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HIGHER EDUCATION AND SOCIAL SECURITY TRADE-OFF: A REPLICATION AND RE-ANALYSIS
Scuola Normale Superiore (ITALY)
About this paper:
Appears in: ICERI2015 Proceedings
Publication year: 2015
Pages: 1366-1372
ISBN: 978-84-608-2657-6
ISSN: 2340-1095
Conference name: 8th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation
Dates: 18-20 November, 2015
Location: Seville, Spain
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.