Higher education in welfare regimes: Three worlds of post-Soviet transition

Abstract

Higher education has generally been excluded from the welfare discourse, especially in transition countries. This article addresses existing research gaps by applying the ideas of decommodification and stratification to higher education in post-Soviet countries, within the comparative framework of welfare regime typology. The purpose of this study is to analyse the extent to which higher education relates to welfare state models in such countries. The research demonstrates that institutional settings and outcomes of higher education provision in Estonia, Georgia and Russia are evolving toward patterns of social-democratic, liberal and conservative models, respectively. Although the correspondence is incomplete, we argue that post-Soviet states are more similar to groups of countries representing these welfare regimes than to each other. This study argues against the assumption of a uniform post-Soviet pattern of higher education policy and shows that its structuring is embedded in the wider context of national welfare state models.

Keywords

higher education welfare state welfare regimes post-Soviet countries case study

Introduction

The relationship between higher education (HE) and welfare states has long remained under-investigated because HE involved a modest share of the population and is, therefore, considered separate from welfare policy. Recent studies have shown a correspondence between HE and welfare state models in western democracies; however, to the best of our knowledge, post-Soviet HE systems have not been studied from this perspective. Post-Soviet countries are often considered to be a specific type of welfare state that emulates the policies of more advanced models (Deacon, 2000). The analysis of HE in transitional states is dominated by the discourse of a neoliberal shift, institutional convergence, copying and decoupling of global patterns, and it underestimates HE embeddedness in the transformation of the broader political economy context. This study aims to analyse the extent to which HE in post-Soviet countries relates to policy patterns in ideal-typical welfare state models and to show the variance of transitional pathways. Building upon the welfare regime framework (Esping-Andersen, 1990), this research presents a descriptive case study of HE in three post-Soviet countries: Estonia, Georgia and Russia. We use the concepts of decommodification and stratification to analyse the institutional organization and outcomes of HE distribution in transition countries compared to liberal, conservative and social-democratic welfare regimes.

The remainder of this article is organized as follows. The next section reviews the literature on HE within welfare regimes and conceptualizes the conditions and outcomes of HE provision, setting the framework for case elaboration. The third section presents the case selection and empirical strategy. The fourth section summarizes existing evidence on HE institutional patterns in ideal welfare models. The fifth section presents the results of the case study analysis, and the final section concludes and discusses the evidence.

Higher education in welfare regimes: A conceptual framework

The welfare regime typology is used to describe the correspondence between welfare states and education systems, including HE, in terms of funding policies and public expenditure (West and Nikolai, 2013), participation patterns (Andres and Pechar, 2013), educational mobility (Blossfeld, 2016), and social mobility through education and educational opportunities (Beller and Hout, 2006). This heuristic intersects with the conceptualization of HE as a part of skill formation systems, complementing other institutional areas such as social policy and the labour market and distinguishing political economy models (Estevez-Abe et al., 2001; Iversen and Stephens, 2008).

Disentangling the place of HE in post-Soviet welfare models is hindered by the transition of the welfare state coupled with the ongoing transformation of HE. Post-Soviet countries are assumed to either form a hybridization of corporative and social-democratic models (Fenger, 2007) or conservative and liberal traditions (Orenstein, 2008), or to eventually converge into ideal western models, with newly emerged political partisanship leading to a redistributive consensus after the end of the transition (Deacon, 2000; Esping-Andersen, 1996). The extent to which the evolution of the welfare state in transition countries is reflected in HE structuring remains largely unknown.

HE is important for both individual and collective welfare, and the patterns of its institutional organization have been empirically proven to comply with the principles of welfare production and distribution. Hence, we assume that HE corresponds to the patterns featured in the reference welfare models into which transition states converge. The alternative hypothesis is that transition countries would have a specific HE organization that goes beyond the boundaries of the welfare state, for instance, being isomorphically transformed following global patterns (as discussed in detail in Huisman et al., 2018).

To discern these alternatives, this study builds on the welfare regimes framework introduced in the work of Esping-Andersen (1990), distinguishing between three ideal types of welfare states: liberal, conservative and social-democratic. As has been shown for western countries, decommodification and stratification – two central dimensions of this framework – can be used to conceptualize the patterns of HE institutional arrangements. For instance, Pechar and Andres (2011) found a correspondence between HE policies (participation, tracking and funding) and welfare regimes. Willemse and De Beer (2012) operationalized the institutional organization of HE using Esping-Andersen’s framework to find rough compliance with welfare regimes.

This study extends the use of the concepts of decommodification and stratification to analyse the institutional organization of HE distribution and draws on the heuristics of welfare regimes to collate HE in transition countries into ideal-typical welfare models. First, it focuses on institutional arrangements related to the accessibility and distribution of HE, emphasizing academic post-secondary education, primarily understood as long-term degrees or ISCED 2011 levels 6–8. However, it considers tertiary and pre-tertiary settings, whose relevance to HE provision has been confirmed by previous studies. Second, it considers existing empirical evidence on the relevance of particular institutional characteristics for distinguishing HE policy patterns among welfare state models. Finally, it distinguishes between the conditions (institutional design) and outcomes of HE distribution. The former refers to decommodification and stratification capacity by design. The latter depicts the actual distribution of HE and largely depends not only on institutional design but also the broader political economy context in which HE is embedded, such as initial social stratification, skill structure, and economic returns to different levels of education.

Higher education institutional design: Decommodification

According to Esping-Andersen, ‘decommodification occurs when a service is rendered as a matter of right, and when a person can maintain a livelihood without reliance on the market’ (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 22). Originally, the concept referred mainly to the emancipation of the individual from labour market dependence through cash benefits. This does not apply explicitly to HE, entailing intrinsic non-pecuniary value and benefits through participation in the labour market. Following Bambra (2005), we draw upon the decommodification of HE as a service, referring to the extent to which welfare eligibility is dependent upon market position and a country’s provision of service is independent of the market.

Regarding HE, decommodification can be illustrated through the funding structure and student assistance model.

