ABSTRACT There is evidence that the increase of educational and social mobility that characterised the middle decades of the twentieth century slowed down at the turn of this century, in spite of persistent expansion of higher education. At the same time, income inequality and welfare retrenchment increased. Applying a two-stage design to a merge of individual level-data from the PIAAC-Survey of Adult Skills (OECD) and country-level data on educational expansion, income inequality and regime of higher education finance drawn from different sources, we test the relative importance of these three factors in the explanation of equality of opportunities of university graduation by social origin. We select individuals who were 25–45 years old in the survey year. Our two-stage design shows a negligible role of higher education expansion, whereas income inequality and the regime of higher education finance are more consequential in explaining cross-national differences in opportunities of university graduation by social origin. Inequality of university graduation by social origin is significantly increased with income inequality and reduced in systems of tertiary education characterised by low fees and high subsidies provided to students.

ABSTRACT Increasing female educational attainment across OECD countries is making hypogamy a widespread phenomenon. This trend provides an opportunity to re-examine the effects of educational assortative mating on children's educational outcomes. This research explores the effects of hypergamy, homogamy, and hypogamy on gender differences in children's expectation of university graduation and actual college graduation. For the first purpose, logistic regression with country fixed-effects is applied to individual-level data from PISA 2015; a similar analysis is carried out for the second purpose with data from the European Social Survey. Three characteristics make us expect higher female advantage among children of hypogamous couples: higher probability of mothers being the main family breadwinner; higher probability of gender value conflict, eventually leading to family breakup and the father's absence; and the possibility that the father's occupation discourages sons from pursuing higher education. A systematic female advantage is indeed found among children of hypogamous couples in terms of expectation of college graduation and actual college graduation. Among the possible mechanisms behind this female advantage, only the father's and the mother's occupation could be explored with the data at hand, but none of them explain this advantage.