Maia Chankseliani, September 2012

This paper examines associations between rurality of higher education (HE) applicants’ residential origin, their priority choices of higher education institutions (HEIs), and university destinations in Georgia. By applying mixed-methods to the study of the quantitative data on approximately 118,000 applicants, a purposive sample of households and policy-makers, the paper contributes to the understanding of academic higher education access inequities in Georgian settings. The findings of this paper indicate that applicants who graduate from rural schools tend to apply and gain access to relatively less prestigious, i.e. less rigorous, HEIs than those applicants who graduated from urban schools.