Inequalities

Tag: higher education

  • What are elite universities for?

    What are elite universities for?

    A perennial question in higher education is whether elite institutions like Oxford and Cambridge are doing enough to recruit people from outside the traditional pool of white private-school kids. Every year we have the same conversation, and reach the same conclusion: probably not. What I didn’t realise until recently was that this debate assumes something…

  • The Immense Benefit of Applying to One More College – A Natural Experiment

    A college degree is more than a wall ornament – it represents immense financial benefits for graduates. These rewards have become even more apparent during the long financial downturn, which have seen widening wage and employment gaps between college graduates and those with only a high school degree. Studies also illustrate that getting students to…

  • Inequality Roundup, Stories in the News

    Today I want to post a roundup of some items in the news that piqued my interest, we have poverty measurement, disabilities, spending on children in the US, Medicaid and mortality, getting high schoolers to go to college, and health/income inequalities in the OECD:  “Official Poverty Measure Ignores Key Improvements in the Safety Net Since…

  • U.K.higher education: Is the social mobility argument really settled?

    Last week Ben chipped in on U.K. higher education reform. I don’t know why he avoided it until now, but I might guess it was for much the same reason that I did. The same reason I was leery of joining in the demonstrations around the tuition fee rise. The protesters had many objections, but…

  • The right protest for the wrong reasons

    Having previously kept quiet about the sharp rise in student fees in England, I finally cracked and wrote this post over at the Sociological Imagination.  In short: I think the student march was the right protest for the wrong reasons

  • Graduates, fees and welfare in Britain and Sweden

    Graduates’ protests against rising higher education fees have revealed a sleepy discontent about the impact of loans on students’ welfare, despite Timo‘s arguments in their favour. In this post, I compare loans for HE in Britain and Sweden, arguing that British system provides insufficient support – and that this directly leads to a higher level of inequality…

  • Why progressives in Europe should learn to love high tuition fees

    Timo Idema argues that graduates should pay for their own education – on fairness grounds. A recent report by the OECD finds that — on average, across OECD countries — a higher educated male’s gross earnings are 300,000 US dollars* higher than those of a lower educated male. Net of direct tuition and other costs…