Abstract
Since the second half of the twentieth century, participation in higher education has increased to historically unprecedented levels. Expenses for education are now perceived as investments in ‘human capital’; modern society is described as a knowledge society. Not much is known about the socio-historical details of this process. The chapter presents an analysis of geographical divergences at the top and the bottom end of the human capital distribution in Belgium and its regions. The authors analyse the forms of segregation of both high-skilled and less-skilled human capital. Their empirical findings suggest that the success of particular regions depends not only on the abundance of highly skilled workers, but also on their ability to avoid relatively large shares of the less-skilled.
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Notes
- 1.
In 1961, there existed four universities in Belgium: a Catholic university in Leuven (founded in 1425), state universities in Ghent and Liège (founded by the Dutch king in 1817), and a ‘free’ university in Brussels (founded in 1834, i.e. shortly after Belgium’s independence). As of 1965, University Expansion Acts allowed for the expansion of these universities, as well as the creation of new ones. By the 1970s, new universities had emerged in Antwerp, Brussels, Hasselt, Louvain-la-Neuve, Mons, and Namur. Some geographical balances were thereby taken into account. But, as we will see, there emerged considerable geographical divergences of human capital levels and university credentials among the adult population in Belgium.
- 2.
It might be added that we drafted a similar map of the spatial distribution of the percentage of 25- to 34-years-olds with a university degree in Belgium in 2011. There exists little systematic incongruity between the spatial distribution of the shares of university graduates among the entire adult population (presented in map 2) and that of the shares of university graduates among the youngest generations in the labour market. But there are clear incongruities between the spatial distribution of the percentage of the entire adult population with only nine years of schooling and those of the youngest members of this population group. While the difference between the nation’s centre and its periphery is still clearly visible for the entire adult population, the spatial structure of map 4 is dominated by the difference between the north (Flanders) and the south (Wallonia).
- 3.
In 1961 the average unemployment rate was 3.0 per cent in Flanders and only 2.0 per cent in Wallonia. In 2001 the average unemployment rate had increased to 7.7 per cent in Flanders and no less than 15.1 per cent in Wallonia. In Wallonia, only the communities near the border with Germany and the area close to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg had relatively low unemployment rates in 2011, while many of their inhabitants found jobs at the other side of the border (see Verhetsel et al. 2007).
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Vanderstraeten, R., Gucht, F.V.d. (2017). Geographical Divergences of Educational Credentials in the Modern Nation-State: A Case-Study of Belgium, 1961–2011. In: Kantasalmi, K., Holm, G. (eds) The State, Schooling and Identity. Education Dialogues with/in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1515-1_4
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