Social Class and Education

Global Perspectives

Lois Weis, Nadine Dolby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415886956
• eBook ISBN: 9781136813689
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Social Class and Education: Global Perspectives is the first empirically grounded volume to explore the intersections of class, social structure, opportunity, and education on a truly global scale. Fifteen essays from contributors representing the US, Europe, China, Latin America and other regions offer an unparralleled examination of how social class differences are made and experienced through schooling. By underscoring the consequences of our new global reality, this volume takes seriously the transnational migration of commerce, capital and peoples and the ramifications of such for education and social structure. Moving beyond national confines, internationally recognized scholars, Lois Weis and Nadine Dolby, offer a set of emblematic essays that break new theoretical and empirical ground on the ways class is produced and maintained through education around the world.

SECTION I Postsecondary Access, Equity, and Educational Opportunity in the Global Economy

DOI: 10.4324/9780203829202-2

1 EXPANDED OPPORTUNITIES FOR ALL IN GLOBAL HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEMS¹

Richard Arum, Adam Gamoran and Yossi Shavit

DOI: 10.4324/9780203829202-3

Introduction

Recent decades have witnessed dramatic changes in higher education systems worldwide. Many systems have experienced rapid expansion and increased diversification. In addition, given public resource constraints, many have increasingly turned to private sources of funding to support student enrollments. How have these profound changes affected inequalities in access? While inequalities could be structured with respect to a multiple broad set of factors (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, region, etc.), we are focused in this chapter on social class background. We explore the extent to which variation in system-level characteristics of education systems is associated with differences in the likelihood that individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds will be eligible and attend higher education. We examine these relationships over time and across countries to take advantage of the variation produced by shifting world-wide changes in educational systems.

Expansion and Stratification

While educational expansion is associated with many advantages, including enhancement of peoples’ general well-being and of societies’ macroeconomic development, scholars have observed that, in and of itself, expansion does not reduce class inequalities in education. Raftery and Hout (1993) have argued that inequality between any two social strata in the odds of attaining a given level of education persists until the advantaged class reaches the point of saturation. Saturation is defined as the point at which nearly all sons and daughters of relatively advantaged origins attain the educational level under consideration. Until that point, the advantaged group is typically better equipped to take advantage of any new and attractive educational opportunities, and class inequalities will persist or even increase as opportunities are expanded. Only when the privileged class reaches saturation at a given level of education, would further expansion of that level contribute to the reduction of inequality in the odds of its attendance because the privileged cannot increase their attendance rates past the 100% mark.

This hypothesis, maximally maintained inequality (MMI), is consistent with results reported by Shavit and Blossfeld (1993) who found that in most countries educational expansion did not reduce educational inequality. More recent studies (e.g., Jonsson, Mills, & Müller, 1996; Shavit & Westerbeek, 1998) found that as primary and secondary education expanded, class inequalities in their attainment declined. This result is consistent with Raftery and Hout’s argument because the middle classes have reached saturation with respect to attainment of lower educational levels. In a recent paper, Hout (2007) analyzed data for 25 nations and found that among market economies, socioeconomic inequality in overall educational attainment is inversely related to the prevalence of higher education. This is also consistent with MMI because in societies with market economies, lower levels of education tend to be saturated in the privileged strata.

Although there are also empirical exceptions to MMI (e.g., in some former state socialist societies, inequality is not related to the degree of saturation (Hout, 2006)), it is consistent with most cases and is considered a useful working hypothesis for studies of educational expansion and stratification (Hout & DiPrete, 2006).

Institutional Differentiation and Stratification

Several scholars have argued that concurrent with expansion, qualitative differentiation replaces inequalities in the quantity of education attained (e.g., Gamoran & Mare, 1989; Shavit, 1984). A well-known tenet of organization theory is that organizational growth tends to be accompanied by differentiation (Blau, 1970). Differentiation is viewed as a means to operate more efficiently by dividing “raw materials” or “clients” into more homogeneous units. Educational expansion often follows this pattern, with systems becoming more complex as greater numbers of students enroll. While differentiation is commonly regarded as a consequence of expansion, it may also contribute to expansion, as new places become available in new segments of the education system. Whereas a functionalist view suggests that differentiation allows greater efficiency (Thompson, 1967), social control theorists point out that a differentiated system of higher education preserves the elite status of those born into privilege (Brint & Karabel, 1989; Trow, 1972).

