Effectively Maintained Inequality in Canada Revisited.

Abstract

The mass expansion of higher education (HE) systems during the 20th century pushed social scientists to theorize how high participation systems continued to reproduce inequalities across socio-economic lines. One popular theory in sociology, dubbed effectively maintained inequality (EMI), suggests that families from the upper economic strata would maintain their competitive advantage by not only acquiring increasing amounts of education, but also gravitating toward the most prestigious tracks within HE. Despite the "flatter" status structure of Canada's HE system vis-à-vis international counterparts, this is a theory that has received empirical support from several domestic studies. Through this study, we re-examine the EMI hypothesis using the 2005 Ontario University Applicant Survey (OUAS), a little-known and thus far unexamined dataset that offers notable advantages relative to those historically analyzed in the Canadian EMI literature, including representative coverage of applicants to Ontario universities, holistic coverage of academic and demographic controls, and the ability to analyze both within- and between-sector forms of status-seeking. Our statistical analyses suggest that applicants from privileged socio-economic backgrounds behave in ways consistent with EMI, gravitating towards more prestigious HE options. We conclude by sketching a path forward for social stratification research in Canadian HE.