Wealth-Based Disparities in Higher Education: Compounding Privilege, Multiplying Barriers

1. Introduction

This Special Issue is prompted by a confluence of developments in higher education: increasing access to postsecondary schooling overall and concurrent increasing socioeconomic inequality. After World War II, American colleges and universities began to “massify,” expanding their enrollments by opening their doors to people who previously would have found them closed. First, these institutions admitted veterans, then people of color and women (Altbach and Reisberg 2018, p. 63; Gumport et al. 1997, p. 2; Labaree 2017, pp. 106–7). The U.S. was not an outlier, and in the ensuing decades, nations around the globe saw unprecedented increases in the number of students pursuing a college degree (Trow 2001, p. 245). This growth in enrollments seemed likely to expand opportunity and potentially to reduce socioeconomic disparities as an increasing share of the population benefited from the financial opportunities associated with higher education. Yet that did not happen. Instead, dramatic increases in access to higher education have coexisted with rising levels of inequality. In fact, the level of wealth inequality among Americans today rivals that seen on the eve of World War II, shortly before the process of massification began (Piketty 2014, p. 76, fig. 1.1).

These trends, seemingly in tension, raise intriguing questions. Why and how did massification, reflecting a democratic impulse toward wider accessibility of higher education, occur alongside stratification in higher education, contributing to wealth and income inequality? How did colleges and universities successfully massify, radically expanding overall enrollment and the diffusion of higher education, even as inequality increased? Why did massification fail to disrupt inequality? Did the stratification among colleges and universities, in fact, perpetuate inequality? How did the declining role of public, direct funding of higher education—especially in the U.S.—contribute to these phenomena?

To understand these dynamics fully, we must consider the multiple ways in which wealth-based disparities shape higher education, affecting what kind of student enrolls at what kind of institution with what sort of outcome. This Special Issue begins with articles that address access to higher education. Much of the debate over wealth-based disparities in the United States focuses on access, particularly the role of persistent increases in college tuition, rising student debt burdens, and their effects on less affluent students. The cost of getting a degree can seem daunting, prompting low-income students to forego college, postpone their studies, attend college part-time, or even drop out (Sanchez et al. 2024, p. 4). Low-income students who do pursue higher education may attend college burdened by the constant worry of finding themselves homeless or hungry on campus (Broton and Goldrick-Rab 2018, p. 122; Hallett et al. 2019, pp. 8–9). These students may also feel less able to access elite social networks, in which affluence is taken as a given, that confer competitive advantages in employment after completion (Jack 2019, p. 9; Rosales et al. 2024, p. 50). Moreover, wealth-based differences can shape the lives of college students long after graduation. Students dealing with substantial educational debt may be reluctant to take on new financial obligations and so may put off potentially costly life changes, including marriage, parenthood, and homeownership (Jabbari et al. 2023, p. 2; Martinez et al. 2024, p. 9).

The challenging questions prompted by the twin phenomena of greater access and increasing inequality do not arise only in the United States. Although there is much to be learned from the American system of higher education, this Special Issue puts those lessons in an international context. Nations around the globe have sought to massify their institutions of higher education (Trow 1999, pp. 315–19). National governments have deployed different strategies to expand enrollment capacity, and these efforts have proceeded at different paces across these different contexts (Pan and Luo 2008, p. 76). Yet, these nations—like the United States—have seen connections between socioeconomic status and educational opportunity (Buckner and Abdelaziz 2023, p. 547; Ilie et al. 2021, p. 1254; Krafft and Alawode 2018, p. 31; Torche 2011, pp. 798–99).

Below, we set the stage for this volume’s work by providing a brief overview of the forces shaping access to higher education and briefly examining the trends contributing to rising inequality in the context of increasing access.

2. Massification

Massification refers to substantial growth in higher education enrollments, so that going to college is no longer the province of an elite and already privileged few (Trow 2011, p. 257). Although massified enrollments fall short of universal access, they nonetheless mean that pursuing an undergraduate degree is no longer a rarity. Nations around the world have recognized the singular importance of increasing participation in higher education to achieve economic growth and development, but they have achieved that goal in distinct ways. The United States was the first to massify, and its experience was instructive to other countries as they followed suit. That said, nations have not adopted a one-size-fits-all approach to expanding the higher education sector. There have been significant differences across national borders in how quickly the sector has grown, how much it has relied on private institutions, and how much differentiation has been tolerated among colleges and universities. Policy choices affecting these development pathways, in turn, have affected how students access higher education and whether that access improves their social mobility.

2.1. The American Experience

In the history of higher education, World War II is a pivotal moment, leading to “the Best of Times” in American higher education (Labaree 2017, p. 145). According to scholars Philip G. Altbach and Liz Reisberg, “[t]he most significant trend in global higher education since the second World War has been massification, the dramatic increase in enrollments around the world.” (Altbach and Reisberg 2018, p. 63). In the United States, before the war, only a tiny fraction of the population pursued a college degree; most of these students were privileged, white, and male (Gumport et al. 1997, p. 2). This began to change with the passage of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the GI Bill, which helped returning veterans finance a college degree (Delbanco 2012, pp. 109–10; Geiger 2019; Gumport et al. 1997, p. 2; Mettler 2014, p. 4). Congress passed the bill with assurances that few returning soldiers would take advantage of the benefit. Initially, that seemed to be the case, but when the law was amended to increase monthly stipends, allow older veterans to enroll, and permit students to take correspondence courses, enrollments grew rapidly (Geiger 2019, p. 5).

Eventually, over the 1946–1949 academic years, one million veterans took advantage of the benefit, and between 1945 and 1954, over two million attended college as a result. This is in stark contrast to a total prewar enrollment of just over one million students. In fact, veterans at one point made up about half of the college population and 70% of all male students (Geiger 2019, p. 6). Veterans mainly chose to go to private, urban universities; flagship public schools; and well-known liberal arts colleges. The strain on these institutions was tremendous, and the federal government offered assistance in the form of supplemental appropriations and surplus buildings from the Army (Geiger 2019, p. 6). Although some university leaders worried about how the influx of veterans would affect educational quality, these students proved to be dedicated and graduated at a substantially higher rate than their peers (Geiger 2019, p. 6).

The massification that resulted from the GI Bill seemed to advance social mobility—at least for the white men who were the primary beneficiaries. This manifested in the growth and spread of personal financial security. As a National Center for Postsecondary Improvement report notes, “[t]he 1950s … saw an expansion of the middle class, increasing family wealth, and the rapid development of suburban areas” (Gumport et al. 1997, p. 2). The benefits extended to future generations: “For these families, a college education became a ticket to social and economic mobility, and the children of the middle class began enrolling in higher education in increasing numbers” (Gumport et al. 1997, p. 1). In fact, historian Andrew Delbanco argues that the GI Bill helped to turn “a class divide into a generational divide” as veterans from humble backgrounds enrolled in colleges that their parents could not have imagined attending (Delbanco 2012, p. 110). At times, this could spark a certain resentment. In Arthur Miller’s 1947 play All My Sons, one character observed that you could “stand on a street corner and spit, and you’re liable to hit a college man” (Delbanco 2012, p. 110).

At the time, the GI Bill represented the nation’s single largest experiment in promoting access to higher education, but it was not the last time that college enrollments would grow dramatically. As a result of the post-war civil rights movement that began in the 1960s, federal legislation expanding access to student aid and attacking the longstanding exclusion of women and people of color led to unprecedented increases in college attendance by members of these groups (Gumport et al. 1997). As historian Roger L. Geiger wrote, this decade “was the most dynamic period in the long history of American higher education” (Geiger 2019, p. 129). Historically underrepresented groups pushed for and achieved greater access to institutions from which they had previously been excluded. For example, from 1964 to 1972, the proportion of African Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 attending college more than doubled, rising from less than 10% to 20% (Gumport et al. 1997, p. 5).

Meanwhile, with the advent of the women’s rights movement, female students began to pursue higher education at a higher rate. In the 1950s, a little over one-third of female high school graduates went on to college, compared to over half of their male counterparts. The gender gap was widest for women with middling academic ability and middling socioeconomic status. For women in this financial bracket, academic ability could boost the chances of going to college, but not as much as for a man (Geiger 2019, p. 130). These patterns began to change during the mid-1970s, as women steadily gained parity with men in terms of college enrollments (Gumport et al. 1997, p. 15). Today, women outnumber men in the student population on college campuses (Delbanco 2012, p. 16).

