Educational Expansion and Shifts in the Social Origins of Tertiary Graduates—Comparing Cohorts Born 1948–1992 in Six Countries
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.