ABSTRACT
Recent decades have witnessed dramatic changes in higher education systems worldwide. Many systems have experienced rapid expansion and increased diversification. In addition, given public resource constraints, many have increasingly turned to private sources of funding to support student enrollments. How have these profound changes affected inequalities in access? While inequalities could be structured with respect to a multiple broad set of factors (e.g., race, ethnicity, gender, region, etc.), we are focused in this chapter on social class background. We explore the extent to which variation in system-level characteristics of education systems is associated with differences in the likelihood that individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds will be eligible and attend higher education. We examine these relationships over time and across countries to take advantage of the variation produced by shifting world-wide changes in educational systems.