Overall, investment in HE demonstrates that the relative emphasis on welfare policy varies across regimes (Pechar and Andres, 2011). The balance between public and private resources is widely recognized as a proxy for decommodification (West and Nikolai, 2013), reflecting the societal perception of HE mostly as a source of private benefits and individual concern or as a publicly valuable good of collective responsibility. The predominance of private funding indicates a higher marketization in the provision of HE, consistent with its commodity imagery. All things being equal, higher public funding is closer to the idea of HE as a citizen’s social right assured independently from the market.

The student assistance model includes the affordability of tuition, breadth of coverage and generosity of public grants, and illustrates the extent to which an average resident can opt for HE regardless of their market position. Prerequisites for grant allocations reflect the principles of entitlement for access to service: conditional upon family status or, alternatively, universal and based on publicly guaranteed rights (Esping-Andersen, 1990).

In complex terms, HE systems bear greater potential for decommodification if HE is completely free for all and public grants are accessible, generous and not conditioned by means-testing or family status. From this perspective, completely payable HE at high costs, not accompanied by scholarship support or public loans, represents the extreme extent of commodification.

Higher education institutional design: Stratification

Stratification refers to the ability of a welfare regime to structure social order through welfare benefit differentials. As the latter have cash value, they are considered a direct proxy for social stratification (Esping-Andersen, 1990). For HE, we distinguish between the stratification of access to it, as to a welfare service, and its outcomes. Analysing the stratification potential of institutional settings, we address the capacity of the following settings to shape disparities in HE distribution.

School differentiation in terms of quality of teaching staff, funding, infrastructure and students’ educational achievement, plays a crucial role in the differentiation of access to HE (Blossfeld et al., 2016).

Tracking is crucial for HE distribution across the population. Tracking patterns are fundamentally shaped by the age of first selection, the number of tracks after secondary school and rigidity, and vocational specificity (Blossfeld et al., 2016). Early and rigid tracking and higher vocational specificity are associated with greater disparities in educational opportunities (Kerckhoff, 2001).

HE institutions (HEIs) differentiation manifests in disparities of resources, staff qualification and selectivity, among others. To our knowledge, cross-country measurements of multidimensional differentiation are limited; however, the balance between academic and professional orientation is a widely used distinction in HE differentiation models. Schematically, binary systems are described through a clear distinction between the university, that is, research-intensive, and professional teaching-oriented segments of tertiary education. Diversified models have no clearly defined tertiary education sectors, but rather, an informal hierarchy of HEIs based on prestige and resources, where both vocationally oriented and academic degrees can be offered (Shavit et al., 2007; Willemse and De Beer, 2012).

Higher education distribution outcomes

We address HE attainment and equity of access to compare HE distribution results. These characteristics relate to the decommodification and stratification capacity of HE institutional settings (in the fourth section, we consider their relationship in different models) but might not be identical because the outcomes of distribution are conditioned by HE complementarity to other elements of political-economic models (Iversen and Stephens, 2008).

The intensity of HE expansion and the level of participation differ significantly across welfare regimes (Blossfeld, 2016) and reflect the probability that any given person will possess the actual right to a welfare service, whether it is a collective or individual responsibility. The differentiation of educational attainment by family background reflects disparities in HE distribution and is used as a proxy for the ability of education to reinforce social stratification outcomes across regimes (Beller and Hout, 2006; Blossfeld, 2016; West and Nikolai, 2013).

Research design

Case selection

This study employs the diverse case method (Seawright and Gerring, 2008) as it allows displaying a higher variance along the chosen dimensions. The choice of cases is conducive to the differences in the welfare states of the selected cases and to their relative proximity to the ideal-typical welfare regimes. However, none of the selected cases is of the pure type due to the ongoing transformation, imprints of the Soviet legacy, and radical liberalization in the early years of transition. The choice of cases accounts for the diversity of macroeconomic and political contexts in post-Soviet countries.

Estonia demonstrated its early ambition to join the European Union and its social model, building a post-industrial economy. Despite the dominance of centre-right coalitions and the strong role of nationalist parties, the centrist party often adopted left-wing positions, and social democrats have been represented in parliament since 1992 (Auers, 2015). Although Estonia preserves certain liberal features, it acquired traits of the Nordic welfare model (Avlijaš, 2020) and was recently classified as a social-democratic regime in social policy (Aidukaite, 2019) as well as in the field of educational provision (Želvys et al., 2017).

Before 2005, Georgia followed an autocratic course; however, after the Rose Revolution, social institutions completely transformed into more liberal ones, and the country approached international development agencies for assistance, with the USA as a reference point (Chakhaia and Bregvadze, 2018). Georgia’s national economy is mostly agrarian. Political representation is highly fluctuating and diversified with the liberal leftist party currently leading. Liberal reforms have significantly commodified public services such as pensions (Hutsebaut, 2017) and healthcare (Rukhadze, 2013).

Russia’s marketizing of ‘shock therapy’ and emerging political pluralism culminated in a dominant-party system, with waning left-wing parties and a nearly unrepresented right wing. Russia remains a parastatal commodity market economy and preserves social policy patterns and signs of the former Soviet model. Although it combines liberal and statist approaches, it is shifting toward expansive statism and conservatism in welfare provision (Bluhm and Varga, 2020; Shibanova and Malinovskiy, 2021).

The cases are illustrative of the natural experiment of HE evolution, formerly homogenized by common Soviet patterns and then embedded into the diverse pathways of welfare state restructuring. During the first two decades after the dissolution of the USSR, post-Soviet countries introduced a similar ‘universal pack’ of macro-level reforms in HE (Huisman et al., 2018); however, subsequent transformations have differed. The analysis covers the 2010s–20s, namely, the period of national policies after the end of the post-Soviet countries’ basic neoliberal transition.

Analysis strategy

First, we use the concepts of decommodification and stratification to define the institutional organization and outcomes of HE distribution (see the second section).

Second, we summarize the existing empirical research and formulate stylized characteristics of HE institutional organization and outcomes in the three ideal-typical welfare regimes.

Third, we analyse the cases of HE systems in Georgia, Estonia and Russia along the same dimensions and compare them to the reference models. The data used included official government documents and reports, databases of international organizations, reports from research centres, national statistical and supranational agencies, and research articles. A range of quantitative indicators (Supplementary Table A1) serves to illustrate the findings of the case study analysis and to compare the selected cases and countries commonly regarded as representatives of the three ideal-typical regimes: Great Britain, the United States, Australia, Canada (liberal); Germany, France, Austria, Belgium (conservative); Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark (social-democratic).

