The stratification of universities: Structural inequality in Canada and the United States

This paper conceives national systems of higher education as stratified populations of organizations. This stratification is a structural component of ‘horizontal inequality’ in higher education, and may be exacerbated by current pressures for colleges and universities to compete for resources and status. To explore this structural inequality, we compare the level of stratification in financial resources across four-year institutions in Canada and the United States over a 35-year period (1971–2006). Our analyses provide a first-look at this form of stratification, employing Gini coefficients, Lorenz curves, and boxplots. Our results provide new and compelling evidence of increasing structural stratification, even in Canada's predominantly publicly funded postsecondary system. Findings indicate that the distribution of resources is far more stratified in the American system, and that both systems have become more stratified over time. We conclude by situating structural inequality within more general processes of stratification in education.     

Trends in the association between educational attainment and class destinations in West Germany: Looking inside the service class

The paper investigates long-term trends in the association between educational attainment and class destinations in Germany. Most recent evidence for several European countries reveals a downward effect of education on social class. To test changes in the association in Germany I use the 1976–2007 waves of the German Microcensus (GMC), which is a nationally representative, repeated cross-sectional survey. For Germany, log-linear models indicate that the relationship between education and class destinations remains rather constant for both sexes. I also find that returns to higher education in access to service class positions do not consistently decline either. Only university graduates’ relative access chances slightly decreased in comparison to Abitur-holders from the 1980s to the 1990s. In order to consider compositional changes in the service class in more detail, I further disaggregate the service class into three types of employment: administrative/managerial positions, professional experts and professional positions in the social services. In fact, I find that access to administrative and managerial positions is less dependent on education than access to the professions. While professional positions in the social services become less stratified by education over time, it is compensated by a reverse development for professional experts. As substantially more employees work in administrative and managerial jobs since the 1970s, the slight reduction in university returns can indeed be attributed to a compositional effect. In spite of these qualitative and quantitative changes, the strong impact of education on access to the service class does not become blurred. The paper concludes that the persistent institutional framework in Germany does not lead to a decline in the overall association between educational attainment and class destinations.     

Back to School: Racial and Gender Differences in Adults’ Participation in Formal Schooling, 1978–2013

Trends and gaps in educational attainment by race and gender have received much attention in recent years, but reports of these trends have generally focused on traditional-age college students. Little is known about whether and how enrollment in formal schooling among older adults (between 29 and 61 years old) has changed over time. In this article, I draw on Current Population Survey data from 1978 to 2013 to provide the most comprehensive analysis of trends in adults’ formal school enrollment by demographic group to date. Results indicate that adult black women in particular have seen relatively high growth rates in their enrollment. Black women were 85 % more likely to enroll in 2011 and 46 % more likely in 2013 than they were in 1978. Their growing advantage relative to other racial-gender groups owes largely to their increasing educational attainment rates overall, given the relationship between prior schooling and enrollment later in life. Taken together, this article’s findings suggest that adult enrollment is at once equalizing and disequalizing. On the one hand, it has the potential to narrow the gaps between those with some college experience and those with a four-year degree. On the other hand, patterns of adults’ participation in formal education are widening educational gaps between those with and without traditional-age college experience.     

Educational Inequalities among Latin American Adolescents: Continuities and Changes over the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s

The goal of this paper is to examine recent trends in educational stratification for Latin American adolescents growing up in three distinct periods: the 1980s, during severe recession; the 1990s, a period of structural adjustments imposed by international organizations; and the late 2000s, when most countries in the region experienced positive and stable growth. In addition to school enrollment and educational transitions, we examine the quality of education through enrollment in private schools, an important aspect of inequality in education that most studies have neglected. We use nationally representative household survey data for the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay. Our overall findings confirm the importance of macroeconomic conditions for inequalities in educational opportunity, suggesting important benefits brought up by the favorable conditions of the 2000s. However, our findings also call attention to increasing disadvantages associated with the quality of the education adolescents receive, suggesting the significance of the EMI framework-Effectively Maintained Inequality-and highlighting the value of examining the quality in addition to the quantity of education in order to fully understand educational stratification in the Latin American context.     

