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

Abstract: This paper analyzes to what extent the political means of rapidly increasing higher education in the 1990s in Sweden has increased 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 oftheir youth grew stronger in the 1990s compared to the 1980s in Sweden, difference-in-difference estimates show that the educational association between parents and their youth grew less in the geographical areas ofthe regional university colleges than in Sweden as a whole. Some support is provided here that social mobility have increased in Sweden, in the sensethat most socioeconomic groups gained from the educational expansion, except for the group with the lowest educated parents.