Higher education and welfare state regimes: A comparative study of social stratification and educational outcomes in the United States and Norway

Countless studies show that college degree attainment is very unequally distributed across socioeconomic strata in the United States. An unresolved question is whether this pattern is primarily explained by differences in priorities and preferences across social strata or whether the widely recognized flaws of the education system itself are actively hindering an otherwise more egalitarian outcome. This dissertation aims to answer this question by comparing the United States with another country, Norway, that is similar on characteristics such as average educational attainment among young adults, but that has more egalitarian social and economic policies. Does it look like the relationship between social background and educational attainment is universal or can the specific social and political context make a fundamental difference?;Using recent, nationally representative longitudinal data from the United States and Norway, the overarching goal of this dissertation has been to use directly comparable statistical models to determine how family income, parents' education level, minority background and gender affect educational attainment and earnings in two very different welfare state contexts.;I found that there are indeed more similarities than differences in the extent to which family background affects educational attainment in the two countries, when both access to and completion of higher education is included in the analysis. Parents' education level is particularly influential in both countries. My findings lead me to conclude that as a general rule, parents' level of education will influence their offspring's motivation to seek higher levels of education, as well as their academic abilities and their capacity to navigate through the education system. This pattern of inequality is therefore likely to be found in all merit-oriented education systems. The fundamental reason for this consistency is that despite its promise of equal opportunity, a 'meritocratic' education system is inherently selective, since only a narrow range of 'merits' are rewarded in the education system.;Yet, context specific patterns of social stratification interact with historical, and politically engineered, features of the two education systems to produce three distinctively different outcomes nonetheless: first, family finances do matter more for educational attainment in the United States than they do in Norway, especially after students have entered college. Secondly, native minority students stand out as particularly disadvantaged in the U.S. education system. Finally, I show that due to the controlled character of the Norwegian labor market, differences in educational attainment produce much smaller differences in earnings in Norway than they do in the United States.