The mode of differentiation in higher education varies between countries. In some countries, tertiary education is offered primarily by a single type of institution—usually, a research university. Meek and his associates refer to this type of system as unified (Goedegebuure, Meek, Kivinen, & Rinne, 1996). Unified systems tend to be quite rigid. They are controlled by professorial elites who are not inclined to encourage expansion, either of their own universities or through the formation of new ones. Very few systems still belong to this type. In our comparative project, only the Italian and Czech higher education systems are strictly unified. Other systems consist of a mix of institutions that are stratified by prestige, resources, and selectivity of both faculty and students. A well-known example is the American system, which consists of prestigious research universities, a second tier of private and public 4-year colleges, as well as many 2-year colleges (Brown, 1995; Grodsky, 2003; Karabel, 1972). Meek and his associates refer to this type as diversified higher education (Goedegebuure et al., 1996).

Often, the second tier of tertiary education takes the form of vocational or semiprofessional training (e.g., the German Fachhochschulen). This system is labeled as binary because it consists of two main types of institutions: academic and vocational. Some diversified systems are also binary in the sense that second-tier colleges primarily provide vocational training. In other cases, vocational institutions were upgraded to university status in an attempt to transform the system from a binary to a formally unified one (e.g., Britain and Australia).

The co-occurrence of expansion and differentiation is the basis for claims that higher education expansion is primarily a process of diversion, channeling members of the working class to lower-status postsecondary opportunities in order to reserve higher-status opportunities for the elite (Brint & Karabel, 1989). Swirski and Swirski (1997) argued that as the second-tier system expands, first-tier institutions become more selective and class inequalities in access to first-tier institutions increase. An alternative view, however, is that expansion of lower-tier postsecondary education enhances opportunity by bringing into higher education students who would otherwise not have continued past secondary school (Dougherty, 1994). Furthermore, one could argue that as higher education expands, first-tier institutions must compete for students and may lower admission thresholds. According to this logic, education expansion that leads to higher overall rates of tertiary enrollments is a process of inclusion, even if expansion is accompanied by differentiation.

Tertiary Market Structure and Inequality

Many studies of the relation between educational expansion and educational stratification suffer from an important theoretical inconsistency. On the one hand, they assume that expansion is exogenous to the stratification process, and that it affects the educational opportunities available to individuals (e.g., Raftery & Hout, 1993). At the same time, these studies assume that educational expansion reflects rising individual incentives to attend school for longer periods of their life course. Some argue that incentives rise in response to changes in the occupational structure (e.g., Blau & Duncan, 1967; Treiman, 1970). Others believe that incentives rise because groups and individuals compete for access to the best jobs (Collins, 1979) or because parental expectations are such that children’s education is likely to equal or exceed that found in the prior generation (Erikson & Jonsson, 1996). Regardless of the specific mechanism, these theoretical orientations share the assumption that expansion is demand-driven; namely, that schools expand in response to growing aggregate demand by individuals for education.

Systems of higher education vary greatly in the degree to which they rely on public or private provision to support tertiary education. Furthermore, the responsiveness of education systems to consumer demand changes over time. Since the 1980s, some systems have undergone deregulation and privatization that facilitates rapid expansion in response to growing demand. In some systems private institutions aggressively stimulate and generate demand for their services through the use of promo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Social Class and Education in Globalizing Context
• Section 1 Postsecondary Access, Equity, and Educational Opportunity in the Global Economy
• Section 2 Cultural Politics, Transnational Movement, and the Role of Class
• Section 3 Class and the Changing Global Educational Context
• List of Contributors
• Index