Abstract:

In a world in which higher education provides considerable benefits to welfare recipients, interventions to promote this sector are constantly confined within two puzzles. First, governmental choices face a trilemma:
1) expanding enrollment rates,
2) encouraging subsidization, and
3) keeping the public cost of higher education under control.

Second, several authors argue that governments’ budgetary allocations to this sector are in a constant trade-off with spending on social security programs. By replicating and extending the analysis of two papers that support this last finding, we investigate the following relevant points: first, whether this trade-off is limited to the liberal welfare states; and second, whether it constitutes a distorted result due to some outlier cases (e.g the case of the USA). The re-analysis presents challenging insights that call for putting the disconnect between higher education and social welfare programs under scrutiny.

Keywords:

Higher education, social security, welfare states.