Speaker
Description
This study examines how educational expansion has impacted the social origin composition of tertiary graduates across 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 investigate changes in parental education distributions, changes in the probabilities to attain tertiary education across social origins, and the evolving social origin compositions of tertiary graduates. We also explore trends in downward educational mobility relative to parental education. We find that the share of individuals from tertiary-educated parents increased universally. The probability of attaining tertiary education between social origins varied, with some countries showing narrowing gaps and others maintaining stable differences. The social origin composition of tertiary graduates varies markedly across countries and cohorts. Australia, Switzerland, and Russia show consistently higher and strongly increasing shares of tertiary graduates from advantaged social origins. In contrast, Great Britain, South Korea, and the USA exhibit initially lower proportions of tertiary graduates from advantaged social origins, with a more gradual increase over time. Despite overall expansion, most countries show increasing proportions of downwardly mobile individuals. We qualitatively discuss how factors such as the pace of educational expansion, inequality within higher education systems, and vocational education sector structures may contribute to these divergent patterns. Our study provides a comparative analysis of educational mobility trends, highlighting the complex interplay between educational expansion, social origin, and tertiary attainment. The findings underscore that expansion alone does not necessarily lead to increased equality in educational outcomes across social origins.
