Stratification In Higher Education Research Articles

Who earns the iron rice bowl? Major marketability and state sector jobs among college-educated workers in urban China

In China, state sector employees enjoy a persistent organizational premium, but surprisingly few studies have examined which college-educated workers tend to work in the state sector. In this study, we focus on one key dimension in horizontal stratification in higher education—field of study—to examine patterns of state sector employment among college-educated workers in China according to the occupational specificity and profit orientation of their college majors. Using data from three nationally representative surveys in urban China, we find that college graduates majoring in less occupationally specific and less profitable fields (i.e. those with lower marketability) are more likely to work in the state sector, and this pattern is more pronounced during the later period of marketization reform. Moreover, family resources in the form of a father working in the state sector can weaken the field-to-sector association, and we observe greater intergenerational mobility into state sector employment among college graduates majoring in fields with lower marketability. These findings highlight the field-to-sector relationship as a unique mechanism of China's horizontal stratification in higher education and school-to-work transition. They also underscore the significance of considering organizational contexts when examining the educational stratification in labor market outcomes.

The Stratification of Universities Revisited: Status, Followers, and the Shape of National Hierarchies

It is generally accepted that Canadian universities are less stratified than their southern neighbours, a hypothesis popularized in the mid-2000s and verified by subsequent comparative empirical research. Through this piece, we revisit the Canadian “flatness” hypothesis, embracing a more sociological definition of status hierarchies and using social media followers as a focal proxy for status. Despite our theoretically based skepticism, adoption of an alternative status proxy, and use of more recent data, our analyses validate the flatness hypothesis. We theorize the implications of these findings, and our novel approach, for the study of organizational stratification in higher education.

Planning for a delay? Horizontal stratification in higher education and the intended age at marriage

Planning for a delay? Horizontal stratification in higher education and the intended age at marriage

고등교육 내 수평적 계층화와 청년 노동시장 성과의 분화: 대학 서열, 전공, 젠더의 측면에서 본 현황 및 추이

고등교육 내 수평적 계층화와 청년 노동시장 성과의 분화: 대학 서열, 전공, 젠더의 측면에서 본 현황 및 추이

Revisiting Horizontal Stratification in Higher Education: College Prestige Hierarchy and Educational Assortative Mating in China.

Existing research on assortative mating has examined marriage between people with different levels of education, yet heterogeneity in educational assortative mating outcomes of college graduates has been mostly ignored. Using data from the 2010 Chinese Family Panel Study and log-multiplicative models, this study examines the changing structure and association of husbands' and wives' educational attainment between 1980 and 2010, a period in which Chinese higher education experienced rapid expansion and stratification. Results show that the graduates of first-tier institutions are less likely than graduates of lower-ranked colleges to marry someone without a college degree. Moreover, from 1980 to 2010, female first-tier-college graduates were increasingly more likely to marry people who graduated from similarly prestigious colleges, although there is insufficient evidence to draw the same conclusion about their male counterparts. This study thus demonstrates the extent of heterogeneity in educational assortative mating patterns among college graduates and the tendency for elite college graduates to marry within the educational elite.

Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University

Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University

Exploring socioeconomic inequalities and access to elite postgraduate education among English graduates

A worldwide trend towards high levels of participation in higher education, paired with concerns about the post-university destinations of an increasing pool of graduates, have brought about two parallel phenomena: a process of sharp stratification in higher education and the growing relevance of postgraduate education as undergraduate study becomes nearly ubiquitous, particularly among the most advantaged groups of students. To date, the literature on socioeconomic inequalities and access to higher education has focussed on undergraduate education, with some researchers specifically investigating access to the most prestigious institutions. We contribute to this body of research by investigating the effects of socioeconomic characteristics on access to postgraduate education at those universities believed to deliver elite forms of higher education. We look at access to ‘elite’ postgraduate education among English graduates, operationalised as belonging to the Russell Group of research-intensive universities. We analyse an exceptionally large dataset (N = 533,885) capturing graduate destinations, including postgraduate education at specific institutions. We find that socioeconomic inequalities in attending an elite postgraduate degree persist, but these are mediated by educational variables. Socioeconomically advantaged students are more likely to attain a good degree and to attend an elite institution at the undergraduate level, which powerfully predicts access to elite postgraduate education.

