Access to a degree in Europe Inequality in tertiary education attainment 1950 - 2011 Prague 2013

Inequality in access to, and attainment of, tertiary education, and particularly how it has been affected by a massive growth of student numbers in last decades, is one of major points of interest. Unfortunately, large international surveys focused directly on it are rather scarce. Yet it is possible to analyse the changing levels of inequity across European countries during past sixty years by using data gathered by surveys conducted on other themes, namely by European Social Surveys (ESS). This approach has been used in a study by the Education Policy Centre, Charles University in Prague (EPC). An article just put on the EPC web summarises it results, analysing basic patterns of the transmission of inequality, its changing levels and its relationship to the expansion of tertiary education. The paper Access to a degree in Europe: Inequality in tertiary education attainment 1950-2011 summarises the latest EPC study published in 2010, extending its time series to 2011. The EPC approach uses data gathered in five rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS 1-5), conducted in 2002/2003 to 2010/2011 in more than thirty European countries. Although the ESS is not primarily focused on education (but on value orientation and social structure), it contains data which can be used very well for analysing the relation between social structure and inequalities in tertiary education attainment. They include essential characteristics of the respondent's family background: education and occupation of his/her father and mother when he/she was fourteen years of age. It has been thus possible to develop a model for defining and calculating the Inequality Index for 21 European countries. The overall size of the database – established by uniting the results of all five rounds and covering almost 200 thousand respondents – has allowed not only to analyse individual countries but also to distribute their respondents into age groups corresponding to six ten-year historical periods (the last one being longer by one year) from the 1950s to 2011. Analyses carried out so far have made possible to answer three important questions relating to different facets of the problem: What is the proportion of graduates coming from families with a higher socioeconomic status and those coming from families with a lower socioeconomic status? What are the basic patterns of the transmission of inequalities between parents and children? What is the level of inequalities in tertiary education attainment in European countries, and how it has changed during …