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education links Access: Effect of campus proximity and socio-economic status on university participation rates in regions
01/C Occasional Paper Series IntroductionThe OECD (1997) found that while expansion has tended to dominate educational developments in OECD countries, many of the most familiar inequalities continue to persist. The report states: ‘… it is clear that socio-economic concerns lie at the core of many issues of equity, access and participation in education and training, whether addressing causes or consequences’ (p. 131). The report further contends that social, home and educational factors combine to explain educational disadvantage, and that these factors tend to be located in particular spatial and geographical settings (p. 67). This review is supported by the findings of Stevenson et al. (1999) which demonstrated that there is a stronger relationship between regional participation and university provision in non-metropolitan areas. Nevertheless, large variation in regional participation rates in metropolitan areas suggested that factors other than proximity to a campus are important. This study builds on Stevenson et al. (1999) by using multivariate analysis to explore the relative importance of socio-economic characteristics and access to university campuses in determining participation rates in metropolitan and non-metropolitan regions. The major findings to emerge are: • Access (proximity to university campuses) and socio-economic status of regions contribute to university participation (p. 8, regression results). • In metropolitan areas educational aspirations (as measured by education and occupation levels) explain the bulk of the variation in participation rates, although the level of access and the level of economic resources explain a significant proportion of that variation (p. 12, Table 2a). • In exploring the variation in participation rates of non-metropolitan regions none of the variables is dominant, with the level of economic resources and access being marginally more important than the level of education and occupation (p. 13, Table 2b). • While the number of university places per head of population in non-metropolitan areas is significantly lower than in metropolitan areas, equality of provision would only reduce the difference in participation to a small degree (pp. 14–15). • A decomposition of the difference between average metropolitan and nonmetropolitan participation rates indicates that a substantial part of the difference cannot be explained by the variables used in this analysis (p. 15). This result suggest that building campuses in non-metropolitan regions is not the way to bring university participation rates up to metropolitan levels. Fundamentally it appears that overall perceptions of the value of university education need to change in non-metropolitan regions before participation rates could approach those of metropolitan regions. Full report
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