In the final step (see Annex), composite indices of decommodification, stratification and distributive outcomes are constructed to further support the case study findings and quantify the proximity of post-Soviet countries to the groups of reference countries.

Patterns of higher education institutional characteristics in welfare regimes

In the liberal model, individual welfare is realized through equality of opportunity based on achievements and provided by the market, while state intervention is residual. The potential for decommodification is the lowest, and competition-induced stratification is high (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Liberal countries favour investment in general knowledge (that is, general upper secondary and long-cycle tertiary education), and vocational specificity is generally lower (Andres and Pechar, 2013), but Anglo-Saxon countries (in comparison to North American ones) have a pronounced vocational trajectory (Triventi, 2014). Human capital imperatives lead to the highest, and predominantly private, expenditures on education (Pechar and Andres, 2011). HE is an individual responsibility and investment commodity, the eligibility for which is highly conditional upon family resources, as most students pay the highest fees among welfare regimes. To compensate for this, student support is mass- and well-developed but is mostly provided through loans (Garritzmann, 2016).

Typical liberal countries have comprehensive schooling and individual choice tracking models, and pupils are not sorted into separate educational tracks. However, a lower degree of standardization in the curriculum and the existence of subject choice shape informal course-by-course ability grouping, which is still less rigid than formal tracking (Chmielewski, 2014). This results in within-school differentiation in achievement being more pronounced than moderate between-school differentiation (Beblavý et al., 2013). A diversified, market-competitive system of highly autonomous HEIs leads to significant institutional differentiation through prestige and resources in liberal countries (Boliver, 2015).

The market drove tertiary education expansion to a relatively high attainment rate (Triventi, 2014), although less is known about university-level education. Evidence on disparities in HE distribution is mixed; some research suggests that liberal regimes are relatively equal (Beblavý et al., 2013), while more recent research suggests significant inequality of educational opportunities that are nevertheless lower than those in conservative countries (Blossfeld, 2016).

In social-democratic regimes, social rights are maximized, while social provision is the least stratified, approaching universal access to middle-class consumption standards. This logic is projected in the consumption and provision of mass HE without reliance on the market. The high level of attainment (Pechar and Andres, 2011), the large and mostly public investment in education at all levels (West and Nikolai, 2013), and the greater equality of educational opportunities (Blossfeld, 2016) situate HE closer to social right imagery. Most Nordic countries, representing this regime, combine no tuition fees for public institutions, mass coverage with generous public aid, and loans to cover living costs (Garritzmann, 2016).

Schools are comprehensive and poorly differentiated by educational achievements (West and Nikolai, 2013). Formal external tracking starts late, usually assuming a division into academic and vocational curricula. However, ability grouping is infrequent; tracking is more inclusive and contributes to differentiation in educational/career outcomes to a lesser extent than in other regimes (Blossfeld et al., 2016). This model emphasizes significant vocational specificity, as social protection of labour and high market coordination stipulate investment in specific skills (Iversen and Stephens, 2008). The binary divide between HEIs is common in the countries following this regime (Willemse and De Beer, 2012). However, the stratification potential is arguably less significant as the distribution of competencies at all educational levels is generally compressed (Iversen and Stephens, 2008) and diplomas from different types of HEIs are comparable in the labour market (Teichler, 2007).

Conservative regimes preserve the most pronounced social stratification, reinforced through welfare distribution and moderate commodification (Esping-Andersen, 1990). This model emphasizes welfare cash benefits (equity of conditions) rather than education (equity of opportunities), and total expenditures in HE are lower than in other regimes (West and Nikolai, 2013). The state plays a major role in the funding of education (Willemse and De Beer, 2012), with relatively higher investment in vocational specificity (Andres and Pechar, 2013). On average, low tuition fees are accompanied by underdeveloped student support, including lack of loans and means-testing, reflecting the conservative idea of families’ greater role in attaining welfare (Garritzmann, 2016).

Educational streaming goes hand in hand with social reproduction. Conservative countries usually have earlier, rigorous, stratified tracking (West and Nikolai, 2013) and the highest level of differentiation across schools (Peter et al., 2010). More tracks have distinct profiles and are usually provided in different types of organizations. The vocational track is often a safety net for low achievers (Pechar and Andres, 2011). The binary HE model is the most common, although it is diversified in some countries (Willemse and De Beer, 2012). In contrast to the social-democratic model, disparities between vocational and academic institutions can be more pronounced under corporate governance systems and higher social stratification (Baethge and Wolter, 2015). HE participation in this model is stable over time and comparatively low (West and Nikolai, 2013; Willemse and De Beer, 2012) and distributed most inequitably among the regimes (Blossfeld, 2016).

Table 1 summarizes the patterns of HE provision in welfare regimes in a stylized comparison with the post-Soviet states discussed in the next section.

Table 1.

Stylized facts on institutional characteristics of higher education provision in welfare regimes and post-Soviet countries.

Welfare regime	Liberal	Conservative	Social-democratic	Georgia	Russia	Estonia
Decommodification
Funding structure	High^a total HE expenditure Predominantly private	Low/Medium^a total HE expenditure Predominantly public	Medium/High^a total HE expenditure Predominantly public	Low^a total HE expenditure, increasing Predominantly private	Low^a total HE expenditure, decreasing Predominantly public	Medium^a total HE expenditure, increasing Predominantly public
Student assistance model	Universal and high tuition fees	Universal and low tuition fees	Absent or not widespread tuition fees	Universal and high tuition fees	Low weighted average tuition fees (half pay full tuition, half study for free)	Absent tuition fees
	Well-developed assistance	Weakly developed assistance	Well-developed assistance through universal grants and loans to cover living costs	Moderately developed assistance (generous with lower coverage)	Weakly developed assistance	Weakly developed assistance
	Wide use of loans to compensate for high tuition	Loans are not widespread		Loans are rare	Loans are not widespread	Loans are rare
Stratification
School differentiation	Medium^a	High^a	Low^a	Medium^a	Medium^a	Medium^a
Tracking model	No formal tracking	Earlier selection	Late selection	De facto single track	Earlier selection	Late selection
	Informal course-by-course tracking	Rigid formal tracking with many tracks	Less rigid division into academic and vocational tracks at upper secondary level	Weak vocational specificity	Rigid formal tracking	Less rigid division into academic and vocational tracks at upper secondary level
	Weak (Anglo-Saxon countries)/Strong (North American) vocational specificity	Strong vocational specificity	Strong vocational specificity		Strong vocational specificity	Strong vocational specificity
HEIs differentiation model	Diversified	Binary/Diversified	Binary	Diversified	Binary	Binary
HEIs differentiation model	Strong differentiation	Strong differentiation	Weak differentiation	Strong differentiation	Strong differentiation	Weak differentiation
Outcomes
HE attainment	Medium/High^a	Low^a	Medium/High^a	High^a	Medium ^a	High^a
Equity of access (odds ratio)	Medium^a	Low^a	High^a	Low ^a	Low^a	Medium^a

