Education Systems and Inequalities

International comparisons

Andreas Hadjar, Christiane Gross, Hadjar, Andreas, Gross, Christiane, Andreas Hadjar, Christiane Gross

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781447335139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. How do education systems shape educational inequalities and differences in educational outcomes? And how do advantages and disadvantages in educational attainment translate into privileges and shortcomings in labour market and general life chances? Education systems and inequalities compares different education systems and their impact on creating and sustaining social inequalities.

The book considers key questions such as how education systems impact educational inequalities along such variables as social origin, gender, ethnicity, migration background or ability and what social mechanisms are behind the links between education system and educational inequalities and provides vital evidence to inform debates in policy and reform.

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Education systems and meritocracy: social origin, educational and status attainment

Andreas Hadjar and Rolf Becker

Meritocracy, educational and status attainment

In modern societies, education is one of the main mechanisms in the reproduction of inequalities in terms of an existing link between social origin and destination class across the life course (see, for example, DiPrete and Eirich, 2006; Müller and Jacob, 2008; Müller and Kogan, 2010). Education is strongly linked to life chances – income, political participation, health, subjective well-being and even life expectancy (see Hadjar and Becker, 2009) – and educational inequalities are reflected in inequalities in life chances throughout the life course (Mayer, 2005). There is a long-lasting tradition of educational policies and reforms which have attempted to weaken the influence of social origin and thus develop more meritocratic educational and status attainment (see Breen et al, 2009). Two key mechanisms have to be analysed with regard to the impact of the institutional settings of the education system on the degree of meritocracy in educational and status attainment: first, to what extent does social origin determine educational attainment; and, second, to what extent does education – rather than social origin – shape status attainment (for example, class position, income, occupational career)? A general assumption regarding why education system characteristics should influence inequalities in educational and status attainment, is that such institutional characteristics have special consequences for the primary and secondary effects of social origin on educational attainment (Boudon, 1974), for example, to what extent do education systems try to compensate for class-specific achievement deficits, and to what extent do education systems include selection points and foster or reduce class-specific differences in cost-benefit calculations (for example, Becker and Hecken, 2009a). The institutional conditions of the transition from school (across general education or vocational training) to work and the general links between education system and labour markets need to be considered in the light of inequalities in status attainment (see Müller and Shavit, 1998; Becker and Hecken, 2009b).

First, theoretical accounts of meritocracy and, in particular, of inequalities in educational and status attainment, and how these are shaped by institutional characteristics, are considered. The empirical section consists of both a summary of major studies and our own empirical multi-level analyses.

Theorising meritocracy and inequalities

According to meritocratic principles illustrated by Young (1958), goods, positions and power should be allocated based on merit, (intellectual) achievement, efforts and skills, and the classic social hereditary (class) and other ascriptive characteristics such as gender, ethnicity or race, should not play any role. While at first sight, meritocracy means greater equality, since ascriptive factors should not play a role in the distribution of goods, it is still related to inequality: (dis)ability appears as a legitimate inequality principle (see Roemer, 1998). The idea of meritocracy is far from the ideal of egalitarianism as expressed in the concept of ‘luck egalitarianism’ (Dworkin, 2000; see Swift, 2004) with the demand that societies should fulfil the needs of all people whatever their natural ability or talent (Roemer, 1998). Another major criticism of the concept of meritocracy is rooted in Collins (1979), who focused on the functionalist core of meritocracy. He doubts the importance that is given to intelligence and effort and refers to ‘credentialism’ in terms of the hunt for educational certificates; educational success in this regard is not necessarily based on IQ and effort.

In contrast to Young (1958), sociological accounts focus on educational qualifications, cognitive skills and effort (for example, Shavit and Blossfeld, 1993; Goldthorpe, 1996; Müller and Shavit, 1998; Jackson, 2007). Education is seen as a major indicator of merit; employers reward formal educational qualifications on the labour market with material and symbolic benefits, income and positions, among other things, which are perceived as ‘genuinely earned, deserved rewards’ (Bell, 1973: 455). Hoffer’s (2002: 255) definition, centring on the mechanism that ‘individuals are selected for educational opportunities and jobs on the basis of demonstrated performance’, as well as Kingston’s (2006: 112f) concept also broaden the definition of merit to include cognitive skills (IQ, knowledge, competencies), educational attainment in terms of certificates and assignments/grades, and general personality characteristics such as diligence and a sense of duty. The idea of meritocracy is not only an ideal in Western industrialised countries. In Japan, the idea of ‘educational credentialism’ is a core feature of the education system, with the implication that entrance to prestigious education institutions is highly competitive and strongly based on achievement, and assuming educational credentials to be the major determinant of socioeconomic success (Ishida, 1993).

