The unequal geography of mass higher education in comparative perspective

The emergence of mass higher education in high-income countries represents a profound social and economic transformation. There is much research investigating the consequences of an increasingly large population of degree holders for socioeconomic inequalities. However, despite rising regional inequality and income segrega?tion in many countries, sociologists have neglected the implications of the expansion of higher education for disparities between places. This paper examines inequalitiesin the geographical distribution of the degree educated from the 1980s to the present day across 17 high-income democracies using granular data from the newly-available Regional Human Capital Database (RHCD). Results show an increasingly unequal distribution of degree holders across places in all countries studied. Educational expansion appears to exacerbate existing inequalities, with faster growth in areas that already had highly educated populations. The paper provides a tentative explanation of these trends, with evidence suggesting a role for sorting: the selective migration of highly educated individuals to already well-educated urban centers. These findings suggest that previous analyses of educational expansion have overlooked its’ highly disparate geographical incidence. They underscore the importance of examining sub-national geographies when assessing the the role that mass higher education plays in shaping inequalities.