How the Higher Education Expansion Reproduce Class Inequality? the Case of Taiwan, 1976-2012

The enrollment rate of higher education in Taiwan has approached 70%, which is one of the highest countries in the world. Did the harsh expansion of colleges improve class mobility of students? The findings show that though higher educational expansion generally provides more educational opportunities, the differentiation within the same educational level also appears; students from higher class have more opportunities to attend selective, cheap and prestigious public colleges, while lower class students only can enter higher-tuition and lower-ranking private colleges. Besides, the enrollment rate of postgraduate schools has approached 26%, but the class inequality of students' background remains. The policy of higher educational expansion in Taiwan has not lessened the given class inequality, and even obscurely maintained the inequality. Engaging the literature on educational inequality and using data from the 1997-2012 waves of the Taiwan Social Change Survey, we posit Mixed-Effects Maintained Inequality hypothesis (M-EMI) and argue that both MMI and EMI hypotheses are supported during the process of higher educational expansion.