Abstract
This study provides comparable lower-bound estimates of inequality of opportunity for tertiary education (EIOp) for 31 countries in Europe, by using the two EU-SILC waves for which information on family background is available (2005 and 2011). The results reveal an important degree of heterogeneity, with Northern European countries showing low levels of inequality of opportunity and Mediterranean and Eastern European countries characterized by significant degrees of unfair educational inequalities. Parental education and occupation are the most relevant circumstances in the great majority of the countries considered. This study also exploits the two point-in-time observations available and analyses the relationship between some country-specific characteristics and inequality of opportunity in tertiary education. The analysis documents a negative association between EIOp and real GDP per capita, possibly indicating that higher equality of opportunity in tertiary education and economic growth are complementary objectives. Two results emerge as especially robust: in all the specifications we find a positive association between EIOp and the students/teacher ratio, and a negative one between EIOp and public spending in tertiary education. While we do not claim that such correlations should be interpreted causally, we think that they might indicate a meaningful underlying relationship between equality of opportunity in tertiary education and the availability of financial and non-financial resources.
Highlights
Educational attainment and, more generally, human capital, are among the main determinants of social progress
We investigate the extent of inequality of opportunity in tertiary education (EIOp hereafter) in Europe using data from European Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) 2005 and 2011
A growing literature in the field of normative economics looks at the different factors generating inter-individual disparities, distinguishing between fair inequality, that is, inequality that is the result of differences in individuals’ effort, and unfair inequality, that is, inequality caused by factors outside the sphere of the individual responsibility
Summary
Educational attainment and, more generally, human capital, are among the main determinants of social progress. The main element that these studies have in common is that, given the selection of the outcome variable (which partly depends on data availability), the empirical analysis tests whether, conditional on a set of observable characteristics, socio-economic background (i.e. parental education/occupation/social class/income) has an impact on the outcome variable. As for the gross enrolment rate in tertiary education, previous studies (Triventi, 2013) have found that it tends to be positively associated with measures of inequality in higher education, possibly as a result of increased competition for the “tickets” (i.e. university degrees) to future “good” (or relatively “less bad”) jobs. Given that our analysis is restricted to the European context in the period 2005–2011, with countries characterized by different levels of universality in education, the binary variable “completion of tertiary education” is adequate to capture the measure of the individual advantage in a comparative setting. As discussed in Section Measuring Inequality of Opportunity in Tertiary Education, the focus of the analysis on completion of tertiary education produces some important insights, from both a normative and a policy-oriented perspective
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