Education-Based Status in Comparative Perspective: The Legitimization of Education as a Basis for Social Stratification

Abstract

Classical and recent accounts of education posit that education legitimately, and authoritatively, classifies individuals to positions of lower or higher status. However, despite these general theoretical claims, empirical evidence that provides an in-depth picture of the relationship between educational attainment and social status remains scarce. In this paper, based on a dataset of 31 countries (International Social Survey Programme), we investigate the extent to which education is related to subjective social status, the degree to which this is seen as legitimate, and how this relationship varies between countries. We contextualize this relationship with the influence of the centrality of education in countries (operationalized as the share of higher educated). Results showed that education is an important source of subjective social status for individuals across all countries, and is seen as relatively legitimate and uncontroversial among all educational groups. Moreover, among those who perceive education to be more important for status, subjective status differences between educational groups are larger. Additionally, in countries with larger shares of higher educated, educational differences in subjective social status correlate more strongly with whether or not people obtained a degree of higher (tertiary) education. Lastly, the relationship between education and subjective social status in these countries is more independent from other sources of status, such as income and gender. It therefore seems to be that as higher education becomes more central and widely shared in a society, rather than leveling social differences, ironically it also becomes more distinctive and diagnostic in distinguishing people along group lines.

“They don’t know what it’s like to be at the bottom”: Exploring the role of perceived cultural distance in less‐educated citizens’ discontent with politicians

“…Cramer, 2016 ; Jarness & Flemmen, 2019 ; Lamont, 2000 ; Mckenzie, 2017 ; Williams, 2017 ). This feeds what Lamont ( 2018 , 2019 ) has called the “recognition gap” and resonates with the literature on feelings of status anxiety and misrecognition among individuals who feel socially subordinated (Gidron & Hall, 2017 , 2019 ), such as less‐educated citizens (van Noord et al., 2019 ; Sandel, 2020 ; Spruyt et al., 2015 , 2018 ; Spruyt & Kuppens, 2015 ).…”

The socioecology of social class

“…Income and education independently predict subjective social status: Higher educated people and those with higher incomes place themselves higher on the social ladder. However, the relation between education and subjective social status is more independent of the relation with income in countries with a larger proportion of higher educated people [28]. Similarly, education has a stronger (negative) relation with feelings of exclusion from society and trust in institutions in countries with a larger proportion of higher educated [29].…”

Western Colonialism and World Society in National Education Systems: Global Trends in the Use of High-Stakes Exams at Early Ages, 1960 to 2010

“…Second, in this context of intensifying pressures to expand education, Western high-stakes exam regimes were maintained at the primary level because they provided an efficient and formally (but not in practice) meritocratic mechanism for stratifying students (Kellaghan and Greaney 1992). As education became increasingly linked to an organized stratification system, higher-paying jobs and occupational status were increasingly tied to higher levels of educational attainment (van Noord et al forthcoming). In this context, high-stakes exams were seen as instrumental for maintaining uniform academic standards in a country’s education system and structuring educational stratification along formally (but not in practice) meritocratic processes (Bol et al 2014; Jackson and Buckner 2016).…”