This paper describes a new dataset collecting measures of educational level and inequality for 31 countries over several birth cohorts. Drawing on four representative international datasets (ESS, EIJSILC, IALS and ISSP), we collect measures of individual educational attainment and aggregate them to generate synthetic indices of education level and dispersion by countries and birth cohorts. The paper provides a detailed description of the procedures and methodologies adopted to build the new dataset, analyses the validity and consistency of the measures across surveys and discusses the relevance of these data for future research. The .csv, .dta, .xml dataset is readily available to GINI members (see website data portal); other scholars may put in a request to the authors YEL Classification: I21, D30, Y1
