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This paper introduces a new quinquennial dataset of educational inequality disaggregated by age group for 146 countries, from 1950 to 2010, by using the Gini index of education as a measure of the distribution of years of schooling. Based on recent estimates of average years of schooling from Barro and Lee (2010), our calculations take into consideration, for the first time, the changes over time in the duration of educational stages, in each country and for each age group. The downward trends in educational inequality observed during the last decades depend on age group, gender, and development level.

This chapter examines the trend in school enrollment and transitions to senior high school and to college in China for selected young cohorts since the 1990s, based on the analyses of the sample data from population censuses in 1990 and 2000 and the mini-census in 2005. We pay particular attention to educational inequality based on gender and the household registration system (hukou) in the context of educational expansion. Results show a substantial increase in educational opportunities over time at all levels. In particular, women have gained relatively more; gender inequality has decreased over time, and the gap in college enrollments was even reversed to favor women in 2005. However, rural–urban inequality was enlarged in the 1990s. The educational expansion has mainly benefited females and urban residents.

In the literature on the relationship between class of origin and educational attainment, the typical conclusion is that class inequality was stable over the last century, and the attempts at egalitarian reform thus proven ineffective. The conclusion turns out to depend on the choice of statistical measure, in this case loglinear measures of association. Also linear measures of association give similar results. If instead, measures of inequality are used, the contrasting conclusion of a strong reduction in the class bias in recruitment to higher education emerges.

As the provision of higher education has increased over time, the trends in the results of these three measures differ. It is argued that it is measures of inequality that capture inequality in the allocation of higher education or bias in the allocation mechanisms. The argument in favor of using loglinear measures has been the special property of “margin insensitivity” attributed to them. It has also been suggested that they capture bias in the allocation mechanism, which may develop in a way different from the trend in the inequality of the allocation outcome. It is argued that neither claim is tenable.

This study examines educational inequalities under socialism in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Russia to assess the extent to which egalitarianism was achieved and whether there was restratification after the common retreat from egalitarian ideology and practices since the 1970s. Exploring the extent of parental influences in three key educational outcomes and their changes in four birth cohorts, the study finds remarkable stability across cohorts and across transitions. Contrary to expectation, the net effect of parental social capital (communist party membership status) is prominent only in the former Soviet Russia and Bulgaria, moderate in Czechoslovakia, and negligible in Hungary and Poland. On the other hand, the effect of parental cultural capital is consistently strong but its influence is somewhat weaker at higher transitions. Its inclusion also dramatically reduces the effect of parental education and father’s occupation, suggesting that a significant extent of intergenerational transmission of educational inequality is mediated through parental cultural capital rather than human capital per se.

During the past few decades, South Korea has experienced a remarkable educational expansion at its secondary and tertiary levels as well as at the primary level, resulting in extraordinary variation between the educational attainment of recent and older cohorts. Using 1990 data from the Social Inequality Study in Korea, the study examines trends in the influence of social background on educational attainment across three male cohorts born between 1921 and 1970. Although in general the impacts of social origin have changed little at the secondary levels of education, there is a significant reduction in the effect of father’s occupation on the odds of completing middle school for the youngest cohort. From a multinomial model of transitions to each type of tertiary education, it is found that family background has a stronger effect in the transition from high school to four-year university than to junior college. Interestingly, there has been an increase across cohorts in the influence of father’s education on the likelihood of entering a university, while such a pattern is not observed for the transition to junior college.

Social mobility research starts conventionally from the children's generation and looks at group-specific individual life chances. However, an immediate interpretation of these results as measures of social reproduction is often misleading. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of a related but alternative approach which looks at intergenerational links from the perspective of the parents’ generation. It asks about the consequences of social inequality in this generation for the following generation(s). This includes questions of how the parental origin context is formed, whether there are any children at all and when they were born as well as the aspect of these children's relative chances of attaining particular social positions. As an empirical example, the paper describes patterns of educational reproduction in (West) Germany during the mid- and late 20th century. Simulations allow assessing the relative importance of various partial processes of social reproduction. A large proportion of the observed levels of educational reproduction can be attributed to family-related processes such as union formation. Drawing together analyses from various areas, the paper combines questions of social mobility research with a demographic perspective and broadens the analytical basis of inequality research for systematic comparative research.