Source: Authors’ elaboration.¹

Note: ¹The characteristics for ideal-typical welfare regimes are based on the article’s fourth section and the analysis of quantitative indicators for referent countries from Supplementary Table A1 in the Annex. The characteristics for Estonia, Russia and Georgia are based on case studies and quantitative indicators from Supplementary Table A1.

^aLabel low is assigned if the indicator for a country lies within (Min; Mean-0.5*St.Dev); Medium if within [Mean− 0.5*St.Dev; Mean 0.5*St.Dev]; and High if within (Mean+0.5*St.Dev; Max) range. Mean is counted for all reference countries representing the ideal types from Supplementary Table A1. Labels for ideal-typical welfare regimes are indicated by the predominant characteristic in the group of countries (/if equally presented).

Results

Georgia

After the Rose Revolution of 2005, Georgia’s education policy radically liberalized and isomorphically approximated to the western/European-style curriculum, financing and governance models, relying on marketization (Huisman et al., 2018). Despite the chronic underfunding of HE, the structure of funding approximates the country to liberal facets: a higher investment in general knowledge, privatization of costs, and commodification of HE provision.

Georgia spends just 1% of GDP on HE, which still substantially exceeds investments in vocational education and training (VET) (World Bank, 2018); however, funding has recently been growing as the country has set the goal of increasing investment in human capital (Li et al., 2019). HE is a costly investment with high individual returns (44.9% compared with general education¹) that is common in liberal countries. Similar to these states, 70% of HE funding comes from households (Supplementary Table A1).

The country leads among the post-Soviet states in HE marketization, with the highest growth rates in the private sector and share of tuition-fee places (Smolentseva, 2020). Most state funding is distributed through state grants according to the market principle ‘money follows the student’. Georgia was the only country in the post-Soviet area that used the voucher system in higher and secondary education.

Student assistance approximates the model that combines predominantly tuition-funded education with high fees and relatively generous student support, lagging behind coverage rates in other liberal countries. The average tuition fee to average income ratio is 59.1% (Supplementary Table A1); to compensate for this, 17% of students in Georgia receive merit-based grants (vouchers) that vary in value – depending on test scores – at levels of 100%, 70%, 50% (the most frequent), and 30% of the maximum fee permitted in public universities. However, in most cases, access to HE requires private investment. Only 4% of students obtain full grants sufficient for study in public universities but not in private ones (World Bank, 2018). The average per capita grant is 27.1% of average income (Supplementary Table A1), significantly higher than in Russia and Estonia, although student support coverage still lags behind the liberal model. Need-based vouchers, increasing in absolute numbers, still cover only 2–4% of enrolment and are primarily targeted at underprivileged groups of the poorest families and ethnic minorities (World Bank, 2018). These grants are set at 100% of tuition fees at public universities, which could be considered a reflection of the logic of ensuring access for those ‘who are unable to participate in the market anyhow’ (Esping-Andersen, 1990: 43). In comparison, in Russia and Estonia, need-based grants are relatively small and aim to support less well-off groups of students who have already enrolled in universities.

After 2005, Georgia transformed the Soviet-type school system, moving toward greater decentralization and competition. Although only one formal type of schooling exists, the private sector (one of the most developed among post-Soviet states) and the voucher scheme favour resource and size differentiation across schools (Tabatadze and Gorgadze, 2017), which corresponds to a noticeable differentiation in student achievement between schools (Supplementary Table A1).

As in Soviet times, school education is still divided into different levels, but almost three-fourths of Georgian schools provide comprehensive schooling (Ruochen et al., 2019). Since 2005, students at the vocational upper secondary level no longer receive a secondary education diploma and are not eligible for HE; only the academic track (general upper secondary) leads to HE. Although vocational colleges exist as part of the Soviet legacy, vocational specificity is least pronounced (Supplementary Table A1); thus, tracking is de facto channelling the overwhelming majority of students onto one track, which is an expected liberal pattern. We do not have enough data to illustrate significant course-by-course tracking, although the reforms of the last decade have created a favourable institutional environment. The national curriculum of 2011 provided teachers with the freedom to develop classroom materials independently, increased school autonomy, empowered parents, and made teaching more student-centred and flexible (Sentočnik et al., 2018).

Georgia is closer to a diversified HE model with a variety of highly autonomous small- and medium-sized institutions, formally grouped into universities, teaching universities and colleges, all of which award the same undergraduate degree but differ in their ability to provide graduate education. In tertiary education, there is virtually no division between the professional and academic segments. The ISCED5 level is formally present but is nearly absent in terms of enrolment.² HEIs’ vertical stratification by prestige and resources is reinforced through market mechanisms. Universities are the most prestigious teaching entities, and colleges are the least prestigious; unlike most post-Soviet countries, private universities are often more prestigious than public universities (Chakhaia and Bregvadze, 2018). Tuition differentiation complies with this hierarchy. Given the high financial autonomy of universities, tuition is not only a derivative of prestige but also the main source of large resource differentiation. The proportions of state grantees are also illustrative of differences in prestige; they are the highest in selective private universities, followed by public universities and other private institutions (World Bank, 2018).

