BOOK REVIEWS

This collection of essays reports studies of how class inequalities in access to higher education vary in 15 countries with advanced economies, including Australia, France, Germany, United States and United Kingdom. The studies used a common theoretical and methodological framework that allowed Shavit, Arum and Gamoran to aggregate results to posit some powerful generalisations in their introduction. Shavit, Arum and Gamoran examine Raferty and Hout’s (1993) hypothesis of maximally maintained inequality, the hypothesis that the expansion of a level of education does not increase the odds of a less advantaged social class participating until the participation of the more advantaged class reaches saturation, which is the point at which nearly all or around 80 per cent of young people participate. Shavit, Arum and Gamoran find that the hypothesis is consistent with the reported studies of eligibility for higher education. That is, in four of the five countries in which inequality in eligibility for higher education declined from the 1960s to the 1990s eligibility had reached saturation, and in eight of the nine countries in which eligibility was clearly below 80 per cent inequality was stable or increased over the four decades. They found a sizeable correlation between saturation and reduced inequality of eligibility for higher education. Shavit, Arum and Gamoran also find that the hypothesis of maximally maintained inequality is supported, on average, for the transition from eligibility for to participation in higher education. That is, expansion of higher education reduces inequality when participation is nearly universal, but not before. However, as many writers have pointed out, in a mass system, higher education institutions tend to be arranged formally or informally into hierarchies, and which institution one attends can be almost as important for social outcomes as whether one attends higher education at all. Shavit, Arum and Gamoran find that systems with near universal levels of eligibility for and participation in higher education are more likely to be segmented into tiers or tracks. Lucas (2001) posited the hypothesis of effectively maintained inequality; the hypothesis that once saturation is reached in a level of education, lower inequalities in participation overall may be replaced by inequalities in participation in a more selective tier or track at that level. The results for that hypothesis are mixed, as Shavit, Arum and Gamoran report. It is confirmed for systems in which the second tier comprises mostly vocational or occupational programs, such as in France and Germany, but it is not borne out in systems in which the second tier includes occupational programs and those that may lead to further academic education, such as in the US, Japan and Taiwan. That is, if a tiered system has an academic program in the second tier, such as an associate degree, it has slightly less inequality than if the tiered system has only occupational programs. The two untiered systems of the Czech Republic and Italy had even less class inequality between the students who participated in higher education, but at the cost of lower levels of participation overall. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management Vol. 30, No. 4, November 2008, 415–419