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Beyond the high participation systems model: illuminating the heterogeneous patterns of higher education expansion and skills diffusion across 27 countries

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Abstract

Over the decades, higher education has markedly expanded worldwide. Alongside its trajectory, scholars have investigated how such high participation systems (HPS) affect social stratification, with close attention to (in)equality in educational opportunities and heterogeneous/declining returns to tertiary degrees. While HPS have thus been the fundamental concept for education and social science research, recent studies argue that the accumulation of highly skilled human resources, or skills diffusion, operates as a distinct societal trait for stratification. However, we know little about how higher education expansion (EE) and skills diffusion (SD) have progressed within societies and how such pathways differ cross-nationally. Using the large-scale OECD data for 27 countries in tandem with the typological framework “EE-SD Model,” this study detects five distinctive societal clusters according to heterogeneous trends of EE and SD: (1) reaching universal higher education with mid-high skills (universal escalator); (2) moving towards universal escalator with mass higher education (mass escalator); (3) improving skills with relatively limited higher education expansion (mass elevator); (4) enhancing higher education without explicit skills development (mid-skilled travelator); and (5) rising from low levels of education and skills (emerging). These frameworks/findings, along with the HPS model, will advance comparative studies on (1) the qualitative differences in higher education and related social systems that affect the process of EE and SD; (2) social inequality in educational attainment and skills acquisition; (3) returns to higher education and skills including their distribution across individuals with diverse socio-demographic attributes; (4) the societal-level consequences; and (5) typologies of societies.

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Source: OECD (2014, 2016); OECD.Stat (https://stats.oecd.org/) (Accessed: May 8, 2022)

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Data availability

Data are available from the following websites: https://www.oecd.org/education/education-at-a-glance/ and https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/.

Code availability

Not applicable.

Notes

  1. For up-to-date statistics, see the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (http://data.uis.unesco.org/) (Accessed: January 10, 2022).

  2. ICT skills are also assessed in PIAAC, but the current paper uses literacy and numeracy given that the number of respondents who participated in the assessment of ICT skills is limited (compared to literacy and numeracy).

  3. See the OECD websites for more details about PIAAC (https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/) and Education at a Glance (https://www.oecd.org/education/education-at-a-glance/) (Accessed: January 10, 2022).

  4. Although PIAAC has been administered only once so far, it is designed in a way to ensure comparability with other international assessments such as the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and the Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey (ALL) (OECD 2019b). One may therefore examine age and cohort effects to some extent (despite the remaining period effects) as demonstrated by prior studies (Flisi et al., 2019).

  5. Tertiary education refers to the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) 2011 level 5 and above.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Takehiko Kariya, Richard Breen, Jan O. Jonsson, Herman van de Werfhorst, Mai Araki, seminar participants at the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to colleagues at Lingnan University for their generous support and encouragement.

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  1. Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong

    Satoshi Araki

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Araki, S. Beyond the high participation systems model: illuminating the heterogeneous patterns of higher education expansion and skills diffusion across 27 countries. High Educ 86, 119–137 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00905-w

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