One other change in the composition of the college-going population is worth noting. Beginning in the 1970s, older students began to pursue higher education in larger numbers. Between 1970 and 1975, their enrollments grew by over 50%, while the number of traditional-age students stayed constant (Gumport et al. 1997, p. 15). In 1970, older students accounted for only about one-fourth of the college population, but by 1990, that figure had risen to approximately half (Gumport et al. 1997, pp. 15–16). As a result, Delbanco notes that students are often “preoccupied with the struggles of adulthood—finding or keeping a job, making or saving a marriage, doing right by one’s children” (Delbanco 2012, p. 16). For that reason, these “students experience college—in the limited sense of attending lectures, writing papers, taking exams—as a smaller part of daily life” than was true in the past (Delbanco 2012, p. 16).

When Congress enacted the GI Bill, they supported increased enrollment in higher education by providing college students with monthly stipends and by expanding the capacity of existing colleges. However, the process of massification that later took place for students of color, women, and non-traditional students looked different. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the federal government continued to provide some direct grants, but only to low-income students (Gumport et al. 1997, p. 4). In 1972, Congress created Basic Educational Opportunity Grants, which were later known as Pell grants, in recognition of the effort that Senator Claiborne Pell put into their creation. These grants covered most of the cost of tuition at public schools and around 30–40% of that cost at private institutions (Delbanco 2012, p. 115; Mettler 2014, p. 10). The grants were rooted in twin goals of “quality and equality” (Geiger 2019, p. 220). That is, federal direct aid would bolster financial resources for colleges and universities and enhance access for traditionally underrepresented groups (Geiger 2019, p. 220).

There were also funds allotted for campuses to provide financial aid through work–study programs, so long as each institution agreed to pay a small amount of matching funds. These programs first emerged as part of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958, which was designed to ensure that non-veterans with aptitude in science and technology could pursue post-secondary education and help the United States win the Cold War (Mettler 2014, pp. 57–58). The NDEA also provided low-interest federal loans for lower-income college students (Mettler 2014, p. 58). In 1965, the Higher Education Act provided expanded subsidies for low-interest loan programs. The federal government guaranteed repayment to banks offering education loans and set interest rates, making the loans more affordable (Glater 2015, p. 1598). Given that, for decades, tuition was relatively modest, students could fairly assume that the return on a college degree would allow them to pay off their obligations (Gumport et al. 1997, p. 23). Over time, these provisions for student financial aid would become “the largest source of funds for higher education.” (Geiger 2019, p. 217).

Public four-year institutions and two-year community colleges absorbed most of the burgeoning enrollment (Mettler 2014). In the 1960s, enrollments at four-year public colleges and universities grew by 142%, while those at community colleges jumped by 314% (Geiger 2019, p. 147). Existing institutions did not simply increase their capacity. Instead, between 1960 and 1970, the number of colleges and universities grew dramatically, with the founding of 521 new institutions (Gumport et al. 1997, p. 8). The number of community colleges doubled between 1960 and 1974, reflecting significant investment by state legislatures (Geiger 2019, p. 148; Gumport et al. 1997, p. 8). These colleges were locally focused and allowed students to attend part-time, recognizing that many were older and had to meet other obligations (Gumport et al. 1997, pp. 8–11). The rise of community colleges also affected access for less advantaged students. Early in the 1960s, education scholar Martin Trow observed that “where there is a local public junior college in the community, half of the boys from lower-class backgrounds went on to college, as compared with only 15% of boys from similar backgrounds … with no local college” (Trow 1962, pp. 255–56).

As the number of colleges and universities proliferated, new standards developed to classify them and allocate students among them. In 1960, the state of California adopted a “Master Plan” that directed the most academically successful students to public research universities, modestly successful students to public four-year colleges, and the remaining students to community colleges (Geiger 2019, p. 59; Gumport et al. 1997, p. 12). As Geiger notes, “By providing something for everyone, the Master Plan reflected the emerging realities of American higher education as it entered a period of accelerating growth” (Geiger 2019, p. 59). That is, massification was tempered by stratification. In 1970, the Carnegie Foundation reinforced this trend by creating a system that distinguished among doctoral-granting institutions, master’s-granting institutions, baccalaureate-granting institutions, associate of arts colleges, professional schools and specialized institutions, and tribal colleges (Delbanco 2012, p. 108; Gumport et al. 1997, p. 12). As a result of this new hierarchy in higher education, institutions began to strive to move up (Delbanco 2012, pp. 116–17).

These trends in higher education started to change in the late 1980s. During that time, federal lawmakers prioritized controlling spending, and responsibility for many social welfare programs devolved to the state and local level. At the same time, taxpayer revolts—like the one in California in 1978—limited legislatures’ ability to generate additional revenue to cover their growing costs (Labaree 2017, p. 152). Faced with these new financial pressures, states began to limit or reduce funding for higher education. State and local support peaked in 1977, comprising 57% of the higher education budget, but dropped to just 39% in 2012. Meanwhile, federal funding peaked at over 20% in 1967 and fell to only 12% in 2012 (Labaree 2017, p. 153).

To offset this drop in revenues, public institutions of higher education, which enroll the vast majority of college students in the United States, began to raise their tuition dramatically. From 1981 to 1993, the funds generated by tuition and fees more than doubled (Gumport et al. 1997, p. 26). Colleges and universities redirected some of this money into financial aid. Even so, the value proposition had changed. Students had to pay more for a degree that would generate a smaller wage premium than in previous years (Gumport et al. 1997, p. 27). During this time, the share of higher education costs that families paid rose from a low of 33% in 1977 to 49% in 2012 (Labaree 2017, p. 153).

Over time, federal direct aid to low-income students became less generous. In 1976, a Pell grant for a lower-income student would cover nearly all of the tuition at a public school, but by 2004, the grant covered less than a quarter of that cost (Delbanco 2012, p. 115). Faced with this shortfall, the most financially vulnerable students often found their path to a college diploma interrupted by the need to work to pay for tuition, fees, and living expenses. Low-income students, students of color, and older students often dropped out before completing a degree (Gumport et al. 1997, pp. 31–33). Many of those who graduated finished with increasing amounts of debt, a trend that has only grown over time.

As costs increased, the federal government’s student loan program took on new significance. Initially, Congress intended for the program’s subsidized, low-interest loans to serve as a “backstop” for students who needed additional funds (Geiger 2019, p. 281). By 1978, these loans had begun to assume greater importance in financing higher education, and by 2010, substantial numbers of undergraduates were borrowing money to finance their degrees. That year, total student debt was more than ten times higher than in 1979 (Geiger 2019, p. 282). The result was what Geiger describes as “a loan culture in which many students became routinely dependent on loans to meet a portion of their educational expenses, and institutions became dependent on those monies for tuition” (Geiger 2019, p. 282).

As education scholar Patricia Gumport and her colleagues conclude:

Beginning in the late 1980s, there were visible signs of an erosion of support for American higher education, as it increasingly became perceived as an individual good, rather than a public good. Students and parents began to question the value of higher education’s expensive credentials, particularly since the return on—though not the necessity of—a college degree eroded in the American job market. Economic retrenchment, the rise of market forces, and increased competition for declining public appropriations have also eroded the foundation upon which higher education has flourished in the decades after World War II.

(Gumport et al. 1997, p. 23)

In short, in the postwar era, the number of college graduates every year was far greater than in the prewar era, but the terms of the educational experience changed: amidst criticism of its cost and its results, the golden years of higher education in the United States were coming to an end (Labaree 2017, p. 181). While some education scholars hope that the rise of technology and online education offerings will counter these developments and create new forms of access to higher education (Guri-Rosenblit et al. 2007, p. 16; Trow 1999, p. 321; Trow 2011, p. 254), the future of distance learning remains uncertain, particularly given the predatory behavior of for-profit, virtual universities (Mettler 2014, p. 35).

2.2. The International Experience

Although the United States was the first nation to massify its higher education enrollments, other nations have pursued similar efforts to expand access (Trow 1999, p. 303). However, the reform trajectories in these countries have varied depending on the overall level of education in the population as well as the infrastructure used to deliver higher education. Some nations have tried to preserve a tradition of public colleges and universities, while others have turned to the private sector to support rapid growth in enrollments. Countries have also differed in their tolerance for disparities in the nature and quality of higher education institutions.

