Wealth Follows Wealth: Stratification and Socioeconomic Segregation in Higher Education

The expansion of higher education systems has often resulted in low-SES students gravitating toward second-tier institutions, while high-SES students concentrate in top-tier universities. This matching between high-SES students and elite universities creates a circle effect between institutional stratification and students' socioeconomic segregation. Institutions drawing affluent students accumulate prestige and resources they leverage to raise public and private monies, reinforcing the institutional hierarchy.

This study explores the stratification and socioeconomic segregation across universities in Brazil and Chile. These two countries differ significantly regarding public universities' governance and funding mechanisms. However, both have experienced a growing participation of new private universities and have implemented large-scale inclusion policies in recent decades.

Using the Lorenz curve and the Gini index, I approach stratification through the inequality of revenues and expenditures across institutions. Similarly, I approached socioeconomic segregation as the unequal distribution of students from different socioeconomic backgrounds (household income and mothers' education) across institutions, focusing on the Dissimilarity Index. Finally, combining these approaches, the study examines the link between the proportion of high-SES students and the resources of universities in both countries.

The results show greater institutional stratification in Brazil (Gini index of 0.35) compared to Chile (Gini index of 0.28) but higher segregation levels in Chile. The Dissimilarity index for high-income students is 0.42 in Chile, compared to 0.27 in Brazil. These patterns result in high socioeconomic disparities in university resources in both countries. Increasing the share of high-income students by ten percentage points is associated with a six-thousand-dollar and two-thousand-dollar increase in yearly per-student expenditure in public and private universities, respectively. The greater inequality in the public subsector largely stems from disparities in research intensity (measured by the number of publications and PhD enrolments). The research activity in the private subsector does not explain disparities between universities with different socioeconomic compositions.