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Abstract
A comparative analysis of how access and equity are defined and how policies
have evolved reveals a number of commonalities and differences between
countries.The overall trend is a movement from the priority given to inherited
merit in the admission process through a commitment to formal equality,
towards the application of some modes of affirmative action for selected underrepresented groups. This overall convergence, which is accompanied by a
growing appreciation of the complexity of social identities, is complemented by
significant national specificity in respect of the social categories which are used
to define social diversity. In the absence of appropriate comparative measures of
participation a Higher Education Participation Index is developed to facilitate
cross-country comparisons. A review of current attempts to measure equity in
access to higher education points to the need to develop a programme of
comparative research which focuses on the social characteristics of students who
are currently enrolled in higher education.
Introduction
One of the defining features of the closing decades of the 20th century
has been the massive growth in post-compulsory education. Between
1970 and 2000, globally, average enrolments in secondary education
increased by 180 per cent while over the same period, enrolments in
tertiary nearly quadrupled (Gradstein and Nikitin, 2004). By 2000, the
number of tertiary students had grown to 100 million, and the World
Bank (2000) predicts that this will rise to 150 million by 2025.
This increase cannot simply be explained by demographic pressure
but reflects the impact of concerted government economic and social
2007 The Authors. Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600
Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4, 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148,
USA.
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139
140
141
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least ambiguous measures and indeed at national level they provide the
best lens by which we monitor change as evidenced by our own work
over two decades (Clancy, 2001). However, it is no longer possible to use
entry data in comparative studies. The problem arises from the distinction which the OECD makes between Type A and Type B higher
education.The former refers to programmes that are largely theoretically
based and designed to provide qualifications for entry into advanced
research programmes and professions with high skill requirements while
Type B programmes are more occupationally oriented, typically of
shorter duration, and lead to direct labour market access. The OECD
correctly cautions users of their statistics that since some students who
enter Type B may enter Type A at a later period and since it is possible
that the same student may be enrolled simultaneously on both
programmes, the two entry rates cannot be added together to obtain
overall entry rates.Thus, aside from the data provided by three countries
that only make available a single rate (the USA, Australia and Finland),
we have no overall measure of entry into higher education, which we can
use for international comparisons.
Thus, we must rely on enrolment data and output measures to
develop comparative indicators. Following an extensive analysis of these
data, the details of which we cannot report here (Clancy, 2006), we have
selected five indictors, which, in combination, provide a robust measure
of the rate of participation in higher education. Three of these are
enrolment measures and two are output measures. The first enrolment
measure is the Gross Enrolment Rate, based on the number of students
enrolled, regardless of age, expressed as a percentage of the population
. . . in the 5-year age group following on from the secondary school
leaving age (UNESCO, 2005, p. 149).While still used by UNESCO, this
measure is no longer used by OECD since one of its limitations is that
the age range of the enumerator does not correspond with that of the
denominator. The second enrolment measure, the Sum of Age Specific
Enrolments is the most comprehensive measure, a variant of which is used
by the OECD to calculate higher education expectancy the number of
years a 5-year-old can expect to enrol over his or her lifetime.3 Our third
enrolment measure, Enrolment Intensity, is based on the average enrolment rate for the two years of age with the highest enrolment. This
measure might be thought of as a proxy for entry rates since it takes
particular account of the all those who experience some higher education, many perhaps on short cycle programmes. We also include two
output measures: the percentage of the population aged 2534 and those
aged 3544 with higher education. These data are widely available and
2007 The Authors. Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
144
reflect the output of the higher education system in recent years and are
preferred to graduation rates, which are not available for many countries.
The distribution of scores on each of these measures for 27 OECD
countries (Canada, Japan and Luxembourg are excluded because of
missing data) is shown in Table 1. To arrive at single summary measure
we standardise the scores on each of the five indicators out of 100 before
being added; the resultant sum is divided by 5, to give a score out of 100.
Korea, Finland and the USA score highest on this index of
participation. Other countries to be included in the top one-third are
Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Australia, Greece and New Zealand. It is of
interest to note that this top one-third is drawn from four continents.The
middle group of countries on this ranking are all European countries,
with the UK occupying the middle position in the ranking, with
Denmark, Spain, France and Ireland having slightly higher scores and
The Netherlands, Iceland, Poland and Switzerland having slightly lower
scores. In our 27-country comparison, Turkey and Mexico have the
lowest participation rates followed by the Slovak and Czech Republics.
