Growing Gaps: Educational Inequality Around the World

The last half century has seen a dramatic expansion in access to primary, secondary, and higher education in many nations around the world. Educational expansion is desirable for a country's economy, beneficial for educated individuals themselves, and is also a strategy for greater social harmony. But has greater access to education reduced or exacerbated social inequality? Who are the winners and the losers in the scramble for educational advantage?

In Growing Gaps, Paul Attewell and Katherine S. Newman bring together an impressive group of scholars to closely examine the relationship between inequality and education. The relationship is not straightforward and sometimes paradoxical. Across both post-industrial societies and the high-growth economies of the developing world, education has become the central path for upward mobility even as it maintains and exacerbates existing inequalities. In many countries there has been a staggering growth of private education as demand for opportunity has outpaced supply, but the families who must fund this human capital accumulation are burdened with more and more debt. Privatizing education leads to intensified inequality, as students from families with resources enjoy the benefits of these new institutions while poorer students face intense competition for entry to under-resourced public universities and schools. The ever-increasing supply of qualified, young workers face class- or race-based inequalities when they attempt to translate their credentials into suitable jobs. Covering almost every continent, Growing Gaps provides an overarching and essential examination of the worldwide race for educational advantage and will serve as a lasting achievement towards understanding the root causes of inequality.

Paul Attewell is a Professor of Sociology and of Urban Education at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His most recent book, co-authored with David Lavin, was Passing the Torch: Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations? It won the 2009 Grawemeyer Award in Education and also the American Education Research Association's Outstanding Book Award for 2009.

Katherine S. Newman is the James Knapp Dean of the Krieger School of the Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. Newman's most recent books include The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America and Laid Off, Laid Low: The Social and Political Consequences of Employment Instability.