Europe. In Europe, the expansion of colleges and universities took place more slowly because of a commitment to public higher education (Orange 2017, p. 112; Pan and Luo 2008, p. 69). These national schools were mainly designed to train political, intellectual, and professional elites (Guri-Rosenblit et al. 2007, p. 12). Even today, the share of European students served by private institutions remains small (Pan and Luo 2008, p. 69).

Because of the institutions’ public nature, capacity-building depended on government resources, which could be scarce (Trow 1999, p. 304). Moreover, many European nations were reluctant to charge tuition, given a tradition of free access to colleges and universities (Pan and Luo 2008, p. 70; Trow 1999, p. 304; Wolter 2017; Yudkevich 2017). As a result, “per capita support for university students declined in almost every European country during the rapid expansion of enrollments over the past quarter century, in some cases dramatically.” (Trow 1999, p. 317). At the same time, free tuition did not ensure broad access. For instance, Eastern European countries refused to charge tuition, but rates of participation remained low, with only 11% to 23% of the population attending college, until the 1990s (Guri-Rosenblit et al. 2007, p. 12).

Latin America. In recent decades, Latin American countries have witnessed a rapid massification of higher education (Pan and Luo 2008, pp. 70–71). Some countries began with only limited college and university systems to build on. In Brazil, for instance, until the 1930s, there were only isolated schools that provided mostly professional training (Balbachevsky and Sampaio 2017, p. 131). The first universities merged these professional schools with new faculties of philosophy, science, and the humanities. After the mergers, the schools still focused mainly on teaching, not research (Balbachevsky and Sampaio 2017, pp. 131–32). Only in 1968 did major reforms lead to the development of modern universities with graduate and research programs (Balbachevsky and Sampaio 2017, p. 132).

The quick expansion of higher education in Latin America was possible due to a willingness to allow the private education sector to grow significantly (Pan and Luo, 2008, pp. 71–72). In addition, both public and private schools were willing to charge tuition to enhance institutional resources and serve more students (Pan and Luo 2008, pp. 72–73). For example, in Chile, there were just eight universities in 1980, most of them private. In 1980 and 1981, the new laws allowed for the development of additional private universities. The laws also authorized two new types of higher education institutions: professional institutes and technical training centers (Bernasconi and Sevilla 2017, p. 141). Professional institutes could issue two- or four-year degrees, while training centers were limited to two-year programs (Bernasconi and Sevilla 2017, p. 141). The resulting growth in higher education was tremendous. At the peak of the expansion, there were 60 universities, 70 professional institutes, and 161 technical training institutes (Bernasconi and Sevilla 2017, p. 143). However, some professional and training institutes were in precarious financial shape, and these institutions sometimes merged, reducing the total number of schools. Even so, enrollments kept growing, and the gap in college-going between affluent and disadvantaged students shrank (Bernasconi and Sevilla 2017, pp. 143–44).

This rapid growth provoked concerns about institutional quality (Pan and Luo 2008, p. 73). Again, Chile’s experience is illuminating. There, the system of higher education is segmented and stratified (Espinoza et al. 2023, p. 540). This has led to what educational researchers describe as “massification without equality” (Espinoza et al. 2023, p. 536). Because the nation’s system of secondary education is marked by “high levels of academic and social segregation,” high schools provide students with different training and expectations regarding opportunities in higher education. High-income families can invest more in preparing their children in private high schools to pursue a college degree (Espinoza et al. 2023, p. 544). According to Professor Oscar Espinoza and his colleagues, in this segregated and segmented system, “education, both at the secondary and tertiary level, functions to socialize and distinguish the elites, closing out other groups” (Espinoza et al. 2023, p. 545).

Asia. The only region in the world that has outpaced Latin America in terms of growth in higher education enrollment is Asia. By 2003, Asia had eclipsed North America and Europe with respect to the number of students pursuing a college degree, becoming “the epicenter of global higher education” (Calderon 2018, p. 8). Even so, the percentage of the population pursuing a diploma remains below that of Europe and North America (Calderon 2018, p. 8). China has had the highest level of enrollment, followed by Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, and Thailand (Calderon 2018, p. 8). A few countries, including Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, have yet to see gains in higher education enrollments (Calderon 2018, p. 8).

As in Latin America, the rapid growth in Asia has been facilitated by heavy reliance on private colleges and universities. In addition to public support, tuition has generated substantial revenues for institutions of public higher education (Agarwal 2017, p. 77; Pan and Luo 2008, pp. 72–73). The case of China is especially revealing. Since 1999, gross enrollment rates in higher education have more than quadrupled, from 9.8% in 1998 to 24.2% in 2009 (Liu 2012, p. 650). To enable this dramatic growth, the government eliminated a longstanding policy of free tuition, recharacterized a college degree as a private good, and embarked on an experiment in cost-sharing (Liu 2012, p. 653; Wang 2017, p. 98). Tuition became an important source of revenue, and for students in rural provinces, the cost was often prohibitive (Liu 2012). Some government financial aid programs, including low-interest loans, were established. However, they were not available at all institutions and were often inadequate sources of support. Private banks administered these programs and preferred to offer loans to students at elite schools, even though those at non-elite institutions had greater need (Liu 2012, p. 654).

During this period of expansion, the “disparities in terms of quality and prestige between elite and non-elite institutions significantly widened, which greatly intensified the competition for admission into elite universities” (Liu 2012, p. 655). Recently established private schools typically have the lowest status, are less selective, and charge higher fees than public institutions (Liu 2012, p. 655). In response to these disparities, China established independent colleges, which are affiliated with public universities. These colleges rank below public schools in prestige, receive almost no government funding, and rely heavily on tuition (Liu 2012, p. 656; Wang 2017, p. 71). Even so, they can provide a desirable alternative to wholly private institutions. To date, the stratification in the higher education system correlates significantly with social class (Liu 2012, p. 656; Mok and Jiang 2016, pp. 7–11). That is, “students from socially, culturally, and economically advantaged backgrounds enjoyed more opportunities in elite universities.” (Liu 2012, p. 656).

This has led scholars Ka Ho Mok and Jin Jiang to conclude that “higher education expansion (at mass level) may actually increase inequality, particularly when inter-generational transfer of assets and resources—not necessarily in monetary terms but encompassing other forms of support like social and cultural capital—have affected higher education admissions, prospective job opportunities and, eventually, upward social mobility” (Mok and Jiang 2016, p. 24). In their view, massification decreases the value of a college degree on the job market, and competition has increased not only for a place at a prestigious school but also for post-graduate employment. Families with resources help their children gain admission to more desirable schools and then assist them in getting jobs through social contacts (Mok and Jiang 2016, pp. 10–11, 20).

Africa. One part of the world that continues to lag significantly behind other regions in higher education enrollments is Africa (Calderon 2018, p. 11). Among the Arab states, the number of college students has remained steady for decades. The nations with the highest enrollments are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria. Some countries have seen increased diversification in their colleges and universities, but substantial obstacles remain to achieving significant growth in the coming decades (Calderon 2018, p. 10). The Egyptian experience is instructive, given the country’s efforts to massify. In 1959, a constitutional amendment made education a right that was free at all levels. The system of public universities expanded from four institutions in the 1950s to twenty-three in 2016 (Said 2017, p. 35). Unfortunately, that growth was not accompanied by significant investment in the educational infrastructure, leading to problems of overcrowding and declining quality. These difficulties intensified after the government guaranteed a job in the public sector to all university graduates in 1963, and demand for degrees grew accordingly (Said 2017, p. 36). Eventually, the Egyptian Parliament allowed for the establishment of private, for-profit universities, and public universities started to operate parallel, fee-based programs. The diversification of the higher education system eased some concerns about the trade-offs between massification and educational quality, but challenges have persisted (Said 2017, pp. 36, 39–40).

In sub-Saharan Africa, higher education enrollments continue to lag substantially behind the rest of the world. Countries with the largest enrollments in this region are Nigeria, South Africa, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ghana (Calderon 2018, p. 11). Ghana’s experience illustrates some of the challenges for massification in this region. In 1990, there were just a few public universities, and the admissions process was highly competitive (Afeti 2017, p. 44). Seats were scarce, even though “only 7.2% of primary school students continue to access postsecondary education” due to high dropout rates in elementary and secondary school (Afeti 2017, p. 45).