Academic Buildings and Their Influence on Students’ Wellbeing in Higher Education Institutions

The purpose of this study is to explore the perception of students about aspects of academic building that affect their wellbeing. The study adopts focus group discussion using semi structured interview guide to elicit their responses. Six different groups of students participated in the study. Interviews were recorded using digital audio recorder and were later transcribed to text. The qualitative data obtained was analysed through content analysis. Six key themes that emerged from the analysis are: comfort; health and safety; access and quality of facilities; space provision and adequacy; participation and inclusiveness; interaction. These six items are considered as parameters that are important to students’ wellbeing in relation to academic buildings. The most emphasised aspects of academic building that are essential to meeting students need include thermal conditions, internet access, furniture, duration of access, availability of refreshment facilities, availability of discussion room and availability of personal workstation. This implies that facilities managers in higher education institutions should give adequate attention to these identified aspects of academic buildings as they can potentially affect students output.     

Determinants of male and female higher education in the United States

Recently a number of studies [3, 5–11] dealing with the question of demand for higher education have appeared. Most of these studies either deal with the total demand for higher education or with the demand for public and private higher education. So far, the question of higher education demand by sex has not been analyzed. Such analysis may be important for a number of reasons. First, during the period 1951–1970 female enrollment increased by 361 percent whereas male enrollment rose by only 233 percent. Such trends might also continue in the future since the present (1970) enrollment participation rate of high school graduates is only 0.47 for females as compared to 0.68 for males. Second, it is important to test empirically whether parents discriminate when they choose to enroll their children in institutions of higher education. Third, the recent social movement towards equality for both sexes and the efforts of the federal government to provide important jobs to females, should also stimulate a greater demand for education on the part of females. In this paper, we attempt to estimate separately demand functions for higher education in the United States for males and females.     

Poor Queer Studies: Class,Race, and the Field

ABSTRACT

This study asks, What are the material conditions under which queer studies is done in the academy? It finds a longstanding association of queer studies with the well-resourced, selective colleges and flagship campuses that are the drivers of class and race stratification in higher education in the U.S. That is, the field of queer studies, as a recognizable academic formation, has been structured by the material and intellectual resources of precisely those institutions that most steadfastly refuse to adequately serve poor and minority students, including poor and minority queer students. In response, “poor queer studies” calls for a critical reorientation of queer studies toward working-poor schools, students, theories, and pedagogies. Taking the College of Staten Island, CUNY as a case study, it argues for structural crossing over or “queer-class ferrying” between high-status institutions that have so brilliantly dominated queer studies’ history and low-status worksites of poor queer studies.     

Infrastructures of immobility: enabling international distance education students in Africa to not move

ABSTRACT

There is now a large literature discussing how mobilities are part of contemporary everyday power geometries and is a resource to which people have unequal access. This body of work has, thus, valorised mobility as a desirable good. Why some people choose immobility and what has to be mobilised to enable this immobility has received much less attention. This paper draws on interviews with international distance education students in Namibia and Zimbabwe studying at the University of South Africa (UNISA) to explore the spatio-temporal underpinnings to why students choose to remain at home while studying abroad and how this is arranged. It outlines the infrastructures of reach that enable student immobility and how their incomplete nature means that students have to rely on extensive systems of mobilities of other people and objects to ensure that their study progresses without their own educational mobility. In doing so we move away from considering immobility as a result of limited access to mobility. Instead, we set out a new research agenda on why and how the infrastructures of immobilities are important in mobility research.     

The Demographic Promise of Expanded Female Education: Trends in the Age at First Birth in Malawi

The expansion of female education has been promoted as a way to postpone the age at first birth. In sub‐Saharan Africa, the first cohorts to benefit from policies that expanded access to education are now reaching adulthood and beginning childbearing. I investigate whether the expansion of education in Malawi, which implemented a free primary education policy in 1994 and subsequently expanded secondary schooling, has led to a later age at first birth and whether the education gradient in fertility timing has remained stable over time. Despite increases in female grade attainment over the past twenty years, the age at first birth has not changed. Using instrumental variables analysis, I find a significant negative association between grade attainment and age at first birth, suggesting that the deterioration of school quality and the shift in the age pattern of enrollment that accompanied educational expansion may have compromised the transformative potential of education.     

