Social inequality in access to higher education: grade inflation in private schools and the ineffectiveness of compensatory education

Abstract

Access to higher education is affected by inequalities worldwide. Here we present a longitudinal study based on large databases of scores in upper secondary education and access to higher education in Portugal. Our findings show how access to higher education builds on and reinforces social inequalities: (1) private, fee-paying secondary schools inflate their students’ scores; (2) this inflation unfairly improves their chances of accessing higher education; (3) the Portuguese national compensatory education programme is ineffective in bridging the gap in academic performance between the less privileged and the rest of the schools. This study, then, provides further insights into how the upper classes are disproportionately benefited by the massification of higher education. To achieve greater equity, issues such as the State supervision of grading practices, the assessment and reconfiguration of compensatory education programmes, and the admission process into higher education have to be addressed.

Keywords:

• Social inequality
• educational inequality
• access to higher education
• grade inflation
• compensatory education

Notes

1. The TEIP programme consists of a set of positive discrimination measures aimed at the enhancement of academic trajectories and results, the reduction of early school leaving, the improvement of the transition from the school to the labour market, and the fostering of schools as active cultural agents in the communities in which they are located. This study deals exclusively with the improvement of academic results.

2. The official Ministry of Education’s webpage from where the databases were retrieved is no longer available (http://www.dgidc.min-edu.pt/jurinacionalexames/index.php?s=directorio&pid=4).

The new Ministry’s webpage only contains the databases from the school year 2003/2004 onwards. Currently (March of 2016), these databases are available at http://www.dge.mec.pt/estatisticas. Databases from the school years 2002/2003 and before can be requested from the authors.

3. Data for 2012 (Graph 3) is available at http://www.dges.mctes.pt/coloc/2012/. Data for 2013 (Graph 4) is available at http://www.dges.mctes.pt/coloc/2013/. Data for 2014 (Graph 4) is available at http://www.dges.mctes.pt/coloc/2014/.

4. For example, in 2013, the list ranks 1122 higher education courses. Of these, in 559 courses demand of places exceeded the number of places available. Of these 559, we then selected the top ten courses to represent the fourth quartile, the courses ranked from position 138 to 147 to represent the third quartile, from 280 to 289 to represent the second quartile, and from 419 to 428 to represent the first quartile.

5. The official Ministry of Education’s webpage from where the databases were retrieved is no longer available (http://www.dgidc.min-edu.pt/jurinacionalexames/index.php?s=directorio&pid=4).

The new Ministry’s webpage only contains the databases from the school year 2003/2004 onwards. Currently (March of 2016), these databases are available at http://www.dge.mec.pt/estatisticas. Databases from the school years 2002/2003 and before can be requested from the authors.