Building social trust through education

Social trust plays a critical role in shaping the quality of governance. However, we still lack sufficient causal evidence of how social trust can be cultivated through the lens of public policy. In this paper, we, therefore, address this issue by identifying college education as an important source of social trust. We implement a fuzzy regression discontinuity design based on the massive college enrollment expansion in China that began in 1999. Specifically, using nationwide survey data from the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP), we find that college education improves both generalized and personalized trust at the individual level. These effects are most pronounced on females and on individuals in less developed areas (i.e., Central and Western China). Further analyses show that college education enhances individuals' social trust by improving their socioeconomic status, such as by helping them to gain urban Hukou and increase their income. Overall, our findings suggest that in developing countries, social trust can be cultivated by improving access to higher education.