https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4793-6901
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ABSTRACT
There is evidence that the increase of educational and social mobility that characterised the middle decades of the twentieth century slowed down at the turn of this century, in spite of persistent expansion of higher education. At the same time, income inequality and welfare retrenchment increased. Applying a two-stage design to a merge of individual level-data from the PIAAC-Survey of Adult Skills (OECD) and country-level data on educational expansion, income inequality and regime of higher education finance drawn from different sources, we test the relative importance of these three factors in the explanation of equality of opportunities of university graduation by social origin. We select individuals who were 25–45 years old in the survey year. Our two-stage design shows a negligible role of higher education expansion, whereas income inequality and the regime of higher education finance are more consequential in explaining cross-national differences in opportunities of university graduation by social origin. Inequality of university graduation by social origin is significantly increased with income inequality and reduced in systems of tertiary education characterised by low fees and high subsidies provided to students.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the attendants of the Permanent Research Seminar of the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology of the Spanish Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) for their comments to an earlier draft of this paper. We are also grateful to Ellu Saar, Silke Schneider and Dieter Verhaest for their expert comments on the system of higher education of Estonia, Belgium and Germany, respectively. Finally, we appreciate the support provided by Francesco Avvisati (OECD), François Keslair (OECD), Vanessa Denis (OECD) and Andrea Forster (University of Amsterdam) with the weighting of the data from PIAAC – Survey of Adult Skills.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Code and data availability
The datasets analyzed during the current study are publicly available on the website of the OECD Skills Surveys (https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/) under the form of Public Use Files (PUF) in the following link: https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/data/ The specific dataset employed for the analysis and the Stata syntax files containing the code used to run the analyses are publicly available at https://osf.io/tkpn6/
Ethics approval
Not applicable.
Notes
1 As revealed by calculations based on our own analysis of the microdata of the Survey of Adult Skills.
2 These individuals were born between 1966–75 or 1969–78 depending on the timing of the fieldwork.
3 These individuals were born between 1976–85 or 1979–88 depending on the timing of the fieldwork.
4 See Schneider (Citation2010) for problems of validity of the ISCED classification for cross-national research. See also Schneider (Citation2018) for assessment of the ISCED classification for the PIAAC study.
5 We chose age 26 as a common age to measure country-level variables because it is the average age of first graduation from tertiary education across the OECD countries in our analysis. We had to make a compromise about graduation age that works for all countries because using different graduation ages for each country would have resulted in comparing different time periods for each country. We believe assuming a common graduation age for all countries does not have severe implications for our results. Each graduation cohort covers several years, and the country-level variables are averaged for all the years included in each graduation cohort. This entails that inaccuracies in assigning a country value to an individual based on the assumed age of graduation can be compensated by averaging country values across years as far as those years belong to the same graduation cohort as the one we assume the individual belongs to.
6 This evolution of income inequality in rich countries, and the recent change from the late 1970s onwards, can be graphically represented in the “Within-country inequality in rich countries” offered by Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality#within-country-inequality-in-rich-countries, (last consulted: January 5th. 2023).
7 Calculated for the 18–23 age group, the gross enrolment ratio in higher education is the ratio of enrolment in higher education to the population in the eligible group.
8 For a reflection about the differences between inequality of opportunities and inequality of outcomes, see Swift (Citation2004) or Breen (Citation2010).
9 Results are available upon request.
10 Gini (disposable income, post taxes and transfers). Income Distribution Database. Retrieved 10 July 2019 from https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=IDD
11 S80/S20 disposable income quintile share. Income Distribution Database. Retrieved 1 February 2021 from https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=IDD
12 The comparison of the same level of educational attainment in two different age groups as a way of approaching educational expansion is a standard procedure both in international reports (OECD Citation2013 (Figure c., p. 58), 2015 (Chart A1.2, p. 33) and academic research (see for instance, Müller and Wolbers Citation2003; Bernardi and Ballarino Citation2014).
13 The raw data for this indicator was obtained from the indicator “Tertiary attainment for age group 25–64 (as a percentage of the population in that age group)”. The data source differs for the different years. For years 1991-2005, data was obtained from the OECD Factbook 2005. Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics, page 195. For year 2009, data were obtained from the OECD Factbook 2012. For year 2011, data come from the OECD Factbook 2014, page 195. Yearly issues of the OECD Factbook can be found here: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/oecd-factbook_18147364.
14 The tracking index is based on age of first selection into different educational tracks, number of tracks for 15 years old and proportion of curriculum that is tracked (Bol and Van der Werfhost Citation2013).
15 The Survey of Adult Skills follows a standard complex sampling design that was adapted in each participant country. This design requires the use of survey weights to get reliable estimates of the population (Mohadjer et al. Citation2013: ch. 15). We apply the survey weights according to the OECD guidelines to account for all these sources of bias through the ‘repest’ package developed for Stata to account for the complex structure of the sample and to apply replicate weights (Avvisati and Keslair Citation2014).
16 Results are available upon request.
17 The Austrian Education System. Retrieved 29 June 2021 from https://www.bildungssystem.at/en/