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Changes in Differences in Participation in Expanding Higher Education: Reply to Hellevik

In our article 'Expanding Education and Improving Odds?' (Kivinen et al. 2001) we focused on the key findings of research on the differences in participation in higher education in Finland in the 1980s and 1990s. In the Introduction we discussed the methods of measuring participation in higher education. We concluded that the advantage of the odds ratio (OR) is that it can also reveal how much more the offspring of the highly educated benefit from the higher education expansion than the others, but that neither the Gini ratio nor the participation ratio (PR) can capture this relative change. Hellevik builds his comment on two basic claims: (1) 'The divergent conclusions drawn from empirical analyses depend on the choice of statistical measure for comparing class-byeducation tables from different points in time', and (2) 'The discussion concerns how to describe the contents of a class-by-education table, or, more generally, the relationship between membership in a social group/category and the possession of some desirable property (a good).' In his comment, Hellevik builds his answer on simulations, class-by-education tables or 'category-by-desirable-good tables' and a distinction between an 'allocation mechanism' and 'distributional outcomes'. Contrary to Hellevik's interpretation, we did not attempt to describe the contents of any simulation tables in our article. Generally speaking, Hellevik has brought up some interesting methodological questions related to 'the divergent conclusions drawn' and to what 'the discussion concerns'. Without exception, every researcher must be methodologically aware of the limitations of the available tools in empirical examination, and choose the tool that works best. In our article we have clearly stated how the participation ratio (PR) is (1) far more problematic in examining differences in participation, and (2) it cannot even be used in a sensible way in examining changes in differences in participation.