Commentary: COVID‐19 Pandemic and Higher Education: International Mobility and Students’ Social Protection

Commentary: COVID‐19 Pandemic and Higher Education: International Mobility and Students’ Social Protection

Aiming high: social and academic correlates of applying to and attending ‘reach’ universities

Less privileged students disproportionately aim low with their university applications and often fail to apply to the institutions that match their academic qualifications. Little attention, however, has been directed toward the converse phenomenon, that of aiming high. These kinds of applications are commonly called ‘reaches,’ meaning an applicant’s credentials fall slightly below the institution’s range for the average first-year student. Using nationally representative survey data from the United States, this study examines whether social background predicts the likelihood of applying to reach institutions and assesses the consequences for disparities in enrollments. We find a strong relationship between students’ socioeconomic background and their likelihood of applying to reach institutions, even after controlling for a range of academic and non-academic characteristics. Further, there is a substantial pay-off to applying to reach institutions, revealing the degree to which these class-based choices at the application stage contribute to the social stratification of higher education.

Social stratification in Higher Education: What it means at the micro‐level of the individual academic scientist

AbstractThe academic profession is internally divided as never before. This cross‐national comparative analysis of stratification in Higher Education is based on a sample of European academic scientists (N = 8,466) from universities in 11 countries. The analysis identifies three types of stratification: academic performance stratification, academic salary stratification, and international research stratification. This emergent stratification of the global scientific community is predominantly research‐based, and internationalisation in research is at its centre; prestige‐driven, internationally competitive, and central to academic recognition systems, research is the single most stratifying factor in Higher Education at the level of the individual scientist today. These stratification processes pull the various segments of the academic profession in different directions. The study analyses highly productive academics (‘research top performers’), highly paid academics (‘academic top earners’), and highly internationalised academics (‘research internationalists’) and explores the implications for individual scientists.

Central-local relations and higher education stratification in China

Regional higher education growth in non-federal states has not attracted much academic attention. This paper is one of the first attempts to explore China’s latest higher education expansion and its systematic and regional impact from the perspective of multi-level governance. This article argues that the state had explicitly utilized the Commanding Heights Strategy to diffuse the higher education authority to sub-national level and promote regional growth. The Central authorities allowed the Ministry of Education establishing a vertical elite coalition to command the heights of tertiary institutional hierarchy and key resources for tertiary development. In addition, the state used both financial incentives and sectoral incentives to mobilize resources for regional expansion. The Commanding Heights Strategy shapes China’s response to the higher education trilemma of costs, access, and quality. Under this strategy, the unprecedented tertiary expansion has expanded college access, but at the expense of affordability, quality, and a large and increasing regional variation.

Poor Queer Studies: Class, Race, and the Field

ABSTRACTThis 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.

“Why you Throwing Subs?”: An Exploration of Community College Students’ Immediate Responses to Microaggressions

Background/ContextCurrent research within four-year university settings reveals the daily encounters students of color and faculty have with microaggressions—brief, intentional or unintentional comments and behaviors communicating covert biases toward individuals based on their social group membership. The majority of all undergraduate students of color currently attend community colleges, but the occurrence of microaggressions in the community college classroom has been overlooked. We situate our study of microaggressions within the racial microaggressions model framework, which addresses how microaggressive events are mediated by institutional racism through systematic policies, practices, and processes that (re)produce inequitable stratification in higher education. Further, we analyze the immediate effects of and students’ responses to classroom microaggressions.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of the studyThe present study explores students’ immediate responses to 51 microaggressions observed in three community colleges. We examine microaggressions in community colleges with the objective to provide a lens into the immediate effects and responses students display to observed classroom microaggressions. In exploring both the effects on students and their responses to microaggressions experienced in 17 classrooms, we gain insight on how these events contribute to or undermine students’ in-the-moment learning experiences, as well as target their academic identities. To this end, we examine the following research questions: 1) In what ways were students’ academic identities targeted by these microaggressions? 2) What were the immediate effects of and students’ responses to the microaggressions experienced in their classrooms?Research DesignTo examine our research questions, we utilize a mixed-method research design, whereby mixed-method “connecting” was used to systematically quantify the microaggressions that occurred, which were qualitatively recorded in ethnographic fieldnotes from structured observations. We conducted content analyses of the observed microaggression ethnographic fieldnotes using the racial microaggressions model.Findings/ResultsMicroaggressions stigmatized multiple identities the students occupied (e.g., college student identity). Using the racial microaggressions model analytical framework, we found that the most common immediate effects of microaggressions were: disengagement, silence, and discomfort. Immediate responses included laughter and responding with a joke or distraction. While less common, students sometimes resisted through actions of peer support and questioning of the perpetrator.Conclusion/RecommendationsBy expanding the racial microaggressions theoretical framework to develop an analytical frame that allows for the examination of responses to microaggressions, we can engage in a deeper understanding of the nature of the microaggressive classroom, and the ways that microaggressions target students’ academic identities. As found in our study, some students are engaging in immediate resistant acts to counter the microaggressions they experience, which warrants deeper investigation. Facing the reality that students with marginalized identities are likely to experience microaggressions, institutions should assist students in developing strategic responses that will help them adapt, cope, and resist.