Market transition or path dependency?: Changing effects of income determinants in the Czech Republic,Hungary, Poland,Russia, and Slovakia, 1991–2002

A major issue in the market transition debate on transitional societies is the extent to which changing economic institutions are responsible for the changing stratification order in post-Communist societies, as assumed by the Market Transition Theory (MTT). Advocates of path dependent transformation processes assume varying transformation processes across post-Communist societies. They have criticized the MTT of being insensitive to the different paths of transformation post-Communist societies go through and the way this will influence changes in the effects of income determinants. This study will test the extent to which trends in the effects of income determinants converge across post-Communist societies. A cross-national and across time comparative research design will be employed, analyzing 61 cross-sectional, standardized surveys for five Central and Eastern countries covering the period 1991–2002. Results from modified weighted least squares regression analyses show an increasing trend in the effect of years of education on standardized personal income for all five countries as predicted by the MTT. Income effects of years of experience, private sector employment and gender do not show increasing trends for all countries, contradicting the MTT. The empirical trends in effects of income determinants are to a great extent consistent with Stark's typology of privatization strategies, giving some support to the theoretical notion of path dependent transformation processes.     

Signals and closure by degrees: The education effect across 15 European countries

Stratification research has extensively studied country-differences in the strength of the relationship between education and labor market outcomes. This research has mostly neglected the different mechanisms that could explain why education is rewarded. In this paper we argue that not only the strength of the relationship, but also the mechanisms explaining why education is rewarded differ between countries. National institutions affect how employers see education, what it brings to the organization, and how workers signal their potential productivity. Empirically we focus on the partial effects of qualifications on top of years of education in 15 European countries. We find that strongly vocationally oriented and differentiated schooling systems have relatively strong net effects of qualifications on occupational status, which is explained by stronger signalling by qualification levels in those countries. Furthermore, in coordinated market economies we find that vocational education leads to higher status jobs relative to liberal market economies, which is explained by higher levels of closure implemented by coordination institutions.     

Welfare states and social inequality: Key issues in contemporary cross-national research on social stratification and mobility

Research on welfare states and research on social stratification and mobility share a common concern for social inequality. Research on welfare states is usually comparatively designed, looking for similarities and variation across countries in a number of aspects related to social structure and social institutions. On the other hand, the basic model of social stratification, utilized in most cross-national research on social stratification and mobility, is an abstract model which does not specify why and how we are to understand cross-national differences. Yet for about 20 years or so, researchers within the social stratification community have undertaken several cross-national studies. This paper reviews a few selected studies within each area and summarizes their conclusions with regard to similarities versus differences between countries. In the final section of the paper, I discuss key issues for future work within cross-national research on social stratification.     

Estimating Educational Differences in Low-Risk Cesarean Section Delivery: A Multilevel Modeling Approach

U.S. rates of cesarean section, and in particular, low-risk cesarean section (LRC) births rose dramatically across the late 1990s and early 2000s, and have since remained high. Although previous research explores how trends in LRC vary between states and across maternal characteristics, within-state heterogeneity has not yet been accounted for, nor has the extent to which maternal and county characteristics might interact to shape the likelihood of a LRC birth. Using U.S. county-level birth data for years 2008–2010 from the restricted National Vital Statistics Systems Cohort Linked Birth-Infant Death Files and the Area Health Resource Files, I conduct race-stratified multilevel analyses to explore the association between the mother’s education, the income of the county in which she gives birth, and the odds of LRC delivery. I find that regardless of race/ethnicity, less education at the individual level and lower income at the county level are associated with higher odds of LRC delivery. There are also persistent racial disparities in these relationships. Non-Hispanic black mothers have the highest overall odds of LRC delivery, yet the effect of both education and county income is greatest for non-Hispanic white mothers. The results highlight the importance of analyzing both individual resources and contextual effects of the county when assessing birthing processes, as both contribute to a mother’s access to and knowledge of natal care.     

居住证对外来流动人口的制度后果及激励效应——制度导入与阶层内的再分化

制度导入的一个重要功能是将原来自发的社会分化正式化和固定化了,并赋予不同阶层的人群以更清晰的身份标签,呈现一个可视的清晰的阶层梯度。本研究以大城市居住证制度引入之后外来流动人口的分化为例说明另一种社会分层的机制特征。虽然外来人口内部的不同阶层之间收入差距并不是非常大,但是其亚阶层的社会保障、就业和教育机会以及通往上一阶层流动或成为城市居民的机会却存在显著的差异。阶层的再分化是由外在制度因素与人群的人力资本、单位以及社会关系状况等内在因素交互作用的产物。作为外在制度的公共政策是非中性的,政策本身具有选择和歧视的不平等特性。     

Stratification and the formation of expectations in highly differentiated educational systems

Highly differentiated educational systems constitute a common organizational form of schooling in which youth are sorted into secondary schools that stress either vocational or academic training and between which movement is rare. With standardized data from five countries, we illuminate two important stratification processes in these systems: (1) social origins strongly influence students’ placement into different types of schools with high SES students most likely to attend academically oriented schools that provide a direct pathway to the university. (2) The types of schools students attend largely determine their educational and occupational expectations and impart a strong dose of realism in these expectations. Thus, the institutional arrangements of highly differentiated educational systems perpetuate socioeconomic inequalities quite early in the life course, well before students complete their education and enter the labor force.     

