The Politics of Social Mobility and Educational Expansion in Revolutionary Iran

• In Event: Nation-Building, State-Making, and Mass Schooling

Abstract

Both the winners and the losers of the 1979 Iranian revolution agreed on a set of outcomes of the new social order put in motion by the Islamic Republic: a leveling of social distinction and a shift in patterns of social mobility were irreversibly taking place. The winners believed that, through the expansion of education, Iranian society was becoming fairer and more equal. The losers believed that, through the expansion of education, the Islamic Republic was creating its own cadres and displacing the trajectory of those educated under the pre-1979 regime, the Pahlavi Monarchy. How accurate is either picture after four decades of education policy in the Islamic Republic? This paper utilizes a newly collected dataset of educational attainment across three generations of Iranians to put forward a provisional answer.

The absolute expansion of educational attainment in Iran after 1979, even through the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, is well documented. The gross enrollment ratio in tertiary education--the number of individuals enrolled in tertiary education over the total eligible university-age population of the country--stood at 19% in 1999. In 2009, it had risen to 38%, and by 2017, stood at 68%. This rapid expansion in educational credentials under post-revolutionary states is not limited to Iran, as similar cases attest in in Cuba, China, and socialist Eastern European states.

Theoretically, these rapid expansions produce contradictory effects in how education is valued and utilized as a form of status distinction. One the one hand, post-revolutionary states rapidly expand educational access in order to produce “red experts”--new cadres in technical-professional fields to staff the enlarged state apparatus with loyal expertise (Szelenyi 1979, Andreas 2009). On the other hand, pre-revolutionary forms of status distinction are repurposed by old elites in order to obtain status and prestige in the new revolutionary order (Khafaji 2006).

Using a nationally-representative survey of 5005 respondents fielded in Iran in December 2016, with questions on family history, educational attainment, participation in war, voting behavior, and other social-demographic variables, this paper will test for the relative mobility of families with high status attainment before 1979 in comparison to families with low status attainment before 1979. In doing so, we aim to contribute to the literatures on social stratification under authoritarian states as well as to unpack the theoretical relationship between state-building and educational expansion commonly posited as a key mechanism of regime durability for authoritarian states.

Author

• Kevan Harris