Structural Stratification in Higher Education and the University Origins of Political Leaders in Eight Countries

Are political leaders “educationally representative” of their electorates? Because almost all national‐level political leaders are university graduates, this question increasingly centers on whether they attended a select number of highly ranked domestic institutions. This study examines international variations in the concentration of universities attended by political leaders by analyzing publicly available information on all 524 national party leaders from the past century in eight countries: Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, France, Germany, and Sweden. Our analyses reveal four major findings. First, the university origins of political elites are most concentrated in the UK and United States, whose higher education systems are highly stratified. Second, British and American leaders were most likely to attend world top‐ranked universities than leaders from any other countries. Third, our results uncover a realignment between elite universities and party ideology in recent decades, as leaders of left‐wing parties become more likely to attend elite universities than their right‐wing counterparts. In conclusion, we theorize connections between higher education and elite recruitment, and suggest directions for future research that can utilize a broader range of nations and societal sectors.

Economism and commercialization as manifestation of the globalization of higher education

The main point of the article is to disclose the essence of the phenomena of economism and commercialization. Economism is seen as part of globalization of education, a global corporatization of education provides training for the global labour market, using human capital economic theories. As noted by George Spring, the human capital, economists argue that investments in education lead to economic growth, reducing income inequality and increasing employment.In general, the globalization of higher education is considered as a process of increasing interdependence and convergence of national economics, trade liberalization and market dominated by competition, struggle, transnational education and the commercialization of knowledge, as well as the erosion and disappearance of national boundaries and models of education. Despite the fact that most researchers associate globalization with the increasing influence of the World Bank and Americanization of higher education, globalization of higher education is not linear, and the same process of unification of educational systems. In modern conditions has acquired a strong relevance to international competition and stratification of higher education is also an increasing competition for social and academic prestige. In the context of this increased institutional cross-border activities and academic mobility, global communications and mobility have created conditions for the emergence of the global higher education market. Consequently, the competition among elite universities is now globally closer to capitalist economic forms. The economization of education is considered as a component of global education, a global corporatization of education provides training for the global labour market using human capital economic theories. Such massive development of higher education is associated with a number of factors such as socio-economic and socio-cultural, which are manifested at both macro level of the whole society and the microsocial level of the individual.It becomes obvious by the fact that in a globalized world, the consumer society is transformed into goods, and the goods that will bring a significant profit with the appropriate investment. However, commercialization of education is quite dangerous for the classical Institute of education. Because education as another global business trend threatens the institutional framework and its content.The processes of globalization is greatly affected the emergence and spread of economism and the commercialization in various educational systems, in particular it is proved that they formed a single world information-educational space, the characteristics of which are: the rapid penetration of the globalization trends in the national educational system; integration of educational systems into the world market for educational services and intellectual products; increased competition in the global educational environment.

Economic achievements of nonacademic parents and patterns of enrollment in higher education of their children: the case of Israel

This paper sheds new light on horizontal stratification in higher education by studying, in the Israeli context, the choice of institution and field of study of sons and daughters of nonacademic economically established parents. These youngsters wish to reproduce their parents’ economic capital, but also to legitimize their social position by acquiring higher education. They can achieve this by studying lucrative professions. We hypothesize that less able children of these parents will use their parents’ economic assets to study lucrative fields in the expensive but non-selective private colleges. Since underprivileged women tend to make instrumental choices of field of study, our hypothesis refers to both genders, despite women’s well-reported tendency to study non-lucrative fields. The sample consists of 8036 Israeli first-year students in 2014. The analysis is based on a multinomial logistic regression, with the combination of institution and field as the dependent variable. The major findings are as follows: (1) Daughters of nonacademic wealthy parents are unique in their tendency to study lucrative fields; (2) The private colleges enable academically disadvantaged sons and daughters of nonacademic wealthy parents to study business and law, two lucrative fields; (3) These colleges are these women’s only option to study a lucrative field, because they refrain from studying lucrative fields in the public colleges, which concentrate on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects; (4) When equipped with high credentials, children of nonacademic wealthy parents, men and women, prefer to study lucrative fields in the prestigious universities.

