The Mismatch between Level of Education and Job Qualifications: A Source of Mistrust and Intolerance Depending on National Context?

This article is just one contribution to the wider investigation into what education does to society.1 Its aim is to examine education systems against the background of what can be described, very broadly, as social cohesion (Green et al., 2003). There is no agreement on the definition of this multidimensional notion, with its hazy boundaries. Thus it can be measured in terms of equality and social mobility or of crime levels, cultural conflict, gender equality, civility and democracy. It may also be defined in terms of its basic components: (i) a feeling of trust, (ii) a feeling of belonging, and (iii) themanifestation of these feelings in objective behaviours, as Chan and Chan (2006) argue. Another difficulty in grasping the notion of social cohesion lies in the confusion of different levels of analysis: social cohesion is amacro-level phenomenon and is not simply the sum of its individual components (Green and Janmaat, 2011). When it comes to analysing the role of education in social cohesion, the relationship between themicro- and macro-effects is not always straightforward: for example, an increase in an individual’s level of education reduces his or her risk of involvement in criminal activity, whereas the countries with the highest levels of education are not necessarily those with the lowest crime levels. At the macro-level, the comparative analyses carried out by Green et al. (2003, 2006) have already revealed the correlations between education, in the broad sense, and indicators of social cohesion (social unrest, crime, civil liberties, etc.).