In recent years, scholars, policy makers, and the popular press have hailed East Asian nations for their impressive educational performance. In China, dramatic expansions in education coincided with a period of dramatic growth in the youth population, setting the stage for a period of unprecedented economic growth (Fang & Wang, 2005; Hannum, Behrman, Wang, & Liu, 2008). Educational expansion in Korea during the past few decades has been remarkable, to the point that now Korea has the highest rate of college graduation in the world among young adult cohorts (Park, 2007). Korea and Japan have achieved some of the highest scores and lowest levels of inequality in comparative tests of achievement, although Japan has fallen in the rankings in recent years (OECD, 2008). The city-states of Hong Kong and Singapore commonly perform well in comparative tests, with Singapore's curriculum for math, in particular, singled out by some scholars and policy makers in the West as a model for emulation (Ginsburg, Leinwand, Anstrom, & Pollack, 2005). The effectiveness of primary and secondary education in East Asia is also reflected in the competitiveness of these students in global higher educational admissions. For example, in the United States, the most frequent destination for international postsecondary educational migration, China, Korea, and Japan alone account for 29.5% of total international student enrollment (Institute of International Education, 2009).

In their authoritative literature review, Breen and Jonsson (2005) claim that ‘one of the most significant trends in the study of inequalities in educational attainment in the past decade has been the resurgence of rational-choice models focusing on educational decision making’. The starting point of the present contribution is that these models have largely ignored the explanatory relevance of social interactions. To remedy this shortcoming, this paper introduces a micro-founded formal model of the macro-level structure of educational inequality, which frames educational choices as the result of both subjective ability/benefit evaluations and peer-group pressures. As acknowledged by Durlauf (2002, 2006) and Akerlof (1997), however, while the social psychology and ethnographic literature provides abundant empirical evidence of the explanatory relevance of social interactions, statistical evidence on their causal effect is still flawed by identification and selection bias problems. To assess the relative explanatory contribution of the micro-level and network-based mechanisms hypothesised, the paper opts for agent-based computational simulations. In particular, the technique is used to deduce the macro-level consequences of each mechanism (sequentially introduced) and to test these consequences against French aggregate individual-level survey data. The paper's main result is that ability and subjective perceptions of education benefits, no matter how intensely differentiated across agent groups, are not sufficient on their own to generate the actual stratification of educational choices across educational backgrounds existing in France at the beginning of the twenty-first century. By computational counterfactual manipulations, the paper proves that network-based interdependencies among educational choices are instead necessary, and that they contribute, over and above the differentiation of ability and of benefit perceptions, to the genesis of educational stratification by amplifying the segregation of the educational choices that agents make on the basis of purely private ability/benefit calculations.

Given the global surge toward the decolonization of curriculum and greater educational equity during the past year, this study helps us to understand the forces and factors that support or inhibit greater equitable access to quality education for all children. In this chapter, the authors analyze and compare a myriad of challenges experienced by the United States and South Africa as they attempt to move beyond a history of racial segregation and apartheid to more equitable access to quality education for all learners. The chapter begins with a brief historical synopsis of each country’s attempts to move beyond years of entrenched racial segregation and/or apartheid governance to greater life chances for all individuals. This discussion includes the role and negative impact of race, ethnicity, geography, language, and/or socio-economic status on enhanced access to equitable education for all. A review of key theoretical perspectives follows and will help to explain how such inequities have survived, as well as how they might be transformed into agents for positive social change. The chapter concludes by suggesting a “way forward” derived from positive historical examples of exceptionally high quality education experienced by some learners, even during difficult periods of racial segregation.