Higher education and the role of family background: Reproduction of the social structure?

After a massive expansion of Higher Education in recent decades, a key question is whether it reduces inequality by providing better opportunities to people of lower socioeconomic status, or it magnifies difference, by disproportionally expanding opportunities for those groups that are already privileged. In this context, access to Higher Education can be considered both as a vehicle for social mobility; or as a mechanism of social closure resulting in the reproduction of the social class system.

Taking this question into consideration, for this paper we analyze whether family background (and other individual characteristics such as age, gender, etc) play a part in the possibility to access and successfully finish Higher Education studies in Argentina. We understand that social reproduction takes place not only through the transmission of material conditions, but also through the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital and standards of education. The study is quantitative, using secondary data from a survey about Social Stratification and Social Mobility conducted in 2007-8. The sample is random, and has 3313 cases nationwide.