Roger Pizarro Milian (University of Toronto) and David Zarifa (Nipissing University) have published a study exploring the hierarchical structure of various postsecondary institutions. Pizarro Milian and Zarifa explain that Canadian universities are generally viewed as having a relatively flat hierarchy, performing roughly equal in prestige and reputation. To explore whether this is true among non-university postsecondary institutions, the authors use social media followers as a proxy for status. They examined social media accounts of over 600 institutions including theological institutes, private career colleges, and community colleges and used follower counts as a proxy to determine structural stratification. The authors found that private career colleges exhibited high levels of inequality, while stratification is much more flat among theological schools and community colleges. They discuss some of the mechanisms that drive these trends.