Five Western European countries make up the remainder of the bottom
third; these are in ascending order: Austria, Portugal, Italy, Hungary and
Germany. A feature of Table 1 is that in addition to providing an overall
measure of participation, the scores on the separate indicators highlight
distinctive features of the higher education system in different countries.
For example, while the USA scores highly on all indicators, it has the
highest percentage of those aged 3544 with higher education, reflecting
the earlier expansion of higher education. In contrast, the overall ranking
of Poland, Greece and Ireland reflects their relatively high score on
enrolment intensity, pointing to high levels of current enrolment among
the younger age groups.
Measuring equity in access to higher education
One of the most frequently quoted generalisations in research into
post-compulsory education is that expansion has not significantly
reduced social class inequalities in access to higher education. Perhaps
the strongest empirical support for this thesis comes from the comparative 13-country research project reported by Shavit and Blossfeld (1993)
who conclude that only two countries, Sweden and The Netherlands,
have achieved a significant equalisation among socio-economic groups.
This conclusion is based on an analysis of relative chances of different
social groups attaining a specific educational level. While, in most countries, students from working class backgrounds have increased their
2007 The Authors. Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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49
61
36
67
86
56
51
68
51
55
50
57
85
22
58
74
81
60
53
32
62
76
49
28
64
81
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Czech Republic
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Hungary
Iceland
Ireland
Italy
Korea
Mexico
The Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Slovak Republic
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Turkey
United Kingdom
United States
280.8
179.5
267.5
169.5
235.6
334.9
253.3
190.2
362.5
225.8
219.5
233.7
233.1
392.2
104.9
235.8
247.2
262
259.7
229.3
158.9
268.9
264
166.2
90.89
211.7
310.1
Net enrolment:
sum of age
specific
enrolments
36.6
22.2
46.8
29.9
31.5
44.5
40.5
22
53.9
31.8
29.2
41.2
33.9
64.1
16.8
33.1
35.3
34
40.5
30.6
24.2
37.1
33.5
20.7
15.6
35.1
42.9
Enrolment intensity:
average of two
years with highest
enrolment rates
36
15
39
12
35
40
37
22
24
17
29
37
12
47
19
28
32
40
20
16
13
38
40
29
11
33
39
Percentage
aged 2534
with higher
education
32
16
31
15
34
38
23
26
22
16
30
27
11
32
17
26
31
33
13
11
11
27
35
29
8
28
39
Percentage
aged 3544
with higher
education
74.7
42.1
74.9
39.1
69.8
87.5
66.1
51.1
72.6
48.7
60.8
66.0
46.5
96.2
32.5
61.1
70.3
76.8
55.0
46.0
34.3
69.7
76.6
53.5
24.8
65.0
84.6
Index of
participation
in higher
educationa
The scores on each of the five indicators have been standardised out of 100 before being added to arrive at an overall participation score,
which is divided by 5 to give a score out of 100.
Gross
enrolment
rates
Country
TABLE 1
Selected indicators of participation in higher education for 27 OECD countries
Access and Equity in Higher Education
145
146
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stable odds, or in the case of four countries (Israel, Japan, Taiwan and
Italy) declining odds, and thus increasing inclusiveness.
A serious limitation of all the mobility research is a reliance on cohort
analysis which renders this work being primarily historical and hence
not immediately relevant to policy makers in education who require
more immediate feedback on policy initiatives. For example, in the
Shavit, Arum and Gamoran (forthcoming) study, the most recent data
relate to those cohorts who completed higher education in the 1990s and
in a few case the last cohort completed higher education in the 1980s.
Thus there is an urgent need to collect data on access and equity from
those currently in the higher education system and to compare these data
with those from earlier enrolment cohorts. This is a major challenge,
which needs to be addressed in a systematic comparative fashion. Higher
education policy makers in all countries have a keen interest in assessing
what progress is being made in reducing social inequalities in access.
