Abstract
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).
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 (and also data from special Czech national surveys). 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.