Globalization, Class and Gender Inequalities in Mexican Higher Education

Abstract

This paper focuses on the way in which socioeconomic, educational and gender inequalities are reproduced in Mexico and how certain mechanisms facilitate or hinder young people’s social mobility. Despite the efforts of various countries to promote schooling and increase spending on education, the structural conditions of social stratification have been reproduced in education, and this type of segmentation has produced a hierarchical fragmentation of higher education institutions. In order to observe the asymmetries in the distribution of resources and in the social positions that young people occupy, as well as the role played by the students’ perceptions of their personal situation compared with that of their parents, in the development of ability to reach the goals they desire and value, this paper will analyze survey data concerning three types of mobility: mobility of economic wellbeing, educational mobility and subjective mobility. This analysis finds that there is a strong relationship between the hierarchical fragmentation of higher education, class inequalities and gender, and that the relationship between gender and class remains an invisible inequality.