While there is good comparative data available on the elimination of
quantitative inequalities in the access for women to higher education and
also on the extent of (persisting) generational inequalities, we remain
very poorly informed on the changes in social group inequalities and on
changing inequalities by ethnic groups and by disability.
The potential for comparative research is well illustrated by the
EUROSTUDENT (2005) project, which is the only significant comparative project in this domain known to us. This research aims to
generate and present internationally comparable indicators on the social
and economic conditions of student life. Eleven European countries
participated in the project, which covered a range of items such as
student demographic characteristics, accommodation, funding and state
assistance, living expenses, student spending, student employment, time
budgets, and internationalisation. Although this was not the prime objective of the study, we are especially interested in the data relating to the
social make-up of the student body. Data were collected in 2003 on the
occupational status and educational level of students parents (EUROSTUDENT, 2005).
All eleven countries did not produce the full range of data required as
evident from Table 2, which presents a summary of the finding on the
social and educational background of students parents. No data are
available from the UK and Latvia on these variables and data on the
occupational background of students parents are also absent for Italy.
Because of the variability between countries in the coding of occupations
we have followed the practice incorporated in the Synopsis of Indicators
Report (EUROSTUDENT, 2005) and limited our analysis to the
2007 The Authors. Journal compilation 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
2.6
3.1
1.2
1.5
2.3
1.4a
NA
NA
1.4
2.8
NA
3.1
2.9
1.7
2.4
2.7
1.1
1.8
NA
2.0
8.2
NA
Relative odds of
participating in higher
education by fathers
education: with higher
education versus
without higher
education
3.1
2.4
1.6
2.2
2.7
1.1
1.8
NA
1.3
6.5
NA
Relative odds of
participating in higher
education by mothers
education: with higher
education versus
without higher
education
Source: Calculated from EUROSTUDENT (2005), The Social and Economic Conditions of Student Life in Europe 2005: Synopsis of Indicators
(HIS, 2005).
a
The rate for Ireland differs from that calculated from the EUROSTUDENT report (1.0). A more comprehensive survey in 2004 suggests
that the best estimate lies between 1.3 and 1.5 (OConnell, Clancy and McCoy, 2006).
Austria
Germany
Spain
Finland
France
Ireland
Italy
Latvia
The Netherlands
Portugal
UK (E&W)
Relative odds of
participating in higher
education by fathers
occupation: all other
occupational groups
versus working class
TABLE 2
Participation in higher education: inequalities by social and education background of parents for selected
European countries
148
Higher Education Quarterly
149
College participation by family income: odds ratio top/bottom income quartile (Mortenson, 2005)
1970: 7.21
1980: 4.59
1990: 6.36
2000: 5.56
2003: 5.75
United Kingdom Higher education by parental social class: odds ratio white collar/blue collar (DES, 2003; ONS, 2004)
1960: 8.9
1970: 8.9
1980: 6.5
1990: 6.3
2000: 4.2
Ireland
Admission to higher education by socio-economic group: odds ratio 6 highest/5 lowest SEGs
(Clancy, 2001)
1980: 6.2
1986: 6.1
1992: 3.2
1998: 3.5
Admission to higher education by parental social class: odds ratio non-manual/manual (OConnell,
Clancy and McCoy, 2006)
1998: 2.2
2004: 1.6
France
Higher education enrolment by social background: odds ratio white collar/blue collar (DEPP, 2005)
1984: 8.3
2002: 7.4
Australia
Admission to higher education by parents social class: odds ratio white collar/blue collar
(Marks et al., 2000)
1980: 2.4
1999: 2.3
Admission to higher education by parents social class: odds ratio with higher education/no higher
education (Marks et al., 2000)
1980: 2.5
1999: 2.5
Finland
Participation in higher education by fathers educational level: odds ratio higher education/primary
education only (MOE, Finland, 2005)
1985: 12.1
1990: 11.3
1995: 9.9
2000: 7.2
Norway
Participation in higher education by parents education level: odds ratio higher education/compulsory
education only (MOER, Norway, 2005)
1992: 8.8
2002: 7.7
United States
TABLE 3
Changing inequalities in access to higher education by social group: evidence from selected countries
150
Higher Education Quarterly
151
152
153
This sum divided by 100 is used by the OECD to measure higher education
expectancy.
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