Educational Expansion and Social Inequality: Increase, Decline or Persistence of Unequal Opportunities. A Matter of Perspective?

Despite educational expansion and institutional differentiation, Germany shows rather high levels of social selectivity. Although new institutional pathways into higher education have emerged in the course of educational expansion, it is unclear whether this has contributed to an inclusion of more students from less privileged families. In the light of these changing opportunities this paper deals with the question of how social inequality in access to higher levels of education has developed over the last few decades. These developments are discussed from both a theoretical and a methodological perspective. Using a combination of two large-scale datasets, we present a novel approach to this issue. Our findings suggest different developments of inequality depending on the different transitions from primary to secondary education. While social selectivity in access to upper secondary education has declined, differences in the transition from upper secondary to tertiary education have increased. In sum, both developments counterbalance each other. The results also indicate that it is a methodological question whether one finds increasing or decreasing inequality: Our absolute measure of social inequality indicates persistent inequality, whereas our relative measure indicates decreasing inequality.