Rural-urban Inequalities and Expansion of Tertiary Education in Romania

Abstract: Rural-urban inequalities of access to higher education occasionally come on the top of the Romanian agenda of education debate. However, there are few attempts to estimate these differences, both in quantitative (access to university) and qualitative terms (differences between fields of study). Our paper focuses on the quantitative inequalities. Our argument is that the historical context shaped the dynamics of such inequalities in the past century. The Raftery and Hout (1993) MMI hypothesis finds some support in the Romanian cases. Romania has low rates of tertiary participation as compared to most European societies. Therefore, the recent expansion of higher education initially led to increasing urban-rural divide. Latter on this divide started to decrease, but it still exists. We use logistic regression models to show that rural-urban inequalities continuously produced effects starting with early 1900s and that these effects are deeper than the ones given by parent education.

Keywords: Rural-urban inequalities, Massification of higher education, Social stratification, Communist legacy