The worldwide expansion of access to higher education.

• In Event: Equitable access to higher education

Proposal

Absolute, gross, and net enrollments in education are undoubtedly expanding globally. This expansion in turn builds up a consistent narrative of success in terms of inclusiveness and equality. In this paper, however, I show that the connection of expansion and inclusiveness might not be this obvious; especially for later education levels. By taking a closer look at the rate of students actually transferring between educational levels this paper readdresses questions on education expansion and inequality in a historic and global perspective.
We can metaphorically describe the education system as a funnel structure, in which progress is constituted by transitions from one level to the next. Students need to pass the funnel from primary education (PE) to secondary education (SE) and then to higher education (HE). My contribution zooms in on these points of transition and estimates the proportion of students that continue to stay enrolled in the next education level. I will utilize an original dataset depicting continuation rates and thus allow for a more differentiated narrative of global and historic expansion of education. I contend that enrollment ratios are focused on giving information on the advancement of the overall (educational) human capital. In contrast, continuation rates give evidence on how permeable specific transition points to higher education levels are. Thus the latter provide information on the selectivity and the state of the allocative function of education systems. In this paper, I evaluate what determines the width of the funnels at the transition points. In other words, what influences the development of the rate of students continuing from PE to SE and from SE to HE?
Data showing a general expansion of education are mostly estimated as a percentage of current students on the (school) population, commonly known as enrollment ratios. Retrospective approaches, in contrast, consider educational attainment as percentage of graduates of the adult population. Normalizing on the (school age) population, however, does not properly consider the funnel-like structure of transitions between education levels. For enrollment in SE one needs to finish PE first. For participation in HE one needs to pass through SE. Therefore, to focus on the access to education levels, this paper uses the percentage of students that continue to being enrolled in the next educational level. Indeed, we find that in particular the continuation rate to HE stayed rather stagnant for most of the 20th century and only recently experiences an increase in a number of countries. Hence, as enrollments have increased remarkably we see a different evolution considering broad access to education.
This paper sets out to find possible reasons for cross-country and cross-temporal variance in continuation rates. Accordingly it uses fixed effects panel regression on a set of over 200 countries from 1960 onwards to test theories on the expansion of education access. In reference to notions of Maximally and Effectively Maintained Inequality (Hout 2006), I assume that as long as enrollment in an educational level is limited – especially for HE – the proportion of students that will continue to that level is limited as well. On the other hand, once enrollments have grown, and thus lose their appeal to elites, selectivity rapidly declines and continuation rates increase. Continuation from one to the next educational level, I argue, is as much a function of the demand side – hinted at above – as it is a function of the supply side; that is government offers of and interests in students continuing. Hence, I implore recent developments in the research on the political economy of education expansion. This is particularly relevant for HE, since here the classical interest structure of party families is actually reversed. In fact, the reasoning goes that left wing parties should have no interest in state led education expansion, while right wing parties should (Ansell 2008). This interest structure, however, is dependent on the existing enrollment ratio. In fact, it switches at a specific point: when enrollment is high, left wing parties aim for higher subsidization and enrollment, because in this context lower class children can benefit from the expansion in education opportunities. Right-wing parties, on the other hand, would want to move to less subsidization and limits to expansion (Ansell 2008, S. 206).
Using these two distinct, yet interconnected, theories as the starting point this paper will quantitatively analyze the global development of continuation rates from both a supply and a demand angle. Using a global data base I intend to offer new insights in the expansion of access to education. Therefore, my analysis speaks to the literature on education expansion through a) explicating the expansionary developments going beyond enrollment ratios and focusing on the access to educational levels; and b) through testing different influences on the development of continuation rates in a cross-national and cross-temporal way.

Author

• Fabian Besche-Truthe, University Bremen