that reduce tracking have a somewhat larger, but still modest, positive and statistically significant effect on social trust. The effect is more pronounced for individuals with poorly educated parents. The positive effect of detracking reforms goes hand-in-hand with more understanding attitudes towards persons with a different background than one’s own. The lack of a clear effect of reforms that extend compulsory schooling on social trust reinforces the findings of recent single-country studies that have been unable to confirm a causal effect of education on social trust. However, the effect of detracking reforms, albeit modest, shows that education can have a positive effect on social trust but that the institutional character of education may be a conditioning factor.

The Effect of School Tracking on Student Achievement and Inequality: A Meta-Analysis

“…This would expand the debate to other relevant questions, such as whether it is worth tolerating some level of short-term inequality if the professional placement of students is assured later, and whether the inequalities reproduced and intensified by tracked educational systems remain in access to higher education and higher-status positions in the labor market. Moreover, future investigations should look at the effects of various forms of tracking on students’ socioemotional competencies and civic engagement, which have been covered by a limited number of studies (e.g., Witschge & van de Werfhorst, 2020; Korthals et al, 2021; Österman, 2021) even though they are increasingly considered important for individuals’ success in life (OECD 2015). Lastly, the literature seems to have somehow overlooked the economic aspects related to tracking policies.…”

Educating Democrats or Autocrats? The Regime-Conditional Effect of Education on Support for Democracy

“…In these cases, we treat the countries as having a single implementation date defined as the year for which the largest number of regions enacted the changes (similar to Brunello et al, 2009;Cavaille and Marshall, 2019;Österman, 2021).…”

“…To make this assumption more credible, we restrict the number of cohorts included before and after reform implementation. In the main specifications, we compare seven “untreated” birth-year cohorts born such that they were unaffected by reform implementation, to seven “treated” birth-year cohorts born immediately on the other side of this threshold (similar to Brunello et al, 2009; Croke et al, 2016; Österman, 2021). We refer to the cohort frame as the “reform-window”.…”

“…That is, children who would have quit school at the earliest possible time point prior to the reforms. However, we lack variables to discriminate this group, such as parental education (Österman, 2021), and thus have to accept that the reform effect on education will be smaller than the formal change in compulsory schooling (Oreopoulos, 2006).…”

“…Similar forms of varied implementation were found in several countries, but it has been argued that such variations in timing of reform implementation do not correlate with overall levels of education (Brunello et al, 2009). In these cases, we treat the countries as having a single implementation date defined as the year for which the largest number of regions enacted the changes (similar to Brunello et al, 2009; Cavaille and Marshall, 2019; Österman, 2021).…”