The Evolution of Class Inequality in Higher Education: Competition, Exclusion, and Adaptation

of socioeconomic status in producing differences in access to postsecondary education since the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. For cohorts born before 1950, family background exerts a significant effect on college attendance (Mare 1980). Postsecondary education has expanded in recent decades, however. Between 1955 and 2005, total fall enrollment in degree-granting institutions rose from 2.6 to 17.5 million, and the college enrollment rate of high school graduates increased from around 45 to 70 percent during the same period (NCES 2008). To accommodate this growth, the number of institutions more than doubled (reaching 4,300 by 2006) and existing institutions expanded. From a modernization/industrialization perspective, such a massive expansion of higher education should narrow class gaps in college attainment by fostering high rates of educational upward mobility (Kerr et al. 1960; Parsons 1970; Treiman 1970). Underprivileged high school graduates should disproportionately benefit from this expansion, as new avenues of upward mobility should open to them. Some scholars cast doubts on this optimistic view (e.g., Jencks and Riesman 1968:154), predicting persistent class inequality in higher education amid a massive expansion: “It is clear that universal higher education and the academic revolution will not contribute to the emergence of an egalitarian, classless society in the same relatively clear-cut way that they contribute to the emergence of a non-sectarian, ethnically homogenized, nationally organized, and in some ways sexually undifferentiated one.” Indeed, a plethora of studies continues to document class-based gaps in college attendance. To reconcile these findings with the rise The Evolution of Class Inequality in Higher Education: Competition, Exclusion, and Adaptation