THE NON-STATE TERTIARY SECTOR AND INEQUALITIES IN TERTIARY ACCESS AND COMPLETION

Equitable access to quality tertiary education has explicitly been incorporated into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under Target 4.3, which states that by 2030, countries commit to ensuring equal access for all women and men to affordable quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university. In line with these global development goals and in response to popular desires for expanded opportunity, access to tertiary education has been expanding rapidly around the world, albeit with significant variation cross-nationally. In many countries, the growth of access to tertiary education has been accompanied by a growth in the number of private institutions, often considered an important policy option for countries to meet unmet demand for tertiary education. Enrolments in private institutions now accounts for roughly one-third of all enrolments globally. However, there is concern that the growth of private higher education, which tends to be tuitiondependent, could exacerbate inequalities in access, and a number of country-specific studies have found that private tertiary sectors cater to the wealthiest segments of their societies. There have been only a few cross-national studies of how the private sector affects inequalities in higher education attendance or completion. Moreover, national studies, which tend to rely on a single dataset or a single point in time, may not capture how inequalities change over time, in relation to system-wide expansion of access or increasing privatization. More analysis is needed to understand how the private, nonstate sector, affects inequalities in tertiary education. This report seeks to contribute to the knowledge base on cross-national trends in inequalities in tertiary education by answering two inter-related questions: 1) How large are inequalities in attendance and completion in tertiary education; and, 2) Is the size of the private tertiary sector associated with inequalities in attendance? One of the major limitations to analyzing wealth-based inequalities in higher education cross-nationally has been a lack of comparable data that disaggregates rates of tertiary education participation and completion by demographic characteristics. Therefore, to answer these two questions, this study draws on data from the World Inequality Database in Education (WIDE) to calculate inequalities in access to higher education and their relationship with the private sector through a regression analysis of nationallevel data. A cleaned version of the dataset includes at least one survey from 122 countries, and at least two surveys from 103 countries. In total, the dataset has 329 surveys spanning 2002-2016. This rich dataset allows us to examine the size of wealth-based inequalities both across countries and over time, and in relation to the extent of private tertiary provision. In the analyses, I calculate three indicators of overall inequalities in tertiary education, for both attendance and completion: the wealth parity index, the concentration index and a log odds ratio. Despite their differing calculations and interpretations, all three indicators generally show similar cross-national patterns. Additionally, because none of these indicators accounts for differences in secondary completion rates, I also decompose overall disparities in tertiary attendance into two components: a gap accounted for by differential secondary completion rates, and a gap accounted for by differential entry rates (ER) into tertiary education. I conduct descriptive analyses and run a series of cross-sectional and fixed-effects panel regression models to examine the relationship between the private share of enrolments in a country and the extent of inequality in higher education attendance for the 18-22year-old cohort. The analyses point to a number of important findings. First, wealth-based inequalities in tertiary attendance and completion rates are large; indicating we are a long way from meeting the SDG goal of equality. However, across the board, the findings point to a significant expansion in access to higher education, which includes growing attendance rates among the poorest. Unsurprisingly, overall attendance and completion rates are highest among high-income countries and remain low in low-income countries. Moreover, various specifications of inequality all suggest that wealth-based inequalities are declining as overall access to tertiary increases. The one world region where this does not appear to be the case is sub-Saharan Africa, where inequalities remain both very large and quite stable. Decomposition analyses suggest that across all countries, about 41% of the overall disparity in tertiary attendance between the wealthiest (WIQ5) and all other quintiles is due to their differential entry rates into tertiary education, while 59% is due to disparities in secondary completion rate. That said, inequalities in entry rates vary substantially across countries, and is largest in upper middle-income countries and Latin America. Regression analyses suggest that the size of the private tertiary sector is not always related to overall inequalities, which are likely driven by many other direct factors, including unequal secondary completion rates and policies governing access to the public sector. However, the size of the private sector is consistently positively associated with inequalities in access to tertiary education in upper middle-income countries. As such, the findings suggest that when the private sector is associated with unequal entry rates to tertiary, it seems to operate by facilitating admission to tertiary education among the wealthiest quintile, relative to other groups. This is likely because middle-income countries have growing numbers of students who are both eligible for tertiary education and have disposable income to pay for access through the private sector when not accepted into the public sector. The report concludes with recommendations for improving data collection and future research on the private sector and inequalities in tertiary education.