The stratification of higher education in the USA and Taiwan: a comparative analysis of students’ college-choice outcomes

This comparative study modifies Cabrera and La Nasa’s model to examine social and class stratification in students’ college-choice outcomes in the USA and Taiwan, and compares the mechanisms that perpetuate this stratification between the two systems. Students’ college-choice outcomes are defined by both institutional selectivity and control, in order to test not only stratification in the quality of institution students attend but also their financial burden of college costs. The findings show that students from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to attend high-selective institutions and institutions that embrace better resources and provide more subsidies to students. Current financing structures embedded in both systems increase stratification, but through different ways. In addition to enhancing academic preparation for socioeconomically disadvantaged students, fundamentally rethinking the financing structures – especially the distribution of public funds – is imperative to increase equality for both countries in the cost-sharing era.

Differentiation in Higher Education: The Impact of Parental Education

The widening of participation in higher education in recent decades has been heralded as a means toward the reduction of social class inequalities in higher education. Research findings indicate, though, that simply increasing the number of people attending higher education does not mean that social inequalities have been substantially reduced. The mass expansion of higher education has existed alongside a differentiated and stratified higher education. Students from more privileged socioeconomic backgrounds usually study in prestigious higher education institutions and departments which offer more ambitious occupational trajectories, while those from less privileged socioeconomic backgrounds usually attend lower status institutions and courses of study. Using official quantitative data, in this article we explore the correlation between familial cultural capital and distribution in higher education in Greece. The research findings show that the Greek higher education sector is differentiated, since students with parents who are higher education graduates are overrepresented in prestigious higher education departments and courses of study. Based on the research findings, we argue that initiatives to reduce social class inequalities in higher education need to tackle the issue of social class stratification in higher education and the unequal representation of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds in prestigious fields of study.

Information barriers and social stratification in higher education: evidence from a field experiment.

Our contribution assesses the role of information barriers for patterns of participation in Higher Education (HE) and the related social inequalities. For this purpose, we developed a large-scale clustered randomised experiment involving over 9,000 high school seniors from 62 Italian schools. We designed a counseling intervention to correct student misperceptions of the profitability of HE, that is, the costs, economic returns and chances of success of investments in different tertiary programs. We employed a longitudinal survey to test whether treated students' educational trajectories evolved differently relative to a control group. We find that, overall, treated students enrolled less often in less remunerative fields of study in favour of postsecondary vocational programmes. Most importantly, this effect varied substantially by parental social class and level of education. The shift towards vocational programmes was mainly due to the offspring of low-educated parents; in contrast, children of tertiary graduates increased their participation in more rewarding university fields. Similarly, the redistribution from weak fields to vocational programmes mainly involved the children of the petty bourgeoisie and the working class, while upper class students invested in more rewarding university fields. We argue that the status-maintenance model proposed by Breen and Goldthorpe can explain these socially differentiated treatment effects. Overall, our results challenge the claim that student misperceptions contribute to horizontal inequalities in access to HE.

A Quest for Equity? Measuring the Effect of QuestBridge on Economic Diversity at Selective Institutions

In response to growing income stratification in higher education, President Obama convened a White House Summit in 2014 where over 100 selective institutions committed to increasing the number of low-income students on their campus. One way colleges proposed to do so is through partnerships with college access organizations like QuestBridge, a nonprofit organization that aims to increase the percentage of low-income students at elite universities. While institutions purport that QuestBridge improved socioeconomic diversity, empirical research has not confirmed these claims. In this study, we estimate the effect of QuestBridge on overall access of Pell eligible students at partner institutions using quasi-experimental methods. We find no increase in the economic diversity of colleges after establishing a partnership with QuestBridge, except for colleges simultaneously partnering with QuestBridge and enacting no-loan financial aid policies. We also consider whether participation in QuestBridge increases institutional status through larger application volumes and increased selectivity, and discuss implications for research and practice in the area of stratification.