EQUITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION: SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS AND ITS EFFECT ON ACCESS TO HIGHER EDUCATION IN POST-SOCIALIST MONGOLIA

Higher education participation has grown worldwide in the past two decades. Mongolia is not an exception. Higher education enrollment grew twelve-fold in Mongolia after the collapse of socialism. This dissertation examines whether the higher education enrollment increase has improved the opportunity to access higher education for students from lower income families. The dissertation addressed the following research questions. To what extent does socioeconomic status influence access to higher education in post-socialist Mongolia? To what extent are government financial assistance programs reaching their target groups? And, how has the role of socioeconomic status in influencing access to higher education changed in the past two decades? Using probabilistic data from cross-sectional Household Social and Economic Survey in Mongolia from 2008 and 2011, I ran logistic regressions, multinomial regressions, age-cohort analyses, and cross-tabulations to find answers to these questions. The statistical models were based on economics and sociology of education literature and status attainment theories. Sequential model building technique was implemented. The key contribution of this study is the innovative approach in creating a composite socioeconomic status variable (SES) out of six sub-scales, taking advantage of the wealth of information on diverse household revenues and expenditures available in the household surveys. The key findings of this study include: family background (SES) is a highly significant predictor of college access in post-socialist Mongolia. As of 2012, government financial assistance programs lack strong priorities, rather demonstrating a flattened-out distribution of the limited resources among students from the entire societal spectrum. Female students have higher probability of accessing higher education than their male counterparts throughout all four locations of residence. Age-cohort analyses revealed that socioeconomic status was a significant predictor of college access for all age-cohorts whose college entrance years ranged from 1994 to 2010. The effect of family background remained relatively stable for these years. Predicted probability of attending college increased for three older age-cohorts, except the fourth—the youngest cohort. And the increase in the probability of attending college from one generation to another was less for the lower SES groups and larger for the highest SES groups