ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews minority status in tertiary education and examines the ways in which dominant groups create educational systems that mirror and serve their own interests as well as legitimate the existing unequal power relations. It also demonstrates the utility of sociological frameworks involving cultural arbitraries, massification, organizational isomorphism, commensuration, and globalization in investigating the persistent nature of inequalities. The post-massification era began in the 1980s and brought declining public support, and a perception that a college education was no longer a public good. The chapter begins with an analysis of dominant social groups ability to define the terms of competition, the influences of recent worldwide trends of massification of higher education in countries where college was previously only available to the powerful, and finally how the globalization of higher education tends to foster isomorphism, commensuration, and spread of legitimated decision-making practices in international competitions.
