The Dispersion of Financial Resources in Higher Education Systems: Comparing the Structural Stratification of Universities in 22 Countries

• In Event: Higher Education, Beliefs and Ethics

Proposal

1. Introduction

Explosive growth during the 20th century rendered national higher education systems more differentiated and stratified than ever before (Arum, Gamoran, & Shavit, 2007; Bastedo & Gumport, 2003). Despite this well-known trend, few have sought to empirically map cross-national trends in the stratification of higher education systems, with scholars (e.g., Bloch & Mitterle, 2017; Brankovic, 2018; Authors, 2016) continuing to rely instead on more impressionistic accounts of how systems themselves are stratified. Only a small group of studies have systematically examined disparities among universities using cross-national data (Boliver, 2015; Authors, 2012; Halffman & Leydesdorff, 2010; Raffe & Croxford, 2015), with most studies in this genre focusing on single nations (e.g., Brint & Carr, 2017; Cheslock & Shamekhi, 2020; Jeon & Kim, 2018; Kivinen & Rinne, 1991; Lau & Rosen, 2015; Wu, 2015).

2. Research Objectives

This study performs what is – to our knowledge – the most extensive and in-depth analysis of the ‘structural stratification’ of universities, defined as the unequal distribution of resources or prestige among a nations’ universities and colleges. Our work precisely measures financial inequality across universities using a series of consequential inequality measures and data visualization techniques that surpass the conventional approach used in previous studies. Our data includes financial information on 3745 universities in the following 22 countries: Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States.

With an expanded scope of higher education systems and diverse set of financial measures, this paper tackles two key sets of research questions. First, to what extent does structural stratification vary cross-nationally? More specifically, which countries exhibit the lowest and highest levels of stratification? Second, which revenue streams emerge as key drivers of financial stratification among universities? In other words, which revenue sources (if any) emerge as prominent contributors to structural stratification?

3. Methods

Our approach to measuring structural stratification mirrors prior empirical work (Authors, 2012), and compares differences in core revenue and expenditure metrics across all four-year, degree-granting universities in each country in 2015. For income and expenditures, we assess the following broader categories of revenues and expenditures for comparability reasons: 1) Government Contributions; 2) Tuition Income; 3) Other Income; 4) Total Income; and 5) Total Expenditures. To assess system-level inequalities in financial resources, we first calculate descriptive statistics and graph these summary measures with side-by-side boxplots. Second, we calculate Gini coefficients and visualize these measures with Lorenz curves. Third, to further compare and assess the robustness of our Gini coefficients, we calculate quintile ratios and Theil’s entropy measure. Finally, we explore the bivariate relationships between our Ginis and country-level Gini coefficients calculated by the World Bank as well as country-level social mobility indicators using scatterplots and lowess smoothers.

4. Results and Contributions

Our expansive scope of countries and robust set of analyses provide much-needed comparative evidence to assess the extent to which national higher education systems vary in their levels of ‘structural stratification.’ Overall, our findings contribute in two key ways.

A first important contribution of our study is that it provides a first objective measurement of financial stratification through which existing impressionistic accounts can be evaluated. On the one hand, our results confirm the perceived “steepness” or “flatness” of various national university sectors. Most notably, the U.S. – as typically assumed – proved highly stratified regardless of the type of proxy or method used. In addition, we witnessed a set of national university sectors, including those in Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, and Ireland, as well as – to a lesser extent – Norway, which exhibited relatively lower levels of stratification that closely align with assumptions in the literature. On the other hand, our analyses produce several findings which are inconsistent with impressionistic accounts. Most notably, the U.K., which is ritually presented alongside the U.S. as an example of highly stratified system, did not always live up to its reputation. By the same token, there were a set of nations that exhibited moderate levels of stratification, including Canada, Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania (public), Sweden and Slovakia. Some of these nations either have a reputation for being more egalitarian than their neighbors, or have been entirely ignored in the literature. However, in numerous scenarios, these countries are seen to lag only slightly behind – or at times exceed – measured degrees of stratification in the U.S.

This pattern of findings leads us to conclude that impressionistic accounts of the stratification of universities in many nations – even those we have produced ourselves in recent years (e.g., Authors, 2022) – can vary in unexpected ways from empirical reality, rendering them unreliable heuristic devices for both theorizing cross-national differences, as well for the strategic development of comparative research designs, as done in several studies (e.g., Authors 2020; Mullen et al., 2021; Kremer-Sadlik, Izquierdo, & Fatigante, 2010). Whenever possible, it is thus imperative to empirically ground taken-for-granted assumptions about the hierarchical structures of national university sectors.

A second noteworthy contribution made by our study is that it demonstrates that “other” income is typically the most stratified financial metric, far more so than student tuition or government sources of income. Further, we observe that other income sources tend to generate more extreme outliers than other forms of university income. This finding is generally robust to the country studied or statistical technique used. We theorize that this is due to the uneven ground on which universities are forced to compete in this new marketized environment, with older and better resourced universities being able to leverage their powerful legacies (Clark, 1972), networks of affluent alumni (Holmes, 2009), and pre-existing infrastructure in lucrative fields like medicine, engineering, and the natural sciences (Altbach, 2007), to out-compete their peers for non-government sources of funding. As such, in identifying the stratified nature of other income, our study sheds light on a process that plays an inequality maximizing function within higher education.

Authors

• David Zarifa, Nipissing University

• Roger Pizarro Milian, The University of Toronto

• Scott Davies, University of Toronto