A New Dataset on Educational Inequality

Abstract

This paper describes a new dataset collecting measures of educational level and inequality for 31 countries over several birth cohorts. Drawing on four representative international datasets ESS, EIJ­SILC, IALS and ISSP), the authors collect measures of individual educational attainment and aggregate them to generate synthetic indices of education level and dispersion by countries and birth cohorts. The paper provides a detailed description of the procedures and methodologies adopted to build the new dataset, analyses the validity and consistency of the measures across surveys and discusses the relevance of these data for future research.