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The social class gap in bachelor’s and master’s completion: university dropout in times of educational expansion

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Abstract

While many papers have focused on socially unequal admissions in higher education, this paper looks at the persistence of class differentials after enrolment. I examine the social class gap in bachelor’s programme dropout and in the transition from bachelor’s to master’s in Denmark from the formal introduction of the bachelor’s degree in 1993 up to recent cohorts. Using administrative data, I find that the class gap in bachelor’s departures has remained constant from 1993 to 2006, with disadvantaged students being around 15 percentage points more likely to leave a bachelor’s programme than advantaged students, even after adjusting for other factors such as grades from upper secondary school. Importantly, the class gap reappears at the master’s level, with privileged students being more likely to pursue a master’s degree than less privileged students. The size of the class gap is remarkable, given that this gap is found among a selected group of university enrolees. As other studies have found that educational expansion in higher education is not necessarily a remedy for narrowing the class gap in educational attainment, scholars need to pay more attention to keeping disadvantaged students from leaving higher education.

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Notes

  1. I use the newest data available, but do not include cohorts enrolled later than 2006, to be able to follow students well after their enrolment year.

  2. As robustness checks, I also ran models of dropout status at years 6 and 10 after bachelor enrolment; these models produced the same results as those presented in this paper.

  3. I choose to model dropout by linear probability models over event history models, because (1) my primary aim is simply to gauge the social gap in non-completion and not the timing of events (i.e. when dropout occurs), and (2) administrative data measure the exact occurrence of dropout poorly (as students may be registered as enrolled long after they have dropped out).

  4. Average predicted probabilities from logit models yield virtually identical results as the ones presented here.

  5. Not shown in Table 1, most of those enrolled in bachelor’s programmes have attended the general Gymnasium (73%), with a smaller share having chosen the technical/business-oriented track (13%) and a different type of the general Gymnasium (‘HF’, 12%) catered towards mature students (on average 23 years old when they obtain their diploma). These students are generally from lower educated homes than students from the general Gymnasium. HF students are on average 20% more likely to dropout than STX students are, even though their GPA is fairly similar (7.9 and 8.1, respectively).

  6. This assumption is supported by the fact that the University of Roskilde is the institution with the highest share of bachelor’s degree holders leaving their institution to pursue their master’s degree elsewhere.

  7. Although we cannot deduce that leavers would have enjoyed the same income as stayers, had they finished their degree, the income gap is unlikely to be attributable solely to selection; that is, dropouts would have some unobservable traits leading them to have lower economic returns, regardless of whether or not they obtained a degree.

  8. Disadvantaged students with a GPA in the top decile have a very high dropout rate, suggesting that this small group will be heavily selected on unobservable traits, which may lead them, for example, to venture successfully into the labour market without a degree. It could also be the case that top performing disadvantaged students enrol in highly selective programmes where they are most likely to feel culturally out of place and hence dropout more (I thank an anonymous reviewer for this excellent point).

  9. This pattern holds true even if we distinguish between different tracks in the higher education-preparatory upper secondary school (general, business, technical and higher preparatory track).

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Availability of data and material

The data that support the findings of this study are not publicly available, as only researchers employed at Danish authorized research institutions, for reasons of security, can get access to administrative data at Statistics Denmark.

Code availability

Data was analysed in Stata and coding files are available upon request from the author.

Funding

This research was supported by the Danish Council for Independent Research, grant no: 4180-00054A.

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  1. The Danish National Centre for Social Science Research, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Jens-Peter Thomsen

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Correspondence to Jens-Peter Thomsen.

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Thomsen, JP. The social class gap in bachelor’s and master’s completion: university dropout in times of educational expansion. High Educ 83, 1021–1038 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-021-00726-3

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