To meet the demand for higher education, in 1993, the government began allowing private colleges and universities—a number of them for-profit enterprises (Afeti 2017, p. 46)—to operate. In the ensuing years, the number of students enrolled in these institutions far surpassed that at public schools. By 2014–2015, public colleges and universities served only 30% of enrolled students and represented 35% of all institutions of higher education (Afeti 2017, p. 47). Although the public higher education sector remains small, it suffers from perennial underfunding. Even after the expansion of higher education, enrollments among some historically underrepresented groups remain low. Women, students in poorly resourced secondary schools, and those in rural or deprived areas are significantly underrepresented. To assist in ensuring greater equity in admissions, Ghana has lowered the competitive admission threshold for these groups so long as they satisfy minimum entry requirements (Afeti 2017, p. 48). Although Ghana has been committed to massifying higher education, significant inequities persist in terms of institutional quality and access for disadvantaged students.

Summary. As shown by this brief history of massification in the United States and around the world, there has been nearly universal recognition of the need to expand access to higher education both to promote economic development and to advance individual opportunity. Nations often have been willing to rely on the private sector to expand enrollments by achieving rapid growth in capacity. While this flexibility increases the speed at which massification takes place, it can lead to considerable variation in cost and quality among institutions of higher education. As a result, access and completion alone do not ensure student success. Instead, stratification and segmentation among schools can maintain patterns of inequality. Students of limited means are more likely than their affluent peers to enroll in colleges and universities that enjoy less prestige, have lower graduation rates, and often cost more. Moreover, these disadvantaged students graduate with degrees that may be less valuable in the marketplace. We address these patterns of stratification and their role in perpetuating inequities in the next section.

3. Stratification

As higher education in the United States experienced a massive expansion in enrollment in the decades after World War II, the institutional environment shifted, growing first to accommodate the influx of veterans and then increasingly diverse waves of students of all kinds, including far more members of groups historically excluded from higher education (Mettler 2014, pp. 6–7). Congress did not, at the time, identify promotion of income equality as a goal of the G.I. Bill, even though it clearly advanced greater access to higher education. Instead, lawmakers were concerned about the same kind of labor glut and resulting unrest that had occurred when veterans returned to the United States after World War I (Dickson and Allen 2006, p. 269). However, looking back, there would have been good reason to view massification as an equality-enhancing policy. Consider some trends that have held for decades: higher education correlates with a higher income and greater likelihood of employment (National Center for Education Statistics 2024, fig. 1), as well as better health and such intangibles as greater civic participation and that most elusive of indicators, happiness (McMahon 2009, pp. 20, 46, 146). Economists have confirmed these correlations essentially worldwide and have found them to be durable over time (Patrinos and Psacharopoulos 2018).

Given such trends, it is not surprising that today, many scholars and policymakers offer higher incomes as a dominant justification for policy interventions promoting access to higher education and propose the expansion of this access as a means to address socioeconomic inequality (Piketty 2014, p. 687). The intuition is straightforward: if completion of higher education correlates with a higher income and if higher education is increasingly available to students from poorer backgrounds, then it is logical to expect that as more students from poor backgrounds earn higher incomes, overall inequality should decline (Bergh and Fink 2008, p. 217). As we noted at the outset, the problem is that history does not support this intuition. Access to higher education has indeed increased dramatically, and yet, so has socioeconomic inequality.

Rising inequality is a global phenomenon (Piketty 2014, p. 686). Research has documented the trend both in terms of income inequality and wealth inequality (Qureshi 2023). In recent decades the share of income earned by those in the top tenth of the income distribution has increased significantly in the United States, as well as in China, India, and Russia (Qureshi 2023); in the U.S., the top twenty percent of the income distribution takes in more than half of total income and those in the top five percent take in nearly one quarter of the total (Guzman and Kollar 2024, p. 7).

Wealth inequality has similarly increased, with ownership of capital increasingly concentrated, and this concentration perpetuates itself as wealth is passed from one generation to the next (Piketty 2014, p. 664). In the United States, disparities in wealth correlate with other aspects of identity and reflect longstanding socioeconomic status: White people have experienced significantly greater growth in wealth than Black and Latinx people, and the gap has been widening for decades (Brown et al. 2024). Disparities in income help to explain the differences in the rates of wealth accumulation across racial and ethnic groups, which compound the long-established advantages conferred by explicitly discriminatory laws and practices that in the past limited the accumulation of capital by members of disfavored groups (Brown et al. 2024). Overall, rising wealth inequality is characteristic of many economies, but even as inequality within many nations has increased, disparities across nations have declined (Qureshi 2023; Zucman 2019, p. 111). Addressing global inequality may thus require distinct policy interventions in diverse domestic contexts.

3.1. The American Experience

One reason that widening access to higher education, even with its correlate of higher earnings, has not reduced inequality is stratification both among (and within) postsecondary institutions and among students who attend them. Stratification reflects differentiation among institutions based on educational quality, reputation, and the prospective status of graduates (Bertolin 2023, p. 190; Jin 2022, pp. 2241–42). As higher education scholar Simon Marginson has written, accessibility of higher education alone does not guarantee equality of opportunity, let alone outcomes, because “not all participation is equivalent” (Marginson 2016, p. 17). Stratification entails differentiation among colleges and universities: the most prestigious institutions yield experiences and outcomes that are superior (Hamilton et al. 2024, p. 482). Members of more privileged groups typically attend the highest-status institutions, while members of less privileged groups typically attend lower-status institutions. Even within the same institution, members of privileged groups may be more likely to pursue programs of study that lead to more lucrative employment opportunities.

Members of elite groups hoard opportunities, in other words, and in so doing limit the impact of massification (Hamilton et al. 2024, pp. 24.2–24.3). Concurrently with massification, stratification has led to the development of a hierarchy among colleges and universities (Labaree 2017, p. 80), placing the most highly resourced colleges and universities, which enjoy the greatest opportunities to invest in research and scholarship, at the top of the higher education pecking order. An important implication of this process has been the need to sort people—students, faculty, and administrators—across these institutions, with candidates for admission or employment seeking to enroll or work, respectively, at the most prestigious institutions. As a result of stratification, then, mass access to higher education has not necessarily entailed greater equality. Rather, attributes of higher education that are not subject to massification—the specific institution attended and the course of study pursued, for example—assume greater importance. Membership in the elite has meant not only obtaining higher education but obtaining the right education, ideally at one of a select group of better-resourced colleges and universities.

A shortcoming of a macro-level analysis of inequality is its failure to take into account the various reasons that people who are members of historically disadvantaged groups have less: differential experiences of racial subordination and discrimination, as well as gendered exclusion from opportunities to participate in wealth accumulation (Moeller 2016, p. 818). These differential experiences affect both the accessibility of higher education and the potential outcomes subsequent to obtaining higher education. Systems of higher education around the world exhibit similar patterns, and one consequence is the enrollment of less privileged people in educational programs that may provide technical skills without putting students on pathways to higher incomes and greater political and cultural influence (Novelli 2016, p. 855). The schools that provide educational opportunities that lead to superior careers may enroll far fewer students from less privileged backgrounds. Certainly, that is the pattern in the United States, where students from high-income families are disproportionately admitted to the most selective and prestigious institutions (Chetty et al. 2023, p. 2).

Stratification means that even as more people access higher education, which has long been touted as the engine of socioeconomic mobility and greater equality (Piketty 2014, p. 686; Haveman and Smeeding 2006, p. 126), inequality can survive and even worsen. The coexistence of massification and stratification means that people who are members of groups who were previously deprived of access to higher education and who reside in a nation that also has historically lacked the political will or the financial capacity to expand such access are disadvantaged both relative to more privileged domestic peers and relative to peers in wealthier nations, “reproduc[ing] social and global stratification” (Novelli 2016, p. 851).

Stratification among colleges and universities has been facilitated by patterns of wealth accumulation among institutions. Increased government spending on both accessibility and research enhanced the resources and prestige of institutions that entered the postwar period with greater wealth, a category including some of the oldest colleges and universities in the Western world. Because of differing degrees of support across the states within the U.S., the trajectories of public institutions also differed, with a few public systems reaching the pinnacle of the hierarchy as a result of more generous state funding. Included in this group were the systems in California and Michigan, for example. Declining public subsidies to these institutions, not surprisingly, have affected both the nature of the educational experience they can offer and their accessibility to students who require financial aid to manage the rising cost of a degree (Moran 2017, p. 99).

