NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES
EDUCATION AND SOCIAL CAPITAL
John F. Helliwell
Robert D. Putnam
Working Paper 7121
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7 121
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
1050 Massachusetts
Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
May 1999
Helliwell acknowledges the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
For research on this and related projects, Putnam would like to thank the Pew Charitable Trusts, the
Rockefeller Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Norman Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New
York, and the Bertelesmann Science Foundation. For generous help with the DDB Needham Life Style data,
we thank Chris Callahan, Sid Groeneman, Marty Horn, and Doug Hughes. The views expressed herein are
those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
© 1999 by John F. Helliwell and Robert D. Putnam. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed
two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is
given to the source.
Education and Social Capital
John F. Helliwell and Robert D. Putnam
NBER Working Paper No. 7121
May 1999
JEL No. 12, JO, HO
ABSTRACT
Education is usually the most important predictor of political and social engagement. Over
the last half century, educational levels in the United States have risen sharply, yet levels of political
and social participation have not. Norman Nie, Jane Junn, and Kenneth Stehlik-Barry (NJS-B) have
offered an elegant resolution to this paradox based on a distinction between the "relative" and
"absolute" effects of education, with only relative education having positive effects on participation.
Using a broad range of evidence, including the data used by NJS-B, this paper shows that
increases in average education levels improve trust and do not reduce participation levels. The
contrast with the NJS-B participation results is found to be due to the definition of the educational
environment. We use a changing regional comparison group, theoretically preferable to NJS-B's
static national measure. Our results point to a more optimistic conclusion about the consequences
of increases in average education levels, while leaving open the puzzle of sluggish participation.
Jolm F. Helliwell
Robert D. Putnam
University of British Columbia
Kennedy School of Government
997-1873 East Mall
Harvard University
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z1
Cambridge, MA 02138
Canada
robertputnamharvard.edu
and NBER
helliwelinterchange.ubc.ca
Education and Social Capital
Education is one of the most important predictors—usually, in fact, the most important predictor—of
many forms of political and social engagement—from voting to chairing a local committee to hosting a
dinner party to trusting others. Over the last half century (and more) educational levels in the United States
have risen sharply. In 1960 only 41 percent of American adults had graduated from high school; in 1998 82
percent had. In 1960 only 8 percent of American adults had a college degree; in 1998 24 percent had. Yet
levels of political and social participation have not risen pan passu with this dramatic increase in education,
and by some accounts (Putnam 1 995a and 1 995b) have even fallen. For at least two decades, political
scientists have mused about this paradoxical "puzzle" (Brody 1978).
Recently, however, Norman Nie, Jane Junn, and Kenneth Stehlik-Barry (1996, hereafter NJS-B) have
offered an elegant and potentially powerful resolution to this paradox, beginning with a crucial distinction
between the "relative" and "absolute" effects of education. If more people now have a college degree, they
argue, perhaps the sociological significance of the credential has been devalued. Social status is, for
example, associated with education, but we would not assume that just because more Americans are
educated than ever before, America has a greater volume of social status than ever before. To the extent that
education is merely about sorting people, not about adding to their skills and knowledge and civic values,
then no puzzle remains to be explained. In fact, NJS-B conclude, participation is affected primarily by
relative educational levels, and thus has not been (and should not have been expected to be) rising with
aggregate educational levels.
The distinction that NJS-B have introduced represents an important insight: Education has external
effects, as well as internal ones. In principle, my behavior can be affected not only by my education, but also
by that of others around me. The core issue is whether (holding constant my own education), I am more
likely or less likely to participate politically and socially if those around me become more educated. Besides
its academic interest, the NJS-B conclusion has practical significance. If the negative effects of average
education match or exceed the positive effects of absolute education, then raising educational levels is a
pointless or even counter-productive way to increase civic engagement.
