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

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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.

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  • Holzer, Susanna, 2007. "The Expansion of Higher Education in Sweden and the Issue of Equality of Opportunity," CAFO Working Papers 2007:5, Linnaeus University, Centre for Labour Market Policy Research (CAFO), School of Business and Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:hhs:vxcafo:2007_005
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    1. Leigh, Duane E. & Gill, Andrew M., 2004. "The effect of community colleges on changing students' educational aspirations," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 23(1), pages 95-102, February.
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    Cited by:

    1. Sofia Tano, 2014. "Regional clustering of human capital: school grades and migration of university graduates," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 52(2), pages 561-581, March.
    2. Sørensen, Elise Stenholt & Høst, Anders Kamp, 2015. "Does distance determine who is in higher education?," MPRA Paper 74517, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Lucia Rizzica, 2013. "Home or away? Gender differences in the effects of an expansion of tertiary education supply," Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) 181, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area.
    4. Duan, Yide & Zhang, Haotian & Wang, Wenfu & Ao, Xiaoyan, 2022. "The effects of China's higher education expansion on urban and rural intergenerational mobility," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 73(C).
    5. Ida Lovén & Cecilia Hammarlund & Martin Nordin, 2020. "Staying or leaving? The effects of university availability on educational choices and rural depopulation," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 99(5), pages 1339-1365, October.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Higher Education; Intergenerational Educational Mobility; Regionalization;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I22 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Educational Finance; Financial Aid
    • I28 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Government Policy
    • J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity

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