Does raising the educational coverage increase quality? The case of higher education in Mexico during the period 1990-2010

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate whether there is a positive relationship between coverage and equity in access to higher education under the assumption that access to any non-compulsory level begins as aprivilege for a minority group, for those socially better situated and that as coverage expands, this entailsgenerating new spaces that allow access by less privileged social sectors, which will leave progressivelyincreasing the degree of social equity of this level of study. The official coverage data of the government reports and the population censuses in Mexico are taken to compare the evolution of the indicators from 1990 to 2010. The author observes that the coverage has increased in a generalized way, keeping the trend both in states and in regions, but that the behavior of equity shows an opposite evolution. This makes possible to affirm that, in the analyzed period, raising the educational coverage did not imply anincrease in equity in higher education.