The stratification phenomenon has consequences for the college experience of students from working-class backgrounds who gain a coveted spot in a highly selective institution (Jack 2019, p. 9), and not just in the United States. In the United Kingdom, for example, scholars have identified similar patterns, finding that students from working-class backgrounds confront a number of hidden and informal barriers to success on elite campuses (Reay 2021, p. 1). Experts on the history and political economy of higher education policy in the United States have found that both formal and informal mechanisms steer students who are members of historically disfavored groups to colleges and universities that are less well-resourced and associated with worse outcomes (Moran 2017, pp. 90–91). In addition, these students often enroll in less promising programs of study within a given college or university (Hamilton et al. 2024, pp. 24.13–24.14). It is difficult to overstate the significance of these observations, which have two important ramifications. First, students who are members of historically marginalized groups—in the United States, Black and Latinx students in particular—may be disadvantaged relative to members of more privileged groups despite having achieved the same level of education because of differences in the institutions they attended. Second, students who attend the same institution, but who belong to differentially privileged groups, will reap dissimilar benefits from attendance as a result of differences in the characteristics of their programs of study. These disadvantages reinforce others, such as disparities in graduation rates and wages. Inequality thus persists alongside access.

Not surprisingly, stratification means that higher education outcomes may not alleviate inequality. What Philip Brown calls the “inconvenient truth” found by sociologists studying socioeconomic mobility in the postwar era is that improving socioeconomic circumstances and a degree of reduction in inequality reflect structural characteristics of expanding economies rather than the effects of greater educational opportunity (Brown 2013, pp. 678–79). Higher education may confer some quantum of economic benefit on graduates, but because the size of the benefit can vary according to the characteristics of the institution and those of the student, mass access does not necessarily produce greater relative equality (Tarlau 2016, p. 863).

A striking consequence of the parallel trends of massification and stratification is the persistence of inequality along traditional lines. In the United States, for example, race remains highly salient: Black and Latinx students disproportionately attend institutions that are less prestigious, have fewer financial resources, and are associated with worse outcomes for students (Hamilton et al. 2024, pp. 24.11–24.12). This result does not require explicitly racist policies but can be achieved through facially neutral practices, such as requiring applicants for admission to take standardized tests on which Black and Latinx students tend to perform less well. Spending less on public higher education, the pathway pursued by the vast majority of students in the United States, also disproportionately disadvantages these same students, who tend to have greater financial need because their families have far fewer opportunities to earn higher incomes and accumulate wealth. These students are less likely to gain admission to and enroll at the most elite and expensive private, nonprofit colleges and universities. Studies of state spending on public universities have indeed found that it has failed to keep pace with rising student populations and their increasing needs, which in turn perpetuates historical disparities in life opportunities (Moran 2017, pp. 89–91; Moran 2022, pp. 610–11).

3.2. The International Experience

Although the forms taken by stratification in different countries have differed, the same trends are evident worldwide: more students attend institutions of higher education, but distinctions among the institutions attended work to preserve inequality. This pattern often persists despite public subsidies that reduce the cost of higher education to near zero; a free, public institution that accepts very few students, most of whom are members of the local elite, will do little to promote socioeconomic mobility and thus equality. Various scholars have identified and analyzed this pattern (Hout 2006, p. 238; Lucas 2001, p. 1652).

Europe. As they have elsewhere, scholars studying enrollment patterns in higher education across Europe have found that students with more privileged backgrounds are more likely to enroll at more prestigious and selective universities (Triventi 2013, p. 491). Even as more students have access to higher education, spots at the most desirable institutions and opportunities for better postgraduate jobs both correlate with student social background. This pattern is especially notable in those European countries characterized by a wider spread of higher education opportunities and, consequently, greater competition in the labor market among university graduates (Triventi 2013, p. 492). These patterns rest on differences among institutions, differences among programs of study, different levels of programs of study (i.e., type of degree granted, such as two-year or four-year), and such intangible characteristics as prestige and reputation (Teichler 2008, p. 355). For example, some countries, including the United Kingdom and Germany, developed new institutional types with distinct missions to accommodate growing numbers of students (Teichler 2008, p. 360; Gross et al. 2016, pp. 14–15; Wolter 2017, pp. 103–5). But, again, the more established universities maintained their more elite reputation and their greater inclusion of more privileged students. This result is consistent with the decades-old analysis of Pierre Bourdieu and other sociologists who have built on his insight that people from more privileged backgrounds benefit from accumulated cultural capital, as well as financial resources (Lucas 2001, p. 1650; Bourdieu 1986, p. 246). Consequently, elites are better equipped to compete successfully for limited spots in more desirable institutions and to make the most of those opportunities once obtained (Bourdieu 1986, pp. 249–50; Gross et al. 2016, pp. 21–22).

Latin America. Across Latin America, massification has occurred in several nations alongside and through the expansion of private institutions of higher education (Brunner and Labraña 2020, p. 35). In some countries, including Brazil, Mexico, and Chile, the government has taken steps to promote access to higher education for those who have been historically excluded, including members of indigenous groups, people with disabilities, and people with darker skin (Chiroleu and Marquina 2017, pp. 149–50). In Brazil, Colombia, and Chile, most students are enrolled at private institutions (Chiroleu and Marquina 2017, p. 146, tbl. 1; Pitton and Britez 2009, p. 459). Despite public subsidies in Chile to support students at public and private institutions, students who are more privileged tend to go to private universities that are more selective (Espinoza et al. 2023, p. 540). In Argentina, the vast majority of students attend public universities funded by the state; Mexico has a similar tradition of free, public higher education, but entry exams restrict access to those universities regarded as more elite (Chiroleu and Marquina 2017, pp. 145–46). However, “[o]verall and in practice, the majority of students study at teaching-only universities and non-university higher education institutions that are less selective and, therefore, have a lower unit cost—these being the only ones that can guarantee mass and eventually universal access, including young people from lower socioeconomic groups” (Brunner and Labraña 2020, p. 38). Degrees from institutions regarded as lower quality, which are attended by members of groups that historically experienced less access to higher education, do not confer the same socioeconomic benefits in the labor market as those awarded by more prestigious institutions (Chiroleu and Marquina 2017, pp. 141–42). In this way, preexisting socioeconomic inequality has persisted despite the expansion of enrollment to include historically disadvantaged students.

Concomitant with the rise in newer universities focused on meeting rising demand for higher education, there have been changes in the role, real and perceived, of the university in society. According to critical observers, broadening access means more students obtain a higher education, but their objective is career-oriented. The result is a shift away from defining the university as a social actor advocating for the public good. The university’s institutional role is limited to providing remunerative skills (Bernasconi 2008, p. 43). Not only, then, are more privileged students attending more selective schools, which are also the universities that are more established and closer to the “politically committed” model, but they are also exposed to a distinct vision of what higher education is for and what responsibilities it confers.

Asia. In different countries in Asia, including China and Taiwan, studies have found that the quality of education is lower for those who are not members of the elite or who do not gain access to elite institutions (Tight 2023, p. 167). In China, access to educational opportunities at all levels has expanded, but inequality has also persisted, largely along a rural–urban axis (Guo and Wu 2008, pp. 30–31). In both China and Taiwan, private higher education providers, which have proliferated in order to accommodate rising numbers of students, are generally less prestigious than public institutions (Liu 2012, p. 655; Chou and Wang 2012, pp. 16–18). One development that has facilitated this is the rising cost of college; Mok and Jiang (2016, p. 9) find that parental education levels play a significant role in college attendance by children. Lenders that provide student loans in China prefer borrowers who attend more elite institutions, contributing to inequality (Liu 2012, p. 654). A similar hierarchy exists in India, where the most elite institutions are attended by just one percent of students (Agarwal 2017, p. 74).

Africa. Across Africa, enrollment in institutions of higher education has increased steadily, if unevenly, in absolute terms, but the share of the population that has benefited remains low (Mohamedbhai 2014, p. 64, tbl. 2). In sub-Saharan Africa in particular, higher education has not reached the massification stage (Lebeau and Oanda 2020, p. 1). Reasons for these patterns are enormously complex and reflect the complicated history of higher education in different countries, often shaped by colonial interventions that deliberately restricted opportunity, which in turn complicate efforts to promote greater fairness in access.

