Comparative

Using harmonised household‑panel data, we track cohorts born 1948–1992 in South Korea, Australia, the United States, Switzerland, Russia, and Great Britain. We show that shifts in parental‑education distributions, together with changing associations between parental education and children’s attainment, produced marked reconfigurations in who earns tertiary degrees. In most countries the share of graduates from tertiary‑educated families rose sharply, while chances for students from less‑educated origins narrowed more slowly than headline attainment trends suggest. Findings underline the importance of considering compositional change when assessing equity effects of post‑war educational expansion.

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.