The influence of socioeconomic background to University Education: the case of Sapin during the nineties.

From the last decades of the XX century, university education has experienced a strong increase, which has been fostered by some socio-economic changes and several educational policies. In fact, Mora (1997) and Lamo de Espinosa (2000) consider that, in a short period of time, Spanish University has become a mass University. In that context, the aim of this paper is to analyse if everybody has the same probabilities to attend to University at this moment or if socio-economic background is a relevant factor in this kind of decisions. Taken the data from the Spanish Labour Force Survey 2000 ad hoc Module Data on School to Work Transitions, we estimate several logit models in order to detect the influence of personal and regional characteristics on the educational decisions. The results show that, in spite of the disappearance of universities for only the elite, socioeconomic variables heavily influence the demand for university education, so the equal of opportunities in this educational level has not completely managed.