1
We are indebted to NJS-B for clarifying the central theoretical importance of this issue. We are,
however, less persuaded by their operational interpretation of "relative." That is, to what population is my
"relative education" relative? How should we measure the "educational environment" of which one's civic
competition is comprised? Both spatially and temporally, the operational standard adopted by NJS-B (1996:
119 and 227-233)
is
puzzling.
Spatially, by using national standards, NJS-B in effect assume that my civic behavior is affected by
educational levels in communities on the other side of the continent. Logically, this operationalization
means that civic participation in Seattle—voting, group membership, and so on—should tend to fall if
educational levels in rural North Carolina rise. Indeed, the operationalization adopted by NJS-B assumes
that the effect of education in rural North Carolina on Seattle participation rates is fully as great as the effect
of education levels in Seattle itself. In some domains—the job market for astronauts (NJS-B: 174), for
example—educational externalities may be undiluted by distance, but whether participation in community
affairs is like that is, we believe, worth exploring. So we propose to measure relative education relative to
the respondent's census region.'
Temporally, by comparing each respondent's education to the level of education of all Americans
who were between 25 and 50 years of age when the respondent reached the age of 25, NSJ-B assume a static,
backward-looking metric of educational externalities. In some job markets, this may perhaps be a reasonable
assumption, but in civic participation it seems implausible. For example, this operational measure of relative
education means that the participation rate of a 55-year-old is influenced not at all by the educational
Logically, of course, the appropriate standard of comparison might be even more local; indeed, we
suspect that it is. Our purpose here, however, is merely to show that even slightly narrowing the spatial
standard of comparison (moving from national to regional standards) can substantially affect one's
conclusions. A fortiori defining more localized standards of comparison should improve estimates still
further, although at some point, an increasingly localized definition might in fact become smaller than the
real range of externalities. For example, although we considered using state- or county-level standards in the
present analysis, we set that aside out of concern that some externalities might be carried by inter-county or
even inter-state commuters. Interregional commuting is vanishingly small. In subsequent work using
"relative education," we recommend that sensitivity testing be done to assess the most suitable level of
aggregation, but however low that turns out to be, it will, we believe, be smaller than the nation as a whole.
2
credentials of her 54-year-old neighbors, but is influenced instead by the educational credentials people long
dead. In other words, in NSJ-B's oddly asymmetric world of civic competition, no one ever competes
against anyone younger, but everyone always competes against everyone older (including the dead). Here,
instead, we propose to compare each respondent's education to all other [living] adults, both older and
younger.2
In short, while it seems to us well worth investigating whether the civic participation of a Seattle high
school drop-out is influenced (positively or negatively) by the educational levels of his neighbors, it seems to
us implausible to assume that his participation rate equally or more influenced by the educational level of
dead North Carolinians.
One special reason for caution regarding the NSJ-B implementation of their important theoretical
insight is (as they fully recognize at p. 134) that since national educational levels have risen monotonically
throughout this century, operationally NSJ-B's measure of relative education (defined as it is in national and
static terms) is virtually a perfect linear transform of the respondent's year of birth.3 Thus, there is the risk
that this operational definition of relative education might falsely take credit for many other factors that have
also been changing nationwide and affecting generations differently.
In this research note, in sum, we explore whether the important findings reported in NSJ-B regarding
the effects of relative education on civic participation are robust when a more finely tuned operational
definition of the educational environment is employed.
Are the Effects of Education Relative or Absolute?
2
Again, of course, this implementation could be tuned more finely to fit specific models of civic
competition. Our claim is merely that it is more plausible than a purely static, backward-looking model.
A close approximation to the NJ S-B measure of educational environment, measured in average
years of education is provided by edenv 9.0 +.07273*yob .O3333*(yob55)*d55, where d55 is a variable
that takes the value 1.0 where yob>55, and zero elsewhere. The equation is thus piecewise liner with a kink
at yob=55. The national average level of education thus rises by .073 for each year of birth up to 1955, and
at .04 (.073-.033) per year for years of birth after 1955, as shown in Table F3 of NJS-B (1996, 232)
3
