Across the three welfare worlds defined by Esping- Andersen (1990), many scholars suspect higher education and welfare policies to march to different drumbeats. Furthermore, the absence of education from most comparative welfare analyses nourishes this conjecture. This paper aims to bring more clarification to the understanding of higher education’s role and position within welfare’s proper. In order to do so, we wonder whether de-commodification efforts in higher education and social security policies have been aligning over time. To answer this question, we articulate our analysis in two steps: 1) we begin by capturing, quantitatively, an index of de-commodification for 18 countries (from liberal, conservative and social-democratic welfare regimes) in 3 decades (1980-2010). We resort to whole clustering as an innovative tool to group similar stratifying trends. 2) Building upon existing literature on welfare regimes’ change, we analyze possible misalignmentsbetween higher education and social welfare. We conclude our paper by arguing that cross-sectoral and longitudinal approaches highlight the changing role and position of higher education within welfare.
