GINI DP 83: The expansion of education in Europe in the 20th Century

The paper focuses on the expansion of participation to education and on its drivers separately for each level (lower secondary, upper secondary, tertiary). In doing this, we build a bridge between economic research, who typically focuses on years of education, and sociological research, who typically considers the title of study achieved by individuals. Building on a new and careful recoding and harmonization of educational levels, we use ESS data for 26 European countries to analyze the process of expansion of participation to three levels of schooling in Europe, from the cohort born in the 20s to the one born in the first half of the 80s. We look at the drivers of this process, studying which factors push the expansion of participation to each school level. Our analytical strategy includes three steps, for each level of schooling. First, we test sociological theories stressing path-dependency as the main driver of educational expansion (whichever the mechanism pushing it), regressing the latter on previous achievement and on measures of direct demand. Second, we add different sets of covariates, each one testing a group of theoretical hypothesis on the factors driving expansion. We consider: a) economic factors; b) political factors; c) social (contagion) factors. Third, we look at convergence over time. Results of our fixed-effects models show both path-dependency and convergence, but there is a strong difference among levels: while participation to lower and upper secondary school shows convergence, no convergence is found for participation to tertiary education.