Educational Expansion and Shifts in the Social Origins of Tertiary Graduates

Status

Working paper, with Kaspar Burger.

Summary

When tertiary education expands, more people attain a degree, and more children in the next generation have tertiary-educated parents. Both changes shape who the graduates are. Research has mostly asked how expansion affects the link between social origin and attainment. We ask how expansion changes the social-origin composition of tertiary graduates. We use household panel data, harmonised with the Comparative Panel File, for native-born respondents born between 1948 and 1992 in Australia, Great Britain, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland and the United States. We measure social origin by parental education. For each country, we compare cohorts on four outcomes: attainment within each origin group, inequality in attainment, the composition of graduates and downward mobility.