Educational expansion has substantially increased educational attainment across the globe. It has also made higher levels of educational attainment a more common prerequisite for many jobs and higher earnings. But do people believe that education should actually be important in determining how much people should earn? Have these beliefs changed alongside educational expansion, and do they differ between high- and low-educated individuals?

This study examined the links between educational expansion and social inequality in tertiary education attainment in Australia, Great Britain, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland, and the United States. Using harmonized longitudinal data from six long-running household panels via the Comparative Panel File for cohorts born between 1948 and 1992, we investigated changes in parental education levels, changes in the probabilities of attaining tertiary education across social origin groups, and the evolving social-origin compositions of the tertiary-educated population.

Proponents of welfare policy have argued that publicly funded early childhood education and care (ECEC), paid parental leave, and family benefts spending can weaken the infuence of social background on educational outcomes by providing a supplementary source of early investment that particularly benefts disadvantaged families. We analyze whether the welfare state context in which children spend their early childhood (ages 0–5) moderates the association between parental educational attainment and the child’s educational achievement at age 10.