The Expansion of Higher Education in Sweden and the Issue of Equality of Opportunity

This paper analyzes to what extent the political mean of rapidly increasing higher education in the 1990s in Sweden has decreased educational inequalities (i.e. the choice of attending higher education has become less dependent on family background in the 1990s than before). Smaller regional colleges were heavily exposed to the expansion of higher education. Although the parental impact on the educational choice of their youths grew stronger in the 1990s compared to the 1980s, difference-in-difference estimates show that the educational association between parents and their youths grew less in the geographical areas of the regional university colleges than in Sweden as a whole. Some support is provided here that social mobility has increased, in the sense that most socioeconomic groups gained from the educational expansion, except for the group with the least educated parents.