Between Beliefs and Truth: A Cross-National Study of Individuals’ Trust in Universities and the Church

• In Event: A Comparative Perspective of Internationalization and University Mission

Proposal

In today’s world, universities are navigating unprecedented challenges. Globally, academic freedom is under threat (Lerch et al., 2024), constraining scholars’ ability to pursue knowledge freely. In countries such as China, Hungary, and Turkey, governments have tightened control over academics and curricula, seeking to align the knowledge produced by universities with state-approved ideologies (Kovács & Spannagel, 2024). Higher education institutions in the U.S. are likewise grappling with increasing political pressure, including restrictions on teaching and research in certain topics like race and gender, as well as efforts to limit diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives on campus. At the same time, rising tuition costs have long imposed significant financial burdens on students, and declining public investment in higher education may further exacerbate these challenges for students and institutions alike.

Partly reflecting these structural shifts, public perceptions of higher education have also changed dramatically over the last decade. For example, in the 2023 Gallup poll, Americans’ confidence in higher education dropped to 36 percent, down from 57 percent in 2015. Although confidence slightly increased to 42 percent in 2025, the overall trend and recent public discourse point to a notable decline in trust towards universities and increasing skepticism about the perceived value of higher education. In alignment with the CIES 2026’s theme on “Re-examining Education and Peace in a Divided World”, this paper proposes a comparative analysis of public trust in universities across 50 countries, with particular attention to the factors associated with these trends.

Existing literature on trust in higher education largely focuses on small-N case studies, particularly in Western contexts, and economic or political factors associated with the perceived value of universities (Gibbs & Maassen, 2022). For instance, in the case of the U.S., politically conservatives, individuals who perceive a conflict between scientific and religious values, and members of certain religious groups are less likely to report strong confidence in higher education (Johnson & Peifer, 2017). Using a longitudinal dataset from the General Social Survey, Miner (2020) finds that confidence in education (more generally) declined between 1973 and 2018 in the U.S., and college-educated individuals are growingly less confident in education over time. The author partly attributes this trend to an increasing cost of higher education and uncertainty with unemployment, but further argues that individuals’ perception of education may be informed by their subjective experiences with the system rather than simply the material benefits attained from higher education. Our study builds on these studies and uniquely extends them by incorporating cases beyond the West/U.S. and analyzing both individual-level and societal-level factors to understand the cross-national variation in public trust in higher education.

Our theoretical framework also builds on prior work linking the worldwide expansion of higher education with the rising dominance of scientific knowledge in the second half of the twentieth century (Drori et al., 2002; Schofer & Meyer, 2005). As tertiary enrollment worldwide quadrupled from 10 percent in 1970 to 40 percent in 2020 (World Development Indicators, 2025), science also gained legitimacy as a rationalized and authoritative form of knowledge that dictated many aspects of society, ranging from engineering, infrastructure, food safety to health and education. While earlier universities developed out of religious and bureaucratic roots, modern universities emerged as central institutions for producing and disseminating scientific knowledge, establishing credible “facts” and “truth” about the world, and creating a knowledge society (Baker & Powell, 2024). In this sense, universities in the modern age can be understood as quasi-religious institutions that channel the faith in science, such that public trust in higher education may be closely intertwined with belief in science (Frank et al., 2024).

Given this theoretical orientation, our analysis focuses on the factors shaping cross-national patterns of individuals’ trust in universities, while also comparing them to trust in a contrasting institution: the church. Whereas modern universities are understood as scientific and secular institutions that produce rationalized knowledge, the church represents older religious and spiritual authorities whose legitimacy has declined over the course of history. Contrary to the common perceptions that religiosity contradicts science and the expectation that more religious individuals would be more distrustful of universities as embodying scientific values, existing studies illustrate that the relationship is not necessarily simple (Scheitle, et al., 2017). Moreover, individuals’ trust in universities may be shaped by distinct mechanisms at the individual and societal levels (Kamens, 1977; Miner, 2020).

To examine these dynamics, we draw on data from the World Values Survey (WVS), a large-scale cross-national survey of individual beliefs and attitudes. The WVS asks respondents about their confidence in a range of institutions, including universities and the church (or organized religion, depending on local contexts). Using this as the dependent variable in multilevel mixed-effects linear regression, with individuals nested within countries, we analyze both individual-level and country-level independent variables. Preliminary results indicate that individuals’ education, religiosity, faith in science, and employment status are positively associated with individuals’ trust in universities. By contrast, countries’ overall level of education (measured by tertiary enrollment) shows no significant association with trust, highlighting the distinction between individual- and societal-level processes. An unexpected finding is that more religious individuals tend to express higher trust in not only the church but also in universities—suggesting that religious values do not necessarily contradict trust in education.

Despite the advantages of having large number of survey responses from more than 50 countries, a key limitation is that the specific variable on confidence in universities is only available in the two most recent waves (Wave 6: 2010-2014 and Wave 7: 2017-2022). This limits our ability to assess long-term changes or achieve complete country coverage. Moreover, the survey does not capture the precise rationales behind respondents’ confidence (or lack thereof). Nonetheless, we argue that responses to these confidence items are useful proxies for the perceived legitimacy of universities and the church in different national contexts during a contemporary era. Taken together, the study sheds light on the drivers of public trust in higher education at a moment of turbulence and uncertainty about the future of both education and what constitutes trustful knowledge.

Authors

• Minju Choi, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)

• Yasemin Soysal, WZB Berlin Social Science Center

• Julia Lerch, University of California, Irvine