Educational Expansion and Inequalities in Educational Opportunity: Long-Term Changes for East and West Germany

Using data on successive birth cohorts from the German Life History Study and the National Educational Panel Study, we analyse how the process of educational attainment of men and women from different educational origins has changed in the long run. Our results show that educational inequality is strongly declining at the first transition to upper secondary education across cohorts. However, it is constant or even slightly increasing at the transition to the traditional university. In addition, there are no origin-specific differences in the transition to university of applied science graduation. In other words, there is no unidirectional trend of change in inequalities of educational opportunities across all transitions.