Economic transition,school expansion and educational inequality in China, 1990–2000

This paper examines the trends in educational stratification during China's economic reforms in the 1990s. Based on the sample data of population censuses in 1990 and 2000, school-age children were matched to their parents’ background information, and the effects of family background on their school enrollment and continuation were investigated. Results show that despite the substantial expansion of educational opportunities in the decade, family background continues to play an important role in determining school enrollment status and school transitions. During the decade, children of rural-hukou status became more disadvantaged compared to their urban counterparts, and the effect of their father's socioeconomic status on school enrollment was enhanced. Despite the fact that children of rural-hukou status gained relatively more opportunities at junior high school level, as a result of nationwide saturation at the 9-year compulsory education, the rural–urban gap in the likelihood of transition to senior high school level enlarged, and the effect of their father's socioeconomic status increased—even after controlling for regional variations in economic development.     

The intergenerational education spillovers of pension reform in China

Economic theory establishes that pension privatization weakens the link between old and young and so reduces the incentive to invest in public education in an economy with lower return rate of capital than growth rate of wage. However, empirical studies of the link change are few. In this paper, we investigate the effects of pension privatization and the central government’s subsidy to individual accounts on public education spending in a three-period overlapping generation model. And then, we take contemporary pension reforms in a number of Chinese provinces as offering natural experiment conditions. Using a difference-in-difference framework and 282 municipal districts panel data over years 1998–2009, we test the pension-education theoretical link change. Both our theoretical and empirical results confirm that pension privatization is adversely associated with local public spending on education in China. Private pension subsidies, moreover, magnify this effect. Our study supports the theoretical assertion and selective empirical findings of a negative intergenerational effect of pension privatization.     

Social Change and the Relationships Between Education and Employment

The relationships between education and employment have long been of interest to social scientists. During the transition from a completely agricultural economy to one that is developing nonfarm opportunities, however, the relationships between education and employment may dramatically change. We examine how two components of education—schooling enrollment and attainment—affect the transition to employment for men and women in the Chitwan Valley of Nepal. Using discrete-time event history models, we find that school enrollment tends to delay employment, while school attainment accelerates employment. We also test how these effects may have changed across successive cohorts. Over time, the effects of enrollment have become stronger, while the effects of attainment appear to have weakened. These shifts in the nature of education may be related to increasing conflict between student and employee roles, as well as changes in the types and availability of employment.     

1990年以来中国各民族人口教育发展研究——来自人口普查和人口抽样调查数据的分析

运用人口普查和人口抽样调查数据,研究1990年以来各民族人口教育发展状况,考察7～16岁儿童在校率的影响因素。在实证分析的基础上,针对如何促进少数民族人口的教育发展提出政策建议。研究发现,在过去几十年中,少数民族与汉族人口的教育都取得了长足发展。少数民族人口中,未受过初中教育的人口比例高于汉族。不论对少数民族还是汉族,与城镇地区相比,乡村地区初中教育的缺失更加严重。在城镇地区,少数民族与汉族7～16岁儿童在校率相差很少,但在乡村地区仍然存在一些差距。在考虑了地区影响因素后,少数民族与汉族儿童的在校概率差异或者缩小,或者消失,只有满族除外。     

Structuring injustice: partisan politics in the making and unmaking of James Madison University's equal opportunity policy

This analysis contributes to LGBT campus climate research on the quality of campus life in higher education in the United States. We argue that public education institutions in different states face divergent impediments to improving campus climate, and that more research is needed identifying structural factors affecting campus climate. Using a social systems analysis of policymaking at one university as a case study, we illustrate how partisan politics and state regulation make Virginia colleges and universities more vulnerable to political scrutiny and control. Finally, we propose a social justice-oriented policy agenda to address structural inequalities.