Participation, equality of opportunity and returns to tertiary education in contemporary Europe

ABSTRACT

The aim of the paper is to investigate the consequences of the expansion of higher education on two goals of the education system, namely promoting equity of educational opportunities and providing credentials that facilitate the matching of labour supply and demand. The first goal is typically studied by research on inequality of educational opportunity; the second by research on returns to education and credential inflation. The key idea of the paper is that educational expansion can have different and possibly opposite effects on the two goals. (a) If, with educational expansion, equality of educational opportunities increases, while the occupational value of the titles decreases, one has a trade-off scenario. For example, an increase in equality of educational opportunities is matched by a decline in the value of higher education in the labour market. (b) If equality of opportunities does not increase, despite the expansion of higher education, and the returns of higher education degrees decline, one has then a worst-off scenario. (c) Finally, if with educational expansion equality of opportunities increases and there is no credential inflation, one has a best-off scenario. In this paper, we systematically investigate these alternative scenarios. We perform the same empirical analysis on two distinct data sets in order to test the robustness of our findings. We use micro data from EU-SILC 2005 and from the five merged waves of the European Social Survey (2002–2010), covering 23 countries.

Key Words:

• tertiary education
• inequality of educational opportunities
• returns to education

Notes

1. For an analysis of the Finnish case, see Kivinen et al. (2007).

2. Higher education could also be defined in a less restrictive way, also including ISCED level 4 (post-secondary, not tertiary education). As a robustness check, we also used this definition, and results of the analyses reported below did not change qualitatively.

3. A basic property of the correlation index r is that r(Y, X) = r(Y−k, X−k). Let then ε be the measurement error due to coding procedure. The observed level of education A is then equal to the true value α plus ε, A=α + ε. If the same ε applies to the parental education and B is the observed parental education and β the true one, then r(A, B) = r(A−ε, B−ε) = r(α, β).

4. According to the aims of the paper, we use the term ‘effect’ in a descriptive sense, without postulating causality.

5. Results are presented in the Appendix (Tables A6–A14).

6. The detailed coefficients of the individual level regressions of the first step estimations by cohort and country cluster are reported in Appendix Tables A2 and A3.

7. The 0/1 rescaling does not affect the results, but it just restricts the interpretation to the actual observed values. This allows avoiding a problem related to our use of the linear probability model: without rescaling, indeed, the model would have predicted an illogical value for the constant. The results for the regressions without rescaling of the independent variable are presented in Appendix (Table A4). In both data sets a one-percentage-unit change in size of tertiary education gives a change in IEO of about 0.3 percentage units.

8. Results are available on request from the authors.

9. A formal analysis confirms this point, showing the explained variance of participation to higher education between countries to be about two times (in EU-SILC) and three times (in ESS) the corresponding explained variance within countries.

10. If one changes category of reference, substituting upper secondary education for lower secondary, the correlations are a bit lower, at−.45 (ESS) and−.43 (EU-SILC). See Appendix Table A13.

11. The regressions without rescaling are presented in Appendix Table A5. In this case the coefficients are, quite curiously, identical at − 27.1 for both data-sets.

12. The demand of highly qualified labour might foster participation at the university. However, high numbers of university graduates might also bring about an upgrading of the occupational structure and favour the creating of new highly skilled jobs. Disentangling these different causal mechanisms stands outside the ambition and possibilities of this paper.

13. ESS allows in fact, to also observe the cohort born in the 1920s, and if the country difference in tertiary participation between this cohort and the last one is regressed on the corresponding difference in IEO, the coefficient turns out to be negative. Results are available on request from the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fabrizio Bernardi

Fabrizio Bernardi is professor of Sociology at the European University Institute since 2010. Before joining the EUI he taught at the University of Bielefeld (1998–2001) and at the UNED (Madrid) between 2001 and 2010. His current research interests lie in social stratification, family and labour market dynamics.

Gabriele Ballarino

Gabriele Ballarino is professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Milan, Italy. He holds a PhD in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Trento. His current research focuses on the relation between education and the economy, at both the micro and the macro level.