The concept of the ‘meritocratic triad’, with education as a proxy variable for ‘merit’ at its centre, has its roots in the ‘status attainment model’ (Blau and Duncan, 1967; Mayer and Blossfeld, 1990). This ‘OED triangle’ conceptualises the links between (social) origin (O), education (E) and destination class (D). Assessing whether or not the meritocratic principle in terms of contest mobility (that is, equal opportunity in access to high-status groups) dominating over sponsored mobility (that is, access to high-status groups through sponsorship by elites) is existent requires the study of two key associations (see Fitz et al, 2005: 69): (a) To what extent do ascriptive characteristics (for example, social origin) determine educational attainment? and (b) To what extent does educational attainment explain occupational status and income? Meritocracy would require that there were no associations between ascriptive characteristics and education, or ascriptive characteristics, status and income, but strong links between education, status and income. Theorising the changing inequality principles in society and the evolution of meritocracy, many studies (for example, Fitz et al, 2005; Jackson, 2007) focus on the ‘increased merit selection hypothesis (IMS)’ (Jonsson, 1992). At the core of this concept is the assumption of a shift from ascription (social position, family connections) as the inequality principle to achievement (education, ability); achievement becomes the only determinant with regard to access to educational institutions, educational qualifications, labour market chances and occupational career in modern societies. The driving forces behind these assumed changes are industrialisation, technological progress and economic prosperity (Treiman, 1970; Bell, 1973; Goldthorpe, 1996), the higher demand for highly skilled people accompanied by an increasing importance of the meritocratic principle when filling managerial and professional positions (Whelan and Layte, 2002), processes of educational expansion, and cultural and normative changes (Dörfler and van de Werfhorst, 2009). The political sphere implements educational reforms with the aim of initialising an educational expansion (Hadjar and Becker, 2009) and to guarantee continuous growth by increasing educational potential. This accompanies a higher intergenerational upward social mobility that differs between countries (see Breen, 2004). The changes assumed with the increasing importance of meritocratic inequality mechanisms in society are symbolised in the frequently used figure of the meritocratic triad (Breen and Goldthorpe, 2001; Goldthorpe, 2003; Jackson et al, 2005).

In the process of increased merit selection, education becomes the main selection criteria or ‘merit’. As the association between social origin and educational attainment (O-E) decreases, the association between educational attainment and class of destination (E-D), and status and income increases. The direct link between class of origin and class of destination (O-D) should decrease or even vanish in this scenario, since class reproduction should only function as mediated by education (Figure 11.1).

Figure 11.1: Prognosis with regard to increased merit selection hypothesis (OED (E) Educational triangle)

There are two influential theses with regard to the question of changing inequality patterns. The maximally maintained inequality hypothesis (MMI) by Raftery and Hout (1993) assumes that middle classes will first benefit from educational expansion and increased educational opportunities. Only after the desire of the middle classes for education has been sated, will the working classes also benefit from the new educational opportunities (see Breen and Jonsson, 2005). Analysing inequalities often neglects horizontal inequalities with regard to education institutions, apparently horizontal tracks in secondary education, and differential curricula. The main assumption is that while vertical inequalities decrease, privileged groups maintain their advantages through educational decisions that at first sight relate to horizontal inequalities, but result in vertical inequalities in the labour market and in life chances. This argument is reflected in Lucas’s (2001) effectively maintained inequality thesis (EMI), with the core assumption that when higher educational institutions such as upper secondary schools or universities become universal, ‘the socioeconomically advantaged seek out whatever qualitative differences there are at that level and use their advantages to secure quantitatively similar but qualitatively better education’ (Lucas, 2001: 1652).

The empirical reality of ‘meritocracy’

The results of studies are highly ambivalent with regard to the assumption of a shift from ascription to achievement as outlined in the ‘increased merit selection thesis’ (for example, Jonsson, 1992). Studies focusing on the original concept of meritocracy and the factor of ‘cognitive ability’ show that intelligence is strongly linked to educational attainment (Sewell and Shah, 1967) and that testing becomes more important at different stages of the educational system (see, for example, Alon and Tienda, 2007 with regard to college enrolment). Ability in terms of job skills demonstrates an impact on income and status in most studies (for example, Saunders, 1997, for the UK).

A meta-study on status attainment by Kingston (2006) leads to the conclusion that Young’s (1958) vision of a perfect meritocracy cannot be backed by empirical evidence, although ‘meritocratic factors have so much more impact on careers than ascriptive factors. As a distributional principle, merit is relatively significant; to the extent that the allocation process is rule-governed, meritocratic rules predominate and their impact is consequential’ (Kingston, 2006: 126). It is thus meaningful to take a closer look at empirical evidence of inequalities in educational attainment and inequalities in status attainment.

Empirical evidence of educational inequalities suggests that they have decreased during the 20th century, but not been abolished: educational opportunities are still distributed unequally among different social strata. Many scholars have concluded from their empirical studies of Western industrialised countries that social inequalities appear to be persistent (Shavit and Blossfeld, 1993). The same pattern of stability, with no decreasing link between social origin and educational attainment, was also found for Japan (Ishida et al, 1991, 1995; Ishida and Miwa, 2008), with its rather low level of differentiation (compulsory schooling to the age of 15) and the – for Asian countries typical – high importance of private extracurricular evening and weekend courses (‘shadow education’; Bray and Lykins, 2012). For China, with its comparably high level of standardisation with regard to the achievement-based entrance into higher education, Tam and Jiang (2014) demonstrate increasing inequalities in this regard and show that one of the maj...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: education systems and inequalities
• one Theorising the impact of education systems on inequalities
• two Comparing education policies in a globalising world: methodological reflections
• three Education systems and intersectionality
• four Measuring educational institutional diversity: tracking, vocational orientation and standardisation
• five Sorting and (much) more: prior ability, school effects and the impact of ability tracking on educational inequalities in achievement
• six Data analysis techniques to model the effects of education systems on educational inequalities
• seven Education systems and inequality based on social origins: the impact of school expansion and design
• eight Education systems and gender inequalities in educational attainment
• nine Tracking, school entrance requirements and the educational performance of migrant students
• ten From exclusion and segregation to inclusion? Dis/ability-based inequalities in the education systems of Germany and Nigeria
• eleven Education systems and meritocracy: social origin, educational and status attainment
• twelve Education systems and gender inequalities in educational returns
• thirteen Education systems and migrant-specific labour market returns
• fourteen Health returns on education and educational systems
• fifteen Good and bad education systems: is there an ideal?
• Conclusions and summary