Educational expansion, equality of opportunities and labour market outcomes from baby boomers to recent generations – the case of Finland

As a rule, educational expansion proceeds as a bottom-up process where widening access and increasing student flows at lower levels force next level educational organizations to change. Educational expansion means increasing educational opportunities and greater demand for education. Even though expansion widens the access, the education system maintains its inherent hierarchy to the top. From graduates’ point of view, degrees are expected to work as credentials for favourable positions in the labour market. Expectations of the value of degrees are much generated by labour market outcomes of preceding generations. A topical question for most welfare states is how do the labour market outcomes (in terms of different levels of earnings of graduates) for successive generations change during the expansion from elite university to mass higher education – especially under “global auctions” of jobs?

By leaning on Finnish longitudinal census data, the paper will analyse expanding education system, for instance, in terms of mechanisms of ‘maximally maintained inequality’ and ‘law of last entry’. Notwithstanding the levelling of playing field, the competition among the highly educated is tightening and the ‘game of elimination’ is fierce. Finnish school system has been praised for its high level of (average) academic performance of students together with low impact of socioeconomic background on student performance as indicated by OECD/PISA-assessments. Strikingly, however, in Finnish school system we can find a remarkably wide inverse gender gap (female students’ performance exceeds male students’ performance), while in the labour markets the gender gap is in a traditional way persistent (woman’s euro is 80 cents). The paper will focus on to what extent equality of educational opportunity of women and men has improved in terms of parent-child odds ratios of participation in university education from baby boomers to recent generations.