Abstract
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. We also explored trends in downward educational mobility relative to tertiary-educated parents. Our post-imputation analytic sample consisted of 166,343 individual-level observations across 54 unique country-cohort combinations. Our findings showed that parental education shifted upwards across cohorts in all six countries. The share of individuals with tertiary-educated parents increased substantially, while parents with only primary or lower-secondary education decreased. The probability of attaining tertiary education rose across all social-origin groups in most countries, though gaps between groups followed divergent patterns: narrowing modestly in Great Britain and South Korea, remaining largely stable in Australia and Switzerland, and widening in Russia and the United States. Despite these varied trends in attainment probabilities, the social-origin composition of the tertiary-educated population changed in that the proportion of tertiary graduates from non-tertiary-educated families declined across all six countries. Furthermore, we found increasing proportions of downwardly mobile individuals with respect to tertiary-educated parents over time across all six countries. Overall, shifts in the social-origin composition of tertiary graduates reflect both the changing distribution of parental education in the population and cohort changes in origin-specific attainment probabilities.