As in liberal models, equality of opportunity and meritocratic competition in Georgia are mediated by the ability of families to participate in market competition, having a strong capacity to contribute to social stratification; for instance, low-income students are concentrated in a limited number of disadvantaged schools (Peña-López, 2016). Access to HE depends heavily on investment in private tutoring, which compensates for the low quality of schooling and is unaffordable for poor families. Higher family income significantly affects the likelihood of receiving state merit-based grants, such as urban/Tbilisi residence, having better-educated parents, and graduating from private schools (World Bank, 2018). Consequently, informal differentiation and merit-based systems penalize lower-income families and minorities. The distribution of HE is unequal, and the odds ratio of HE attainment depending on parental education in Georgia is high compared to that in other countries (Supplementary Table A1).

Russia

The combination of the Soviet legacy of free public education and market reforms has simultaneously shaped HE in Russia as a social right and commodity (Shibanova and Malinovskiy, 2021). The paramount objective of public funding is to facilitate the Soviet-inherited constitutional right to free HE.³ After the government-led shrinkage of private HEIs, marketization gradually shifted to the large state universities; at the same time, public funding of HE decreased over the decade.⁴

Specific partial marketization in Russia is seen in the dual-track model, under which both public and tuition-financed enrolment are possible in the same public universities (Smolentseva, 2020). Depending on the entrance exam score, approximately half of the students acquire HE entirely at public cost, and half buy it as a commodity at a rather high price, often at the same institution. Loans are rare, and only for full-time students; publicly financed enrolees are guaranteed basic (∼4.2% of the average income) scholarships if academic results are acceptable. About 6% of students received need-based help (∼6.3% of the average income⁵). In this context, Russia leans toward a conservative pattern of HE decommodification: state-led and relatively lower overall HE funding, moderate marketization, and reliance on family resources given underdeveloped student assistance.

Stratification of HE in Russia manifests in variations in educational pathways due to rigorous tracking and a highly differentiated educational landscape. School differentiation is reinforced by high cross-regional and urban/rural disparities and variations in school size, resources and curricula (Kosaretsky et al., 2014). As a result, there is a significant variation in PISA scores, which is the highest among the cases reviewed (Supplementary Table A1). The transition to upper secondary general education is conditional on academic achievement, and switching between professional and academic tracks is formally possible but very rare. The proportion of high school graduates choosing VET after compulsory education has increased by more than one-third in the last decade (Dudyrev et al., 2019).

Russia is classified as a binary tertiary education model in which academic and professional education are delivered by different types of institutions (Shavit et al., 2007). This division from Soviet times has been mainly preserved, as is its pivotal role in social stratification. VET and HEIs vary heavily in enrolees’ background, teaching quality and graduates’ outcomes in the labour market (Konstantinovskiy, 2017). Large differences in economic returns to VET and HE have been maintained since the post-Soviet transformation – the latter, on average, entailing three to five times higher returns (Melianova et al., 2020).

HEIs are strongly stratified by prestige, enrolees’ academic achievement, competitive power and funding. The state plays a substantial role in structuring the institutional landscape, recently reducing the mass-absorbing segment and establishing strata of universities, such as elite world-class, federal, national research and regional flagship institutions, with designated public tasks. Public funding redistribution has resulted in the consolidation of supply and widened the gap between leading and mass-absorbing sectors. Four percent of approximately 1200 Russian HEIs are considered to be leading universities and account for 35% of funding and 16% of students.⁶ Per-student funding and fees are amplified with university prestige and metropolitan, research-intense HEIs are the most expensive.

Maintaining the share of state-funded places at HEIs and rapid post-Soviet expansion have raised educational attainment in Russia to the average level of developed countries; however, HE participation is declining and unevenly distributed. Over the past decade, enrolment in undergraduate programmes decreased in Russia from 34% to 28% of the relevant cohort, while VET enrolment increased, indicating the professionalization of tertiary education.⁷ The education system’s institutional design shapes the hierarchy of HE access: choosing the academic track (upper secondary school) is highly dependent on parental background (Blossfeld et al., 2016) and favourable for enrolment in HEIs, especially prestigious ones; 80% of students in the leading universities have at least one parent with HE.⁸ The upper vocational track is a safety net for students from less privileged backgrounds, mostly used to transit to the labour market, and for one-third of graduates, this is a strategy to avoid unified state exams and proceed to HEIs of lower quality. The lower vocational track is often a dead end and attracts the most underprivileged students (Dudyrev et al., 2019). HE attainment depends strongly on parental education, as measured by the odds ratio (Supplementary Table A1). Unequal educational opportunities intersect with social stratification. In the post-Soviet period, Russia maintained one of the highest levels of social immobility in the region even with the expansion of HE (Jackson and Evans, 2017).

Estonia

Estonia is a unique case of a deliberate move to decommodify HE in the post-Soviet area, building public commitment toward free and mass HE provision. Since 2012, HE has become free for full-time programmes in Estonian, and now less than 15% of students pay fees (EACEA, 2020), while 55% did in 2005 (Huisman et al., 2018). After abolishing the Soviet-type model of sector-oriented professional institutions, large, state-owned universities have become key actors in promoting HE accessibility. Today, only 8% of all students study at private institutions (EACEA, 2020). The significance of education in the welfare package manifests itself in the steady increase in expenditure over the last decade, especially pronounced in tertiary education. The latter has reached the level of the Nordic countries (Supplementary Table A1), and its growth rate has exceeded that of all OECD countries.⁹ As in the Nordic countries, even with the prevalence of publicly funded places, a range of scholarships exists to support student learning: need-based allowance, merit-based grants, and grants for training in priority fields. In relative terms, coverage and average amount of aid per student are modest; however, compared with post-Soviet countries, loans are more accessible.

The Estonian education system advanced toward a less stratified school and university landscape that is linked to less inequality in labour market outcomes. As in the Nordic states, Estonia is known for its quality of schooling, although school differentiation is still slightly higher in the country; however, this differentiation arises not due to the socioeconomic status of students (which is estimated to have the smallest impact on PISA reading scores in the OECD) but due to differences between Estonian- and Russian-speaking schools (Musset et al., 2019).