Familiar patterns of stratification are evident in various nations—again, shaped by their particular domestic contexts. The most extreme illustration may be South Africa, where access has inevitably been shaped by years of de jure segregation on the basis of race (McKeever 2023, p. 2). Although the demise of the apartheid regime and the advent of democracy have allowed greater access, the quality of higher education now available is far from uniform, and in any event has not served those who were educated in the prior period. This lack of adequate or sufficiently effective education, in turn, results in poorer employment opportunities and thus helps perpetuate longstanding inequality along lines of race (McKeever 2023, pp. 7–8; Wildschut et al. 2019, p. 975). The unequal availability of better education opportunities is a hallmark of stratification.

A helpful overview of scholarship by Lebeau and Oanda identifies four general trends across higher education in Africa: the creation of more capacity in institutions through the conversion of midlevel institutes into public universities; the establishment of more private universities; the uneven geographic distribution of public and private universities, contributing to a rural–urban access gap; and the emergence of stratification among academic programs along the lines of prestige or content, which places certain programs, such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) above others, such as humanities (Lebeau and Oanda 2020, p. 7–8). The ability of institutions of higher education to absorb a growing number of secondary school graduates has been limited by space constraints, which is consistent with a model of stratification in which elites capture scarce and precious opportunities, but post-secondary student bodies are more socioeconomically diverse than such a model might suggest (Lebeau and Oanda 2020, p. 8). In some countries, growth in the private higher education sector has enabled access for a growing number of students; however, if the quality of newer, private institutions is lower than that of established universities, then they serve to perpetuate inequality, as students with more privileged backgrounds seize spots at more prestigious institutions (Wahab 2025). Exacerbating these distinctions, new institutions offer more educational programs that are narrowly focused on industry-specific training than established schools (Ndulu 2004, p. 74).

Although public universities in many countries are heavily subsidized by the state and so may charge no tuition, such publicly funded education ends up subsidizing access for students of more privileged backgrounds, who benefit from stronger preparation received at secondary schools with greater resources (Mohamedbhai 2014, p. 69). Contributing to these trends are simple capacity constraints that limit the number of students that institutions can manage and educate effectively. Paradoxically, the quality of education at institutions of higher education that, by policy or happenstance, are most accessible may suffer, leading to lower graduation rates and inequality in employment opportunities (Mohamedbhai 2014, p. 71).

Summary. Even a brief review of the literature on stratification makes it clear that this phenomenon can and has undermined the achievement of reductions in inequality that are often offered as a justification for providing greater access and more generous public funding to higher education. As a result, compelling analyses of rising inequality that posit education as a remedy but do not engage with the nuance and complexity of the sector fail to offer a complete prescription. Any effort to address inequality through education must take into account the development of mass access, increased stratification, and the third phenomenon we must address: privatization.

4. Privatization

Complicating both the expansion of access to higher education and the rise of hierarchies among institutions and students has been a trend toward increasing privatization. Although scholars agree that privatization constitutes a pervasive shift in this sector, what they mean by the term can vary (Hicklin Fryar 2012, p. 521; McClure et al. 2020, p. 4). One definition that has the appeal of susceptibility to empirical, quantifiable assessment rests on funding: privatization refers to declining public financial support of higher education and a corresponding expansion of the role of private sector financial support (Hicklin Fryar 2012, p. 523) and potentially of private sector, for-profit providers of higher education. Such private support need not take the form of philanthropy; institutions of higher education themselves engage in revenue-seeking activity just as private, for-profit entities in the private sector do: by selling services to business entities, developing technologies that produce new income streams, and investing in outside businesses or financial markets directly. Revenue-seeking behavior blurs the distinction between nonprofit and public colleges or universities, on the one hand, and for-profit businesses, on the other. These phenomena complicate the definition of privatization by expanding the concept to encompass business-like behavior and adoption of a revenue-seeking, “commercial mindset” (Abrams 2018, pp. 11–12).

Privatization has multiple dimensions; a helpful literature review on the phenomenon by Kevin R. McClure et al. identifies four associated processes: commercialization, corporatization, marketization, and financialization (McClure et al. 2020, p. 6). Commercialization refers to engagement by an institution of higher education in particular activities because they produce revenue, such as developing and supporting companies to sell products enabled by research or expanding instructional offerings online to draw in additional students (McClure et al. 2020, p. 7, tbl. 1). Corporatization typically refers to the adoption of a corporate, for-profit governance structure, rather than a “shared governance” model that gives greater voice to faculty (McClure et al. 2020, p. 7, tbl. 1).

Marketization attempts to capture the diverse ways that market characteristics, such as a focus on competition, efficiency, quality, and cost, increasingly shape institutions of higher education. Marketization might reflect an institutional effort to diversify financial resources to avoid excessive reliance on government funding, for example. In addition, it could relate to developing strategies and tactics to compete more effectively against other institutions in a putative contest for students, instructors, researchers, administrators, grant funding, or other desirable assets (Marginson 2013, pp. 354–55, 357). This aspect of privatization has important implications for students, who are consumers choosing a product in this imagined, competitive marketplace: in such a commercial transaction, both sides are constrained by revenue and risk tolerance. These constraints have many, often subtle, knock-on effects, such as creating pressure on universities to rely more heavily on part-time instructors (Ehrenberg 2006, pp. 48–49) and likely prompting students to weigh factors like the incomes associated with graduation from certain institutions and employment options following graduation with different majors more heavily (Dickler 2023). Student choices of major, in turn, may reflect the information they have, meaning that their selections reflect their cultural capital at the time of the decision. This reinforces preexisting advantages and exacerbates stratification within the student population.

Finally, financialization refers to what may be the most subtle aspect of privatization: the increased significance to institutional operations of financial transactions and people who work in the financial sector (Eaton et al. 2016, p. 3). Consider, for example, the importance to a private, nonprofit university of the effective management of an endowment to maximize the return on its investments, which provide, in turn, an additional revenue stream. More subtly still, there are the values, in dollars and cents, that financialization requires: is investing in a new program of study “worth it”—do its benefits outweigh its costs by a sufficient margin—to the institution? Should a college or university finance itself with debt, and if so, on what terms (Eaton et al. 2016, pp. 4–5)? Nor are these financial considerations limited to colleges and universities; the cost of higher education, the opportunity cost of time spent pursuing higher education rather than employment, the cost of debt to finance higher education, and potential compensation after completion of higher education all affect potential students’ assessment of whether and where to enroll. Put in simple terms, the need for institutions and students alike to find ways to pay to provide or receive education forces increasing attention to the financial costs and benefits of any action.

All four aspects of privatization have in common an indifference to any intrinsic good of education, the public good generally, the democracy-enhancing effects of wider dispersion of education opportunity, or the contribution of the university to basic knowledge (Lieberwitz 2004, pp. 777–78). Indeed, a final attribute of privatization that perhaps deserves more attention is the resulting, exclusive focus on aspects or results of higher education that are subject to quantitative assessment.

4.1. Effects on Students

Privatization plays an important, complex role both in the process of massification and the process of stratification, but that role varies depending on context. Expansion of enrollment in the absence of greater government subsidy puts pressure on institutions to find additional revenue streams, an aspect of privatization; larger enrollments provide revenues that institutional leaders must allocate, applying some often-unspecified normative framework that justifies the choices made. Colleges and universities may pursue the provision of amenities that students want, which confer an advantage in their competition for student customers. Increasing the resources available for financial aid may entail raising the price paid by better-off students, treating more privileged students themselves as revenue streams. The values inherent in privatization affect, and some might say infect, every institutional choice. In the United States, the publicly stated “sticker price” of attending a four-year undergraduate program—as opposed to the individual, net price after applying any financial aid from the government or the institution—has risen steadily over the past three decades (Ma et al. 2024, p. 12). Although private, nonprofit institutions charge much higher prices than public schools (nearly four times higher on average, according to the College Board), the sticker price of attending a public institution in the United States has risen more in terms of percentage (Ma et al. 2024, p. 12).

