Beyond Universities: Structural Stratification in Canadian Tertiary Education.

Abstract

Empirical analyses and theorizing of structural stratification in tertiary education have focused almost exclusively on universities. In doing so, such work ignores large swaths of the organizational field, including counterparts in the understudied community college, private career college, and theological sectors. Through this study, we re-examine structural stratification in Canadian tertiary education using a custom web-scraped dataset containing information on over 600 organizations spanning four distinct sectors. Using the social media followings of these organizations as a proxy for social status, we overcome hurdles that have historically prevented cross-sectoral analyses of structural stratification in this field. Using these data, we make multiple novel empirical observations. First, stratification in the private career college sector exceeds that detected anywhere else in this field. Second, observed levels of stratification among community colleges and universities are virtually indistinguishable. Third, structural stratification is most muted in the theological sector. We explore and theorize potential mechanisms that could be driving these trends, including mission drift, sector straddling, exposure to market forces and embeddedness in localized communities.