Formal tracking retains the Soviet imprint, and at first glance, it seems similar to Russia, but in fact, it is a good illustration of evolutionary differences. Both countries used to distinguish between academic and two vocational tracks at the upper secondary level. While Russia has preserved two vocational tracks that have become a lower level of tertiary education (ISCED5), reinforcing the social polarization between academic and professional education, Estonia has deliberately constrained the sorting power of tracking by mitigating the formal hurdles to changing tracks. In 1997, the upper vocational track was transformed into a professional HE degree (ISCED6) (Blossfeld et al., 2016), and the lower one formed vocational upper secondary education.¹⁰ As a result, in Estonia, the selection now starts late and involves a choice between fewer pathways. An inclusive feature of Estonia is adults’ opportunity to acquire upper secondary education for better job placement and to continue their studies in HE. Approximately 1/6 of all upper secondary students study in secondary schools for adults (Musset et al., 2019).

The Estonian binary HE model distinguishes between universities, with a mission to provide research and enable the development of responsible and enterprising citizens, and professional HEIs, aimed at meeting the needs of the labour market and applied research. Professional HEIs are still perceived to be less prestigious, but vertical stratification is not as obvious as in Georgia or Russia. Both types of degree were equalized by the New HE Act of 2019. Both are governed by the same educational standards, provide the same credit points, and allow students to pursue graduate programmes, and both are valued in the labour market (Leppik, 2019). The compressed structure of skills is mirrored in less dispersed wages resulting from the excellent quality of schooling and an equal emphasis on specific and general skills formation, which makes well-being less dependent on educational differences. Economic returns to HE are relatively small compared to upper secondary education in OECD countries (OECD, 2019). Non-academic options are not stigmatized: graduates of professional institutions earn 16.9% more than academic bachelor graduates, and even a master’s qualification does not produce a huge wage premium compared with professional HE (Jaggo et al., 2016). HE graduates’ employment rate is just 1 percentage point above that of upper secondary education graduates (OECD, 2019). Hence, similar to the Nordic model, and in contrast to conservative states, significant vocational specificity, either at the upper secondary or HE level, contributes less to disparities in outcomes.

The state-driven, universalistic approach in Estonia leads to one of the highest levels of educational attainment and comparatively larger equity in its distribution. The academic upper secondary track is still twice as popular as the vocational track, and the latter entails fewer chances to proceed to university, majorly attracting graduates with very low GPAs – an issue addressed by ministerial policy (Musset et al., 2019). However, for comparison, the share of those enrolling in HE upon graduation from VET in Estonia is higher than in Russia (∼50% versus ∼20%).¹¹ Estonia has one of the lowest differences in literacy proficiency between adults with highly and lowly educated parents (OECD, 2019): the odds ratio is the lowest among the reviewed cases and close to the values of social-democratic countries (Supplementary Table A1). Nevertheless, ethnicity is still a major source of inequality in access: Russian-speaking students are overrepresented in VET and attain HE less often than do Estonian-speaking students (Musset et al., 2019).

Conclusion and discussion

Our analysis has shown that the welfare regimes framework previously used for advanced western states (for example, Pechar and Andres, 2011; Willemse and De Beer, 2012) can be relevant for analysing HE institutional design and educational outcomes in transition countries. The case study of Estonia, Georgia and Russia demonstrates that differences in HE provisions in the three countries are largely congruent with the institutional patterns of the welfare regimes into which these countries converge. The case analysis is further supported by the clustering analysis (Supplementary Figure A2, Annex) of the composite indices of decommodification, stratification and outcomes, demonstrating that the selected cases are more similar to countries representing the ideal models than to each other (Supplementary Figure A3, Annex).

Similarities between Estonia and the socio-democratic model can be seen in the high decommodification through mass and free HE provision and in the comparatively lower stratification of access. The least decommodified HE provision in Georgia is strongly shaped by familial resources and market mechanisms, while state intervention is residual, resembling the liberal perspective. In Russia, state-governed marketization is moderate, and stratification is high.

In all three countries, the right to HE is legislatively guaranteed, and is de jure integrated into welfare provisions. However, in Georgia, reforms transformed HE into an expensive commodity and lucrative investment, largely dependent on private funding and market competition. In Estonia, HE tends toward social rights imagery: mostly free, produced and funded by public entities. In Russia, for half of the population, HE is a commodity; for the other half, it is a constitutionally guaranteed right, both majorly provided in the same public institutions.

The low stratification potential in Estonia stems from lower, socially induced differentiation between schools, relatively lower disparities in conditions and outcomes between professional and academic tracks, and from the alignment of universities and professional HEIs. Georgia, while having a formally unstratified educational provision, draws on inter-school resource and market-driven HE differentiation. In Russia, high stratification is associated with differences among schools, distinct and rigid tracks after compulsory education, and state-driven differentiation of the HE landscape.

The three countries have become high participation systems; however, the scope and mechanisms of enrolment growth differ. HE attainment in Georgia is comparatively the highest and it was predominantly achieved through privatization. Due to the lack of funding sources besides tuition fees, HEIs’ sustainability is highly determined by enrolment, which led to expansion. However, access to HE is highly dependent on family resources, despite a formally meritocratic and non-stratified system. Estonia gradually minimized privatization and committed to maintaining high attainment with a relatively more equal distribution. Russia took advantage of the market but limited it and regained control later, gradually reorienting toward the professionalization of tertiary education. In comparison to Estonia, Russia’s high vocational specificity and binary HE model contribute to larger differences between professional and academic tracks, strongly stratifying educational outcomes.

These results support Esping-Andersen’s assumption that transition countries will move closer to ideal-typical models as they evolve (Esping-Andersen, 1996); nevertheless, as seen in the case study and quantitative analysis (Annex), post-Soviet HE did not fully conform to ideal patterns. Some deviations can be attributed to the hybridization of the initial common liberalization and the institutional features of the ideal models (Orenstein, 2008; Fenger, 2007). Estonia lies between liberal and socio-democratic camps, gravitating more toward the latter (Supplementary Figure A3, Annex). Russia relied heavily on Soviet institutional mechanisms, layering the imperatives of marketization and conservative statism. Georgia has intensified liberalization, becoming even more market-oriented than other countries in this regime.

