Inequality in educational achievement

Education is far from universally attainable, with the resulting educational inequality having wide implications for both individuals and societies. Because of this importance, this chapter reports trends in educational inequality from the 19th century to the present. We do this by using relative and absolute measures of inequality in (formal) educational attainment. Overall, we observe a strong decline in the Gini coefficient of years of schooling over the period, a decline that is caused mostly by a reduction in the share of persons with no formal education. Looking at absolute inequality, as measured by the standard deviation, we find a rising trend in the first half of the 20th century and a decline afterwards.