THE global perception that ‘trust’ is a dirty word is presently gaining momentum and credence. This is happening largely because people use trust as a concept without bothering to present it in a way that it can be measured. Without measurement, it becomes difficult to assess the quantity and quality of trust, and is problematic to determine specific trust.  Many applications present trust as ‘general’ and not ‘specific’. Once trust is general and not presented in a measurable way, the goal of achieving trust and solving the problem in question become improbable.
For this reason, in this fragile world of today where it has become so easy to lose your job and career; where it is hard to make ends meet; where there is hardly any real experiences of childhood and adolescence; where nurturing the family is fast slipping away; and where Gemeinschaft is now a thing of the past, it is hardly surprising that people have little trust in almost anything that remains a contributor to their vulnerability.

Apparently, a growing number of people worldwide mistrust trust, as problems remain unresolved. Nonetheless, this happens mainly because they remain wedded to a general trust that is not measurable. And, therefore, at the endpoint, trust is unable to deliver the goods.
And this mistrust tears into the ranks of young people, too, wherever they are; nevertheless, not a mistrust of general trust (as indicated in the previous sections), but a mistrust of a specific trust.
How so? Look at the education system in many developing areas, and observe what it produces. For some time now, the world has been experiencing education inflation. In economics, inflation refers to a situation where the general prices are increasing, and where the dollar buys less. This meaning of inflation in economics is no different in education. In education inflation, credentials value less. For example, the bachelor’s degree has less value today when compared to some years ago, as to what its worth was and what it could do for your career. Many young people’s dreams today are shattered as a result of education inflation.

Their reasoning is that after four years of university life and becoming a graduate, acquiring jobs should be easy. There are two problems with this reasoning. One, jobs are not easy to come by in both the developed and the developing worlds. Two, many first degree graduates globally have to contend with jobs that underutilise their skills. For those young graduates affected in this way, It is hardly likely that their belief in the education institution would be the same as when they started as an undergraduate.
And in this regard, as they question their university’s capacity to deliver the goods for them, their distrust of the education institution now becomes a factor in their lives. And their mistrust in their alma mater has begun to have a carry-over effect to other institutions, including politics, on which the foundation of a young graduate’s career heavily depends.
Graduates experiencing education inflation see politics as untrustworthy, thereby reducing their political consumption (political buy-in) as, interest in political matters, voting, and political institutions’ lack of efficacy in removing the ills of society.  Let me add that adults also experience education inflation and hold jobs that underutilise their sills. For these reasons, they also mistrust the institutions in the political economy. And let us not believe that the foundation for this mistrust is education inflation alone.
This Perspective wants to highlight the use of ‘domain-specific trust’ (measurable trust), which means that we could trust a government with one thing, but not another; we could trust private sector agencies with one thing, but not another; and we could trust civil society with one thing, but not another.
For these reasons, domain-specific trust can better explain the connection between trust and political consumption than some general sense of trust (Berlin, 2011). The implication of the use of domain-specific trust in the case of education inflation among a large group of a population is that this population will not invest politically in any government, if education inflation remains unchecked. In other words, this group’s domain-specific trust in education as well as its political buy-in will be low.
In this example of education inflation, while people may show distrust for a government in the education domain, this same group may express trust  on health matters toward the same government. In other words, the group has low political consumption for education, but demonstrates a better political consumption for health.  A Swedish national survey in 2009 showed that people rarely evaluate a government’s total performance, in order to establish trust and political buy-in; people frequently ‘sus out’ their political consumption in a government vis-à-vis domain-specific trust.
For this reason, a society where people experience perpetual education inflation will show low trust and low political ‘buy-in’ toward any government with responsibility for education. Low trust and limited political buy-in also will happen in areas other than education, where people experience perpetual delays in removing ills pertaining to those domains.