**7. Determinants of higher education access in Turkey**

Educational indicators and research in Turkey demonstrate that not all individuals benefit equally from educational services. In Turkey, there are inequalities based on socioeconomic status, gender and living area of the student in terms of education access and quality [48]. These inequalities continue to become more apparent in the higher education phase. Due to the difference between regions and school types, children of families with good income can be better prepared for higher education. There is also a difference between higher education access for females and males. This difference has not shown any significant decline in the past few years. All these points show that there are inequalities in access to higher education [49].

Research in Turkey reveals that socioeconomic factors such as parents' educational level [1, 45, 50–52] and income level [51–53] are the most important determinants of benefiting from university and test achievement. Additionally, factors such as the type of school attended before higher education, and the quality of the education received [54–56], residence type [51, 55–58], after‐school support and attendance of private courses [37, 52, 59–61] are listed as other factors affecting university access.
