How educational expansion affects educational inequality has long been a key concern for students of social stratification. In recent decades, there has been a global surge of students from rapidly developing countries studying overseas. However, extant literature has not paid sufficient attention to the role of overseas degrees in educational stratification. Using Hong Kong census and by-census data from 2001, 2006 and 2011, this thesis examines how the omission of overseas degrees affects our understanding of the process. The analyses find that (1) omitting overseas degrees underestimates the effects of family background on tertiary attainment but overestimates the negative effect of immigrant status; (2) upper-class families disproportionally opt to send their children overse...[ Read more ]

How educational expansion affects educational inequality has long been a key concern for students of social stratification. In recent decades, there has been a global surge of students from rapidly developing countries studying overseas. However, extant literature has not paid sufficient attention to the role of overseas degrees in educational stratification. Using Hong Kong census and by-census data from 2001, 2006 and 2011, this thesis examines how the omission of overseas degrees affects our understanding of the process. The analyses find that (1) omitting overseas degrees underestimates the effects of family background on tertiary attainment but overestimates the negative effect of immigrant status; (2) upper-class families disproportionally opt to send their children overseas, conforming to the expectation of the Effectively Maintained Inequality (EMI) hypothesis; and (3) the effect of family income decreases over time for local students but increases among those who receive overseas training. Such visible trend divergence strongly suggests that unless researchers explicitly incorporate overseas tertiary training into their analyses, they may run a strong risk of underestimating the active role of families in educational stratification, not only in Hong Kong but also in other similarly situated societies.