大学進学における所得格差と高等教育政策の可能性

抄録

In a society like Japan, where half of students graduating from high school go on to college, there seems to be a universal belief that anyone who wishes to can gain access to college. In line with this, higher education policy has been directed toward increasing the quality of education. As a consequence, less attention seems to have been given to the ideal of equal opportunities for higher education. However, parental financial support for children has been pushed to the limit because of decreasing public finance and rising tuition at private universities.

Yet there has been little systematic investigation of economic disparities in access to universities and the potential of equal opportunity policy. This article attempts to fill this gap. The 2005 National Students? Career Survey (NSCS) data set, which consists of the data from 4,000 high school seniors and their parents filled by random sampling, provides materials for examining these issues.

We first estimated the marginal effect of the "achievement-income" dummy variables, high school rank, sex, and parent? s education on the probability of university attendance. Secondly, in order to examine the role of national universities, which are supposed to enroll students with "high academic achievement and low-income," we examined mobility patterns of application and admission among respondents as a function of city size, and university type (national/private). After examining the relationship between these patterns, we reported the results of the logit model to predict the marginal effect on four outcomes (national/private, home/away). We then investigated the effectiveness of scholarship loan programs (category 2 loans from JASSO, which bear interest) on the probability of university attendance. And finally, to clarify the reason not of "risk aversion" but of why parents go into debt, and to identify the latent group which applies for the loan program, a latent class analysis was used.

The major findings are as follows: (1) Economic inequality in access to university education still exists after controlling other factors. (2) National universities guarantee post-secondary opportunities for students with "high academic achievement and low-income." (3) Student loan programs based on prior applications do not increase the accessibility of low-income students to colleges. These results show that, rather than loans themselves acting as an incentive, parents who have already intended to enroll their children into university apply for the loan program. (4) Parents who are willing to go into debt belong to a latent class, which are characterized as low-or middle-income, upward mobility.

These findings show that the tight financial conditions facing higher education since the 1990s have changed the incentive structure by creating policies that give low-income families incentives comparable to those of higher-income families. Therefore, guaranteeing college opportunities for the low-income students, and extending opportunities for individual choice, are important problem for higher education policy.