The pursuit of nongovernmental revenue has other consequences for institutional behavior and culture. Institutions of higher education adopt the values of the marketplace, weighing the “return on investment” of offering a new degree, for example (Kelchen and Barrett 2025, pp. 3–4). Institutional financial resources come to drive decisions. In this way, the education provided becomes a commodity that institutions sell, with students in the role of consumers. Students come to view education as a commodity, too—an investment in higher lifetime incomes (Williams 2016, pp. 132–33)—thus reinforcing the process of commodification. One effect of privatization, therefore, is greater emphasis placed on the private benefits that higher education generates for universities and students alike (Labaree 1997, pp. 42–43), while another may be the reinforcement of belief in the propriety of suboptimal public financial support for higher education overall (McMahon 2015, pp. 414–15). As higher education comes to be accepted as a private good, justifying public expenditure to promote greater access becomes increasingly difficult; paying to help someone else to earn more money is a tough sell.

Yet the greater the share of the cost of higher education that is borne by students, the greater the risk that the increasing sticker price will deter students of lesser means from enrolling. Many of those who are not discouraged must take on the financial risk of debt, which in turn undermines the economic benefit of higher wages typically associated with higher education and punishes those who fail to graduate. Rising prices, then, favor that segment of the population that can more easily afford to pay. Compounding the disadvantage to less privileged students is the expansion of access to higher education in the form of for-profit institutions, which are often more expensive than their public rivals (Ma et al. 2024, p. 10, tbl. CP-1), provide smaller benefits to students who graduate (Cellini and Turner 2018, p. 2), and fail to achieve graduation rates comparable to their public and private, nonprofit peers (National Center for Education Statistics 2022, fig. 1) Students from the wealthiest families are dramatically overrepresented at private, nonprofit institutions that are among the world’s richest (Chetty et al. 2020, p. 1569). At the same time, because graduation rates are highest at these elite colleges and universities and lower everywhere else—especially at for-profit institutions (National Center for Education Statistics 2022, fig. 1)—the risk of failing to graduate is greater for those less privileged students who enroll elsewhere. In short, the wealthiest, most prestigious, and most expensive colleges and universities, which have raised their prices to the highest levels, disproportionately enroll the wealthiest students and give them an educational experience that few other institutions can match. While it is also true that the high-achieving students of modest means who gain admission to these schools (Chetty et al. 2020, p. 1569) may receive financial aid that puts a comparable educational experience in reach, they are few.

Clearly, one consequence of privatization is the treatment of students themselves as costs, both in that they require resources as part of the transaction between school and student, and in that some of them require additional financial support in order to enroll. Students are also treated as benefits, in that they provide revenue that helps pay for the institution. This conceptualization of the student and the relationship between student and university or college does not attend to the intellectual needs of the former or the public mission of the latter. A focus on finance has powerful, pervasive, and ultimately corrosive effects.

4.2. Implications for Faculty and the Student Experience

As the population of postsecondary students has increased, the ranks of instructors have correspondingly grown, but not simply through the hiring of a larger number of traditional, tenure-track faculty. Rather, higher education has undergone a series of slow and steady transformations that have resulted in a far greater number of instructors whose positions are more precarious (National Center for Education Statistics 2023, tbl. 315.10). There are larger numbers of “adjunct” faculty hired to teach large numbers of students, often on a part-time basis, with fewer benefits and lower wages (Danaei 2019, p. 10). These instructors are typically not expected to contribute to the research enterprise of the university but instead to manage teaching. If class sizes decline, these instructors may quickly find themselves unemployed. The employment relationship between the college or university and the adjunct resembles that between a boss and any other at-will employee and is consistent with the overall, broader adoption by higher education of the structures, processes, and logics of the for-profit business sector.

The size of the administrative apparatus of the modern college or university has also increased in the postwar decades, corresponding to the increasing complexity of institutions that operate in the economy, again, like any other business (National Center for Education Statistics 2021, tbl. 314.20). The modern university is a multifaceted enterprise demanding managerial expertise in areas ranging from employment to logistics to research and, of course, teaching (Gumport and Pusser 1995, p. 502). With increasingly diverse student bodies, institutions of higher education have also expanded their support services to provide the advising, counseling, and other forms of assistance that students from less privileged or otherwise marginalized backgrounds may need in order to succeed. Growth in all of these administrative functions has not been without controversy. Critics charge that “bloat” is a reason that the growth in the cost of higher education has continued to exceed the pace of inflation overall; faculty members themselves have at times lamented the increasing number of higher education employees not directly involved in educating students. (Weinstein 2023, p. 2) These debates indicate tension over the institutional mission: just what are the obligations of the university to its students?

Different types of colleges and universities have vastly different capacities to support students who may be differently situated. The wealthiest and most selective institutions, which cater to students who arrive on campus with great privilege, can afford generous financial aid for the small number of poorer students they admit (Hoxby and Turner 2014, p. 2). And we use the term “poorer,” in the relative sense, deliberately: Yale University just recently announced that it would waive undergraduate tuition for students whose families earned less than $200,000 a year, which is not a poverty-level income (Yale University 2026). Perversely, less wealthy institutions may saddle students with greater debts, despite their lower upfront costs, because they cannot afford to offer such generous aid (Hoxby and Turner 2014, p. 2). Another effect of varying costs of attendance for students is the need to work while enrolled, which can undermine a student’s ability to keep up with studies and to participate in activities on campus that conflict with earning a wage (Moran 2022, p. 614).

The instructional experience itself also varies across institutions. The wealthiest private, nonprofit institutions and flagship public universities may provide access to cutting-edge research technologies, for example, and opportunities to work with world-class research teams. Institutions with less wealth cannot match these experiences. Class sizes may vary widely, as will reliance on graduate student instructors, who interact with undergraduate students in discussion sections for classes that might have hundreds of students enrolled. The small college seminar featuring Socratic dialogue is a boutique higher education experience that is out of reach for most institutions and most students.

Even as the composition of the student body has shifted toward greater diversity and the ranks of higher education administrators have increased, the demographics of the traditional college and university faculty have held quite steady. Indeed, one study of postsecondary faculty hiring found that if current trends continue, the population of full-time instructors will never resemble the national population; people of color will forever be underrepresented (Matias et al. 2022, p. 1606). At the time of this writing, attacks on efforts to promote diversity in the faculty ranks have proliferated and likely will undermine already-weak efforts to increase the numbers of professors who are not white men (Kim and Hamilton 2025, pp. 5–6). The challenge of achieving equity in instructional opportunity remains daunting, not least because the criteria applied to discern who has merit are neither clear nor uncontested. The more institutions of higher education resemble for-profit actors, the less likely they may be to pursue goals like ensuring the diversity of their instructional staff. Put differently, to the extent that privatization means behaving like a private business, the phenomenon also portends reduced commitment to a public mission.

4.3. Pathways of Privatization

Privatization occurs in distinct ways in diverse contexts. Because of the complex interactions of public and private activities, the term is often used to refer to the adoption of the tactics and priorities of private businesses by institutions identified as public. It also may refer to the phenomenon of growth in the private, for-profit higher education sector. In the United States, where the line between public and private has long been quite murky, colleges and universities designated as “public” engage in extensive fundraising efforts, or “development,” and also conduct research intended to produce technologies that can be marketed and generate revenue for the institution (Labaree 2017, p. 124). Private, nonprofit institutions and for-profit higher education providers alike rely heavily on access to federal student aid programs that provide grants and subsidized loans to students, and some of the largest recipients of federal research grants are private institutions that are among the wealthiest universities in the world (Labaree 2017, pp. 110–11, 129–32).

In other countries, privatization has taken other forms and had other results, with private institutions expanding to enable massification when public universities lack the capacity to accommodate increasing numbers of students and the government lacks the funds to help them grow. This has been the pattern in China (Liu 2012, p. 655), as well as across several African nations, for example (Lebeau and Oanda 2020, p. 8). In this way, privatization is often linked to massification. At the same time, newer institutions springing up to provide greater access to educational opportunities may lack the cachet and resources of older universities, meaning that their development simultaneously enables more students to enroll and contributes to stratification. Different tuition pricing at public and private institutions may further advance stratification if private institutions charge more, reducing the overall socioeconomic benefit of the education provided, especially if students must borrow to cover the cost (Gumport et al. 1997, pp. 26–27).

