Educational Achievement in Comparative Perspective

ABSTRACT: We carry out an analysis of societal variations in the process of educational attainment using a multilevel modeling strategy to assess how societal modernization, educational expansion, social inequality, a world-wide secular trend toward greater equality of opportunity, and communist educational policies affect the dependence of educational attainment on parental status and the gender gap in educational attainment. Using data from 541 sample surveys conducted in 54 countries, we define five-year birth cohorts ranging from the late 19th century through the late 20th century. We first estimate a micro-level model of the determinants of years of school completed in each of the 661 ¿contexts¿ (created by crossing cohort by country) for which we have adequate data. We then treat the coefficients derived from the micro-models as variables in a meta analysis, predicting variations in the size of the coefficients (the effects of social origins and gender and the size of the intercept) from macro-social features of each context. We test various hypotheses derived from arguments as to why educational reproduction and the effect of gender should be reduced by educational expansion but reinforced by educational inequality and as to why the level of education should increase and the gender gap diminish with societal modernization and over time, and we assess several claims regarding the impact of communism on equality of educational opportunity.