The underfunding of HE echoes the abrupt transition to the market and the subsequent budget deficits in almost all transition countries (Orenstein, 2008). Countries have responded differently to the challenge of financing the dramatically increased demand for education in their new economies: Georgia privatized the supply of HE and passed on the costs to households. Estonia gradually increased its public expenditures. Russia retained the scale of Soviet-era public funding but introduced the opportunity to buy education in the same state universities. Nevertheless, Georgia and Russia still lag behind the averages of their reference models in terms of funding.

The comparatively higher attainment levels in the three countries can also be attributed to the liberalization of the HE market after the collapse of the USSR, which was a key driver of the steeper HE expansion. At the same time, sudden marketization was accompanied by an increase in social inequalities in the transition countries (Jackson and Evans, 2017), partly explaining, on average, higher inequality in educational opportunity than that found in the reference models.

To understand the deviation in our cases, both the resilience of Soviet institutions and the vectors of ongoing transition must be considered. An illustrative example is the evolution of tracking, which is formally similar in the three countries and accompanied by relatively lower differentiation between schools, retained from the Soviet times. The countries used to have the same tracks after secondary school and age of the first selection, common in the former USSR states. However, in Georgia, vocational specificity has become the least pronounced, as in the liberal model, approaching comprehensive tracking. Estonia has converted the upper technical track into professional HE equated to university education, while in Russia, the distinction between professional and academic tertiary education preserves a high stratification capacity.

Student assistance models partially diverge from the hypothesized patterns, which may be the other side of underfunding. In Estonia, HE provision is mostly free, as in Nordic countries; however, student support is less developed. In Georgia, high tuition fees are not well compensated for by student support, the scope of which lags behind liberal countries. With the same low level of private per capita investment and modest student support as in conservative countries, the dual-track model makes Russia somewhat different from conservative countries. In Georgia and Estonia, education loans are underdeveloped compared to peer models, although Georgia has set itself the goal of developing an affordable loan system as the principal instrument for financial availability of HE.¹²

The limitations arise due to the case study design, which does not represent the full diversity of post-Soviet transformations. Moreover, the attribution of post-Soviet countries to welfare state models is still far from conventional (Cerami and Vanhuysse, 2009). Minor non-uniformity in the data is also important to note.

The results of the study challenge the identification of post-Communist countries as distinct and coherent welfare models as well as the existing debate about convergence and emulation of the dominant global institutional forms in HE (for example, Dobbins and Knill, 2009). In analysing transition countries, one should consider the wider context: the adoption of global western-type ideas, combined with strong Soviet legacy or an intentional break from the past, and the partial emulation of a welfare model from a reference family of countries.

Given the short history of political partisanship, however, a significant conceptual limitation is the difficulty in applying the power resource approach – the key explanatory construct for the welfare regimes framework – to transition countries. The task of explaining why post-Soviet countries can gravitate toward certain welfare models was not the focus of this study but is still highly relevant.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Material - Higher education in welfare regimes: Three worlds of post-Soviet transition

Supplemental Material for Higher education in welfare regimes: Three worlds of post-Soviet transition by Sergey Malinovskiy and Ekaterina Shibanova in Journal of European Social Policy

Footnotes

Funding

This article is an output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University).

ORCID iDs

Sergey Malinovskiy

Ekaterina Shibanova

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

References

Aidukaite

(2019) The welfare systems of the Baltic states following the recent financial crisis of 2008–2010: expansion or retrenchment? Journal of Baltic Studies 50(1): 39–58.

Andres

Pechar

(2013) Participation patterns in higher education: a comparative welfare and production régime perspective. European Journal of Education 48(2): 247–261.

Auers

(2015) Comparative Politics and Government of the Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the 21st Century. London: Springer.

Avlijaš

(2020) Beyond neoliberalism? Revisiting the welfare state in the Baltic states. Europe-Asia Studies 72(4): 614–643.

Baethge

Wolter

(2015) The German skill formation model in transition: from dual system of VET to higher education? Journal for Labour Market Research 48(2): 97–112.

Bambra

(2005) Cash versus services: ‘worlds of welfare’ and the decommodification of cash benefits and health care services. Journal of Social Policy 34(2): 195–213.

Beblavý

Thum

Veselkova

(2013) Education and social protection policies in OECD countries: social stratification and policy intervention. Journal of European Social Policy 23(5): 487–503.

Beller

Hout

(2006) Welfare states and social mobility: how educational and social policy may affect cross-national differences in the association between occupational origins and destinations. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 24(4): 353–365.

Blossfeld

H-P

Buchholz

Skopek

, et al. (2016) Models of Secondary Education and Social Inequality: An International Comparison. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

10.

Blossfeld

(2016) Inequality of educational opportunity and welfare regimes. World Studies in Education 17(2): 53–85.

11.

Bluhm

Varga

(2020) Conservative developmental statism in East Central Europe and Russia. New Political Economy 25(4): 642–659.

12.

Boliver

(2015) Are there distinctive clusters of higher and lower status universities in the UK? Oxford Review of Education 41(5): 608–627.

13.

Cerami

Vanhuysse

(2009) Post-communist Welfare Pathways: Theorizing Social Policy Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe. Dordrecht: Springer.

14.

Chakhaia

Bregvadze

(2018) Higher education system dynamics and institutional diversity. In: Huisman

Smolentseva

Froumin

(eds) 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity. Georgia, Cham: Springer Nature, pp. 175–197.

15.

Chmielewski

(2014) An international comparison of achievement inequality in within - and between-school tracking systems. American Journal of Education 120(3): 293–324.

16.

Deacon

(2000) Eastern European welfare states: the impact of the politics of globalization. Journal of European Social Policy 10(2): 146–161.

17.

Dobbins

Knill

(2009) Higher education policies in Central and Eastern Europe: convergence toward a common model? Governance 22(3): 397–430.

18.

Dudyrev

Romanova

Travkin

, et al. (2019) Employment of vocational graduates: still a slough or already a ford? Educational Studies Moscow i(1): 109–136. DOI: 10.17323/1814-9545-2019-1-109-136

19.

EACEA (2020) National Student Fee and Support Systems in European Higher Education – 2020/21. Eurydice – Facts and Figures. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.

20.

Esping-Andersen

(1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

21.

