More Inclusion than Diversion

March 1, 2013

More than ever before, students have a variety of ways to benefit from higher education.

High school graduates who seek further education have a choice of community colleges, 2-year campuses, online courses, 4-year public institutions and, for the very few, private colleges and universities.

UW–Madison professor of education and sociology Adam Gamoran studies expansion of access to higher education. He has found that the structure of higher education has been transformed as it has expanded.

In the United States and other economically advanced countries, expansion of access has been accompanied by differentiation. National systems that had consisted almost exclusively of research universities have developed second-tier and less-selective colleges. Much of the growth in student enrollment has been absorbed by these second-tier institutions.

Yet at the same time that students from the working class found new opportunities to enroll in higher education, the system was being hierarchically differentiated, which means that these new opportunities may have diminished value.

Does this world of expanded educational opportunity magnify inequalities in education by expanding opportunities disproportionately for those already privileged? Or does it reduce inequality by providing more opportunities for persons from disadvantaged families? Or both?

Some argue that expansion of access to higher education is a process of diversion, whereby members of the working class are diverted from elite opportunities and are channeled to positions of lower status. Others, however, argue that even lower-tier postsecondary schooling represents enhanced opportunity, so that the important effect of expansion is more inclusion.

In the book Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study (Stanford University Press, 2007), Gamoran and colleagues assess these and other propositions about the relationship between forms of higher education expansion and social stratification. In analyzing and comparing higher education systems in 15 countries, they discuss how class inequalities in access to higher education vary across systems with different levels of expansion, institutional differentiation, and practices of private versus public allocation.

Research teams in the 15 countries analyzed higher educational attainment using nationally representative data. Each team used a framework agreed upon in advance and designed to generate findings that could be compared across countries. The point of the study was to identify systematic inequalities in access to higher education across social strata. (Higher education was defined as postsecondary programs that are either academic or occupationally oriented.)

The study found that expansion of access to higher education can reduce educational inequality, but its effect is not a linear one. Rather, educational expansion tends to reduce inequality when it reaches the point at which educational attainment at a particular level is nearly universal. 
Expansion of access to higher education is associated with many advantages, including enhancement of people’s general wellbeing and of societies’ economic development. Higher education serves as a gatekeeper for professional and managerial jobs.

Yet expansion often includes a  kind of qualitative differentiation that replaces inequalities in the quantity of education attained. Some higher education systems consist of a mix of institutions stratified by prestige, resources, and selectivity. The American system, for example, consists of a first tier of prestigious research universities, a second tier of private and public 4-year colleges, and a third tier of 2-year colleges. In diversified systems like that in the United States eligibility rates and attendance rates tend to be higher than in binary systems. Binary systems, as found in Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere, combine academic higher education with second-tier programs that are occupationally oriented. In other words, diversified systems are more inclusive. A larger proportion of the population is eligible for higher education and goes on to attend. Inequality occurs at a lower rate. 
As one might expect, private sector funding is associated with inequality in higher education. Gamoran and colleagues found support for the proposition that reliance on private sources of funding is conducive to greater differentiation. In systems with a high degree of private funding, the mode of differentiation is more likely to be diversified than binary.

However, privatization of financial sources of support for higher education can be beneficial to a point. In so far as private funding increases general levels of educational attendance, it reduces inequality of access. Controlling for this expansion, however, we see that increased reliance on private sources of funding tends to magnify inequality of access. Taken as a whole, privatization is associated with larger higher education systems and similar aggregate levels of inequality overall.

The study found no significant relation between private funding and attendance in higher education when attendance was considered only for the subset of the cohort that was eligible. This finding suggests that where higher education is largely funded by private sources, it expands through the adoption of lenient eligibility criteria. The researchers also suggest that in highly privatized systems class inequalities may reflect family differences in the ability to pay tuition fees.

Policy implications

One report has emphasized that expansion in higher education enables the privileged classes to retain their relative edge in the process of educational stratification (see “Persistent Inequality: Changing Educational Attainment in Thirteen Countries,” by Shavit and Blossfield, 1993). 

Yet Gamoran’s interpretation is different. The expanding pie is increasingly inclusive, even when relative advantages for some are preserved, because it extends a valued good to a broader spectrum of the population. Educational expansion is an equalizing force and diversification is not inconsistent with inclusion.

For more, see Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study. The book details trends in inequality of enrollment in higher education in 15 countries and examines the relation between privatization and inequality.