Abstract
Does the expansion of higher education in Taiwan facilitate social mobility, or form a horizontal stratification in higher education to maintain social inequality? Using the Taiwan Social Change Survey, this paper examines the effects of higher educational expansion on the distribution of educational opportunities among students with different family backgrounds. The findings show that the expansion of higher education produces horizontal stratification within higher education. Advantaged students are more likely to attend selective and prestigious public colleges and to enter graduate schools as a result of higher educational expansion, while lowerclass students tend to enter lower-ranking private colleges with higher tuition. These results reveal that both Maximally Maintained Inequality and Effectively Maintained Inequality hypotheses work during a period of educational expansion. Finally, due to differences in tuition and the wage gap in the labor market between public and private college students, educational expansion policy in Taiwan has not mitigated class inequality, and has even functioned in subtle ways to maintain this inequality.