Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study (review)

It is common to challenge the assumption that higher education expansion leads to greater equality on the grounds that what really happens is that the underprivileged get tracked into low-status institutions, thus preserving higher-status institutions for the socially privileged. Hence, social differences are allegedly maintained.

It is also common to portray the introduction of tuition as a regressive measure exacerbating differences in educational opportunity between the privileged and the less privileged. Hence, tuition is widely thought to handicap the poor. Though intuitively compelling, the universality of these generalizations has never been tested.

This book is likely to serve as a watershed. It represents the first incorporation of labor market datasets from 15 countries (Israel, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland, Australia, the Czech Republic, and Italy) to test a common set of propositions. U.S. data were drawn from the National Labor Survey (NLS)—72, High School and Beyond (HS & B) and the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS). From each country, the data sets were roughly parallel. The surveys involved a total of over 420,000 respondents drawn from the five generations since World War II. As far as possible, theories were tested over time within the same country as well as across countries.

It would be tempting to limit the discussion of this book to the compelling overview drafted by the editors. However, the 15 country-specific chapters each contain up-to-date detail on the organizational arrangement, size, regulation, administration, funding, and recent reforms in each country. In addition, each chapter contains a full statistical description of the changes in higher education (a) eligibility, (b) entry, and (c) entry into the elite tier of universities and provides new information on each of these important issues.

It is the overview chapter, however, which elevates this book from being simply interesting to being important. Higher education systems are categorized in several new ways, first by categories of heterogeneity. There are unitary systems (Italy and the Czech Republic) where all higher education institutions are identical in structure and purpose. There are binary systems (Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Russia, and Switzerland) where higher education institutions are distinguished by academic and vocational purposes. And there are diversified systems (Taiwan, the United States, Sweden, Korea, Japan, and Israel) where higher education institutions differ dramatically in quality, prestige, and selectivity of both faculty and students.

The study also differentiates higher education systems by the degree of their "privatization." Privatization is defined as the portion of higher education finance derived from sources other than the government. The study further differentiates countries in their definition of eligibility for higher education, dividing those who attain eligibility with a secondary school certificate based on an examination (Italy, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Russia, and Switzerland) from those that allow eligibility on the basis of having completed a course of study (Sweden, Netherlands, Australia, the United States, the Czech Republic, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan).

The authors note that, over the course of the study period, the rate of eligibility increased from 35 to 80%; attendance at higher education institutions increased from 20 to 40%, and attendance in Tier 1 universities increased by 200%. The first question asked was whether expansion reduces inequality in a linear fashion or whether inequality is reduced only after a point of "saturation"—the point at which all children from advantaged origins have already entered higher education. The authors found that, in five countries, inequality is reduced with expansion; in nine countries inequality does not decline until saturation has occurred, and, in one, expansion was associated with an increase in inequality. In almost every country, inequality dropped after saturation. They therefore concluded that expansion can attenuate inequality but that its effect is not linear.

Does expansion occur in all higher education systems equally? The answer appears unambiguous: The greatest expansion is associated with differentiated, not binary or unitary, systems...