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Session Submission Summary

The consequences of educational upgrading: persisting inequalities?

Wed, April 17, 3:15 to 4:45pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Pacific Concourse (Level -1), Pacific B

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Education has become the major determinant of social positioning, a gatekeeper for access to the labor market in all "schooled societies". Over the past 150 years, the average level of education worldwide has skyrocketed ("upgrading"). Independent of the school system - whether comprehensively organized or differentiated by achievement in tracks - the average percentage of highly qualified persons increased. This upward trend is understood as a verification of more equality of educational opportunities and a higher – better – education level of the population. In the succession of generations, it seems that new generations are better educated than former generations.

Taking up one of the main questions underlying this year’s CIES conference theme, we ask “what is the longer-term cost of an education that promises productivity, industrialization, modernity, and consumption?” Are there unintended consequences of this general positive development? And if so, who pays the price and the larger costs? Up to now, we only witness this increase in educational qualification per generation, but we don’t know the consequences – especially the unintended.
The panel asks exactly for the consequences regarding social inequalities and costs. The focus is on societies which have recently experienced or are still experiencing rapid educational expansion. We expect that several unintended phenomena characterize modern education as direct outcomes of the continuous upgrading of the education level of the population. These excesses of educational upgrading are, for example, increased competition, ranking of institutions, increased private investments, such as supplementary education or temporarily transnational migration (i.e. study abroad).

Throughout the presentations, the following core assumptions about social inequality on the changed associations between social origin, educational attainment, and social destination are put forward:
(1) Educational upgrading is an ongoing international trend with positive and negative consequences. The latter are becoming especially visible in highly educated societies. We witness new forms of social inequality, such as the expansion of private and supplementary education or greater competition among parents and students for the best training opportunities in a globalized world.
(2) Educational upgrading has a non-formal component. Beyond formal education taking place in school and university, families increasingly invest in private, non-compulsory and supplementary forms of education to not only increase their children’s absolute education level (vertical level or quantitative dimension), but more and more focus on their children’s relative education level (horizontal level or quality dimension).
(3) Educational upgrading leads to relative devaluation of educational credentials in absolute terms. As a result, the transition to the labor market has changed in the course of educational expansion in such a way that, from generation to generation, higher formal education qualifications are needed to achieve a similar status in terms of income, class, occupation, etc. Hence, as the level of vertical education of the population of a country increases (i.e., the highest level of formal education), horizontal competitive advantages (i.e., the quality of the educational degree and additional qualifications) should become more important in order to achieve favorable social placement.

In the first presentation, Wolfgang Lauterbach and Steve R. Entrich first draw on international data to recreate and visualize educational expansion and upgrading over more than 200 years. In the following, numerous common and innovative sociological and economic theoretical concepts and empirical evidence on the genesis of educational expansion and social reproduction are brought together to explain the general macro trend of educational expansion through micro level based status reproduction theories focusing on the causes and implications of increasing educational investments of families. The data and arguments indicate that there is no educational ceiling effect making ‘overeducation’ just a myth that holds only for a short period of time, at best.
In the second presentation, Steve R. Entrich focuses on one concrete outcome of educational expansion in a variety of countries: the emergence, expansion and universalization of shadow education, i.e. private, for-profit and academically oriented extra-curricular lessons outside of school, and its implications for social inequality in 63 countries using data from the 2012 PISA study. The author claims that there exist ‘systems’ of shadow education in all countries which naturally differ in terms of scale and impact on the students’ national performance, as well as how likely students of different social origin are to access these lessons. Finally, the possible impact of shadow education on social inequality is evaluated across the 63 countries.
Using the same data, the third presentation by Hyunjoon Park, Hee Jin Chung and Soo-yong Byun will then focus on the differences in student participation in commercial out-of-school classes according to the mothers’ education background. The mother’s education reflects their cultural orientation toward their children’s education. The authors show that the mother’s educational difference is found in most of the 63 countries and claim that there is a global spread of "concerted cultivation."
In the last presentation, Yasemin Soysal and Hector Cebolla Boado then shed light on Chinese university students’ study abroad activities and how this relates to unobservable selectivity that might corroborate with the findings of social inequality research. Using the Bright Futures dataset, the authors first look at how observable factors such as socioeconomic background affect students’ study abroad activities, before they look at a number of unobservable characteristics, i.e. individual traits of students (are they agentic or ambitious?). Findings show moderate to strong selection by social background, but no evidence of selection on the basis of unobservables.
In the following overall discussion, all presentations will be linked together to come to conclusions regarding the unintended and least observed consequences of educational upgrading worldwide with special emphasis on the reproduction of social inequalities.

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