A new dataset on educational inequality

This paper describes a new dataset, in which measures of educational level and inequality were collected for 48 countries over 13 5-year birth cohorts. Drawing on four representative international surveys (ess, eu-silc, ials and issp), we collected measures of individual educational attainment and aggregated them to generate synthetic indices of educational 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. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.