התרחבות ההשכלה הגבוהה, שוויון כלכלי ושוויון הזדמנויות

This paper discusses changes in inequality of educational opportunity (IEO) between socioeconomic strata at the tertiary level. We suggest a new approach to the understanding of IEO, which combines both economic inequality and educational expansion as determinants of change. The paper begins with a discussion of the theoretical distinction between economic inequality and inequality of opportunities and a discussion of the relationship between the two concepts. This is followed by a review of changes in Israeli higher education and economic inequality. Lastly, we analyze several data sets (ESS, ISSP and LIS) to estimate the effects of the expansion of higher education and the increase in income inequality in Israel on the IEO. We show that the failure of educational expansion to reduce IEO at the tertiary level is partially due to the contemporaneous increase in economic inequality, which has a positive effect on IEO.