Global trends in educational inequality

Abstract

Whereas the dramatic expansion of education worldwide has been widely documented, educational inequality has received far less attention. Studies that have looked at inequality in education mostly employ the same dataset, and are based on relatively coarse educational categories. We aim to replicate and improve on earlier estimates of inequality by using a newly compiled dataset on years of education. For that purpose, we assembled a large dataset from comparable sources: the census micro-data samples from the IPUMS project, the Demographic and Health Surveys, the European Social Surveys and the International Social Survey Programme. Our database consists of 153 census samples and 1011 household surveys covering 126 countries from the period 1960-2014. Results suggest that educational inequality has been declining consistently across the globe, that variation within countries is a larger source of inequality than variation between countries, and that tertiary education is slowly gaining in importance as a generator of inequality