The diverse contexts of privatization at the national level make regional agglomeration misleading. In different countries in Latin America, for example, the role of the private sector varies widely. In Brazil, Colombia, and Chile, most students are enrolled at private institutions (Brunner and Labraña 2020, p. 35), while in Argentina, students overwhelmingly enroll at public institutions (Chiroleu and Marquina 2017, p. 146). Similarly, the prestige enjoyed by private institutions varies across regions. Private, nonprofit universities dominate the ranks of the most elite schools in the United States, although far more students attend public universities (Wong 2018). In contrast, longstanding public institutions are the most prestigious in many countries in Western Europe and Africa. Distinct historical contexts mean that the implications of the various forms of privatization are diverse not only across but within regions of the world; every nation’s pathway is sui generis.

Although privatization manifests differently in each national jurisdiction, patterns connecting privatization to massification and stratification are evident. In some countries, privatization advances because of greater reliance on the private sector to provide the capacity to massify: existing public institutions of higher education cannot or, for political reasons, will not expand to accommodate growing numbers of students. The less public support these new institutions receive, the more they adopt the habits of for-profit actors in the private sector. This trajectory may enable massification accompanied by stratification. That is, newer higher education providers are deemed less prestigious, and members of historically subordinated groups disproportionately attend them. Meanwhile, stratification across institutions works to preserve socioeconomic inequality among graduates because those who attend the more established, elite institutions will likely be members of more privileged groups before enrolling and enjoy better opportunities after attending those institutions (Espinoza et al. 2023).

The existence and apparent success of nonpublic institutions of higher education may provide a justification for decreasing public support for higher education. To a degree that varies across individual states, this has happened recently in the United States (Labaree 2017). As a result, privatization threatens earlier gains in access through massification. The contraction in support can lead to new patterns of stratification, as public institutions suffer a loss of resources. Only the public “flagship” universities are likely to retain their prestige, not least because they increasingly emulate their private, nonprofit and even private, for-profit peers. The result can be stratification within the public sector as well as between the public and private, nonprofit sector.

This is not to claim that the expansion of private higher education inevitably undermines public colleges and universities. For decades, elite public institutions in the United States have coexisted alongside elite private, nonprofit entities, for example. But coexistence does not imply an inevitable disruption of prior status hierarchies among institutions; here, the United States may be something of an outlier, in that elite public universities postdate the most prominent private institutions but are nonetheless among the nation’s most prestigious. This synergistic result may only be possible in an environment characterized by consistent demand for higher education and sufficient financial resources to support the higher education institutional ecosystem. In the United States, capacity growth enabled a golden age of higher education: with the rise of the multiversity and a growth in public–private partnerships, resources flowed into public and private colleges and universities alike. The rise of public elite institutions with a mission of service to the students of their home states has also disrupted status hierarchies among students. It is no accident that the universities that enroll most students from relatively poor backgrounds are public, not private (Reber and Sinclair 2020).

We can draw tentative conclusions. First, there is no inevitable pathway that higher education follows. Second, each of the three processes discussed in this introduction—massification, stratification, and privatization—interacts with the others. Massification can but need not counter inequality, which is itself a product of stratified socioeconomic relations. Privatization can contribute to stratification and undermine the democratizing effects of wider access. Third and perhaps most importantly from a policy perspective, institutional financial precarity can undermine successful massification, contribute to greater stratification among institutions and students, and incentivize counterproductive forms of privatization.

5. Contributions of This Special Issue

The contributions to this volume span the higher education process, beginning with patterns and practices in admissions and enrollment, moving through the postsecondary experience for differently situated students, and looking for potential determinants of greater or lesser equality of educational opportunity. The study by Uma M. Jayakumar and William C. Kidder that launches the project reveals the dark arts deployed to shape admitted classes at the University of Texas (UT) and the University of California (UC), describing how UT adopted standardized testing to exclude Black applicants, and UC implemented a “special admissions” policy favoring veterans returning from World War II. These two policies, the authors argue, enabled an intergenerational transfer of privilege along multiple axes, including race: access to federal veterans’ education benefits was not equal, and Jayakumar and Kidder conclude that nearly all the veterans who benefitted from UC’s admissions process were white men. The preference for veterans and the testing requirement had the same effect, excluding potential students who had been excluded in the past by other, more overt means. The tactics of the past persist in the present moment, Jayakumar and Kidder show, as colleges and universities under pressure from the current Trump Administration adopt policies all but certain to limit higher education access for students who are members of historically excluded and underrepresented groups. This fresh analysis of discriminatory tactics makes plain the ways that admissions processes can reward privilege, even as more students enroll, rather than promote equality of opportunity.

The next two contributions move beyond a focus on access through the admissions process to consider how wealth-based disparities affect student life on campus. The article by Nicholas Freudenberg and Rashida Crutchfield explores the material insecurities that students with limited resources confront as they struggle to obtain basic necessities like food, housing, and health care. Based on a comprehensive synthesis of recent multidisciplinary research, the authors find that precarity is far from an anomaly at American colleges and universities. In fact, the rate of food insecurity among college students is notably higher than for the general population. Only about one in five students lives in a dormitory while attending college. As a result, many students must deal with a lack of affordable housing, and a few even report being homeless while going to school. These difficulties can contribute to health problems, yet college students are more likely to be uninsured than children and older adults. As the authors explain, these patterns of need and want are linked to processes of massification and privatization. Non-traditional students and their families lack the income and wealth to be buffered against financial adversity, and privatization has led to rising costs for those seeking a college degree. The article closes with a call for advocates to “educate public officials about the connections between meeting basic needs, academic success, social mobility, and shared prosperity.”

The article by Clarissa Gutierrez, Amado M. Padilla, Oswaldo Rosales, Miriam Rivera, Veronica Juarez, and Michael Spencer offers another perspective on how wealth-based disparities influence the college experience. Focusing on first-generation Latine students at a highly selective private university, the authors find that “social mobility is not a straightforward, meritocratic ascent but rather a nonlinear, relational process that is often catalyzed by chance, sustained through access to cultural and social capital, and commonly shared with family.” Despite growing up in poverty, these students have typically been sustained by their personal drive and family support. Although all of them had strong academic potential, they often reported that access to elite institutions occurred by happenstance; that is, the students had “serendipitous encounters with individuals or programs that opened doors.” According to the authors, the role of happenstance reveals how incomplete institutional structures of support are for low-income, first-generation college students. The article also demonstrates the importance not just of fiscal capital but also of cultural and social capital. Prestigious institutions allowed students to gain access to networks of privilege that “were not merely supplemental; they were also central to our career development and long-term path toward mobility.” As the article makes clear, even after decades of massification, the path to a top college or university can be mystifying for students with few resources. Moreover, in a highly stratified system of higher education, admission is just the beginning. Students must learn to navigate previously unknown networks of influence and power to make the most of their degree.

Looking across nations, patterns of postsecondary enrollment and completion suggest that students from more privileged backgrounds experience greater opportunity and better outcomes in employment and income. Indeed, this is a premise of the entire Special Issue. The contribution of Yara Abdelaziz and Elizabeth Buckner looks for relationships between economic inequality, postsecondary educational opportunity, and political egalitarianism. They find a positive relationship between political egalitarianism, measured by the degree of protection of rights and equality of distribution of resources across social groups, and access to higher education: the more egalitarian a society, the greater the access. Similarly, lower levels of economic inequality correlate with a more equal distribution of higher education opportunities. Their findings raise provocative questions about the relationship between the tangible opportunity to pursue higher levels of education, on the one hand, and policies that promote democracy and economic redistribution in favor of the less advantaged—policies that are not directly related to traditional education inputs like public subsidy of universities or student aid.

The contribution of Sonia Ilie and Lin Wai Phyo, who study policy interventions and their effects in specific national contexts, provides an essential complement to the findings by Abdelaziz and Buckner, whose work, by design, examined access at a relatively high level of aggregation across nations. Ilie and Phyo examine postsecondary opportunity in eight countries in Southeast Asia, assessing whether patterns of access are consistent with “maximally maintained inequality,” a theory that socioeconomically privileged people capture higher education opportunities as they increase, and consequently, greater access does not translate into greater equality of opportunity. Their study sheds light on the interaction between educational opportunity and wealth, gender, and rurality. This intersectional analysis reveals that the gap in opportunity between rich and poor may decline if gender and rural background are taken into account, for example, as in Laos. Such disparities both lend nuance to the assessment of overall expansion in higher education enrollment and complicate any effort at policy design: seeking to address only wealth inequality may miss the critical role of social norms and geography in determining who can pursue postsecondary education. Recognition of the implications of such a nuanced perspective provides a fitting conclusion to this Special Issue.