Esping-Andersen

(1996) Welfare States in Transition: National Adaptations in Global Economies. New York: Sage.

22.

Estevez-Abe

Iversen

Soskice

(2001) Social protection and the formation of skills: a reinterpretation of the welfare state. In: Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 145–183.

23.

Fenger

(2007) Welfare regimes in Central and Eastern Europe: incorporating post-communist countries in a welfare regime typology. Contemporary Issues and Ideas in Social Sciences 3(2): 1–30.

24.

Garritzmann

(2016) The Political Economy of Higher Education Finance: The Politics of Tuition Fees and Subsidies in OECD Countries, 1945–2015. Cham: Springer Nature.

25.

Huisman

Smolentseva

Froumin

(2018) 25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity. Cham: Springer Nature.

26.

Hutsebaut

(2017) Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (German Political Foundation Associated), Pension System Reform in Georgia: Comments and Alternatives. Available at: http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/georgien/13980.pdf (accessed February 14, 2020).

27.

Iversen

Stephens

(2008) Partisan politics, the welfare state, and three worlds of human capital formation. Comparative Political Studies 41(4–5): 600–637.

28.

Jackson

Evans

(2017) Rebuilding walls: market transition and social mobility in the post-socialist societies of Europe. Sociological Science 4: 54–79. DOI: 10.15195/v4.a

29.

Jaggo

Reinhold

Valk

(2016) Labour Market Success of Vocational and Higher Education Graduates Analysis. Department of the Ministry of Education and Research. Available at: https://dspace.ut.ee/handle/10062/51600 (accessed February 1, 2020).

30.

Kerckhoff

(2001) Education and social stratification processes in comparative perspective. Sociology of Education 74: 3–18.

31.

Konstantinovskiy

(2017) Expansion of higher education and consequences for social inequality (the case of Russia). Higher Education 74(2): 201–220.

32.

Kosaretsky

Grunicheva

Pinskaya

(2014) School System and Educational Policy in a Highly Stratified post-Soviet Society: The Importance of Social Context. Higher School of Economics Basic Research Program Working Papers WP BRP22/PA/2014. Available at: https://wp.hse.ru/data/2014/12/09/1105032362/22PA2014.pdf (accessed April 22, 2021).

33.

Leppik

(2019) Labour Market Success of Vocational and Higher Education Graduates: Summary and Main Conclusions. Estonian Ministry of Education and Research. Available at: https://www.hm.ee/sites/default/files/labour_market_success_of_graduates-summary.pdf (accessed May 11, 2021).

34.

Kitchen

George

, et al. (2019) OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment in Education: Georgia. Paris: OECD Publishing. DOI: 10.1787/94dc370e-en.

35.

Melianova

Parandekar

Patrinos

HA,

et al. (2020) Returns to Education in the Russian Federation: Some New Estimates. Washington, DC: The World Bank. Available at: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/34473 (accessed May 15, 2021).

36.

Musset

Field

Mann

, et al. (2019) Vocational Education and Training in Estonia. Paris: OECD Publishing.

37.

OECD (2019) Education at a Glance 2019: OECD Indicators. Paris: OECD Publishing. DOI: 10.1787/19991487

38.

Orenstein

(2008) Poverty, inequality, and democracy: postcommunist welfare states. Journal of Democracy 19(4): 80–94.

39.

Pechar

Andres

(2011) Higher-education policies and welfare regimes: international comparative perspectives. Higher Education Policy 24(1): 25–52.

40.

Peña-López

(2016) PISA 2015 Results: Policies and Practices for Successful Schools Volume II. Paris: OECD Publishing. DOI: \10.1787/9789264267510-en

41.

Peter

Edgerton

Roberts

(2010) Welfare regimes and educational inequality: a cross-national exploration. International Studies in Sociology of Education 20(3): 241–264.

42.

Rukhadze

(2013) An overview of the health care system in Georgia: expert recommendations in the context of predictive, preventive and personalised medicine. EPMA Journal 4(1): 1–13.

43.

Ruochen

Hannah

Bert

, et al. (2019) OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment in Education: Georgia. Paris: OECD Publishing. DOI: 10.1787/94dc370e-en

44.

Seawright

Gerring

(2008) Case selection techniques in case study research: a menu of qualitative and quantitative options. Political Research Quarterly 61(2): 294–308.

45.

Sentočnik

Sales

Richardson

(2018) Educational reform in Georgia: recommendations for building leadership capacity as a critical success factor for instructional change. International Journal of Leadership in Education 21(6): 651–668.

46.

Shavit

Arum

Gamoran

(2007) Stratification in Higher Education: A Comparative Study. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

47.

Shibanova

Malinovskiy

(2021) Higher education in Soviet and Russian welfare states: hybridization, continuity and change. European Journal of Higher Education 11(3): 273–291.

48.

Smolentseva

(2020) Marketisation of higher education and dual-track tuition fee system in post-Soviet countries. International Journal of Educational Development 78: 1–14. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijedudev.2020.102265

49.

Tabatadze

Gorgadze

(2017) Affirmative action policy in admissions system of higher education of post-Soviet Georgia. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education 9(3): 363–377.

50.

Teichler

(2007) Does higher education matter? Lessons from a comparative graduate survey. European Journal of Education 42(1): 11–34.

51.

Triventi

(2014) Higher education regimes: an empirical classification of higher education systems and its relationship with student accessibility. Quality and Quantity 48(3): 1685–1703.

52.

West

Nikolai

(2013) Welfare regimes and education regimes: equality of opportunity and expenditure in the EU (and US). Journal of Social Policy 42(3): 469–493.

53.

Willemse

De Beer

(2012) Three worlds of educational welfare states? a comparative study of higher education systems across welfare states. Journal of European Social Policy 22(2): 105–117.

54.

World Bank (2018) Technical Assistance to Support Reforms to the Higher Education Financing System in Georgia. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/895021551184190719/Technical-Assistance-to-Support-Reforms-to-the-Higher-Education-Financing-System-in-Georgia (accessed January 31, 2020).

55.

Želvys

Jakaitienė

Stumbrienė

(2017) Moving towards different educational models of the welfare state: comparing the education systems of the Baltic Countries. Filosofija. Sociologija 28(2): 139–150.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.34 MB