ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the crucial importance of social justice perspectives for understanding higher education. It conceptualises social justice in higher education as a complex phenomenon which is context- and time-specific. We argue that social justice regarding participation in higher education has a multidimensional character and define the most prominent of these dimensions to be inclusion, fairness, social justice for whom, social justice where and social justice to what. This chapter provides empirical evidence about three of these dimensions – ‘inclusion for whom’, ‘fairness for whom’ and ‘social justice in terms of what’ – based on secondary data analyses from the European Social Survey and EUROSTUDENT. The results show that in the majority of the studied countries, there is a trend of inclusion over time with regard to people with either tertiary or non-tertiary education backgrounds. Our findings also demonstrate that it is more difficult to achieve the fairness aspect of social justice in higher education in comparison to its inclusion aspect. In relation to the ‘access to what’ aspect, our results reveal a stable trend, according to which involvement in different higher education degrees is more favourable for people with tertiary education backgrounds.
