Different universities for different students: mapping the socioeconomic and academic segmentation of the Chilean university system

In both Europe and the United States, the expansion of university education has led to a process of differentiation among universities based on their quality, prestige and student composition. The differences between the institutions tend to be associated with students’ background, but it is unclear to what extent their segmentation reflects broader patterns of social stratification. This study analyzes the segmentation of the Chilean university system in terms of the socioeconomic and academic profile of first-year students. Using administrative data from over 90,000 first-year students across 45 universities in 2022, we apply Latent Class Analysis (LCA) to construct six student profiles. These profiles are then used to identify six clusters of universities according to the composition of their first-year enrollment. These clusters reflect the current structure of a consolidated system after decades of expansion. The findings suggest that the Chilean university system is structured around an elite-mass binarism. On one side, two small clusters of institutions enroll students from privileged backgrounds. One is made up of traditional universities with strong academic prestige, and the other comprises private institutions that serve as exclusive spaces for the country's socioeconomic elite. On the other side, a larger group of low-selectivity universities has absorbed most of the new enrollment resulting from the expansion process. These results show how institutional segmentation reflects underlying patterns of socioeconomic inequality within a massified and highly privatized higher education system.