Public debate today is often pessimistic about meritocracy and education's promise to level the playing field. But Herman van de Werfhorst's recent study tells a different story. His paper ‘Is Meritocracy Not So Bad After All? Educational Expansion and Intergenerational Mobility in 40 Countries’ won the 2025 Distinguished Publication Prize of the European Academy of Sociology. In this interview, the Professor of Sociology at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences discusses what six decades of data actually reveal about educational expansion and opportunity.
You study nearly six decades of people across 40 countries. When you look at that huge sweep of history, what does "educational expansion" actually look like in real life? What changes did ordinary families experience?
The 20th century saw a rapid expansion of education across the world, especially in the West. In the United States, for example, the "high school for all" movement early in the century meant that every municipality had to have a high school. That really spiked educational attainment at that level.
Then later, the generations born after the Second World War saw massive expansion of education. Many people went to university, not only in the US but in Europe as well. One big question in sociology has been whether this changed the level of mobility in society, and there's been quite a bit of debate. Some studies find that expansion had the expected effects, others don't find much impact.
So, I wanted to look at as much data as we could gather on as many countries and birth cohorts as possible. What you see is that many people achieved higher levels of education than their parents did. They went to high school where their parents didn't, went to university where their parents hadn't been.
Today, we think about first-generation students often – those who are not from a family that has been educated at university. First-generation students were way more common back in the day than they are now. I, myself, was a first-generation student, educated in the 1990s, but before that, there was a massive expansion of education going on.
Altogether, I think educational expansion has changed societies in tremendous ways. There are simply more skills in society, which has led to all kinds of goods. Moreover, if you look at the long run, as I did, and compare many different contexts that have different levels of educational expansion, you see that whatever happens in those little differences that people can make within levels of education, they don't counter the overall trend that with more expansion, we see more mobility. In other words, less association of where you end up based on where you come from.
There's a common belief that no matter how much we expand education, advantaged families will always find ways to stay ahead. What made you question this idea?
There's a lot of evidence that in more expansive educational systems, parents of more advantaged backgrounds find ways to steer their children into the right destinations. The type of university you go to – Harvard or the next best if you can get in. The fields of study you choose – law or medicine relative to, say, education. These things matter, I'm not denying that.
But, overall, they don't counter the trend that if we open up universities, there will be a weaker association between the economic standing of the family and the economic standing that people achieve themselves. It's a very sociological claim to think of all these differences that people can make in the type of education they take within the level of education. But, if these strategies were totally successful in countering the trend, we would not see a change in mobility when education expands, right? And we do see that, at least in my study, very clearly. So, in that sense, I'm more optimistic about what education has achieved.
Of course, today we see a lot of debate about education being inaccessible due to high tuition fees, for instance in the US. But, those critiques are actually pointing to the fact that society is not so meritocratic anymore. You need a lot of money to get to university now. That's not a critique of meritocracy. It's a critique of the non-meritocratic system that we have entered.
This connects to policies that make education more accessible – giving resources to parents, avoiding child poverty. All these welfare state policies matter for improving opportunities in education.
Looking across countries and generations, did expanding education actually change how much someone's family background shapes their working life?
It's known from the literature that the association between parents' socioeconomic standing and children's socioeconomic standing is weaker among students who have gone through university than among those who didn't. I build upon that finding in my paper.
It sounds counterintuitive at first, but it means that when people of different social backgrounds go to university, how much they gain from coming from a rich family is much less than if they did not go to university. If you think of it the other way around, it makes more sense. If you think of people who don't make it in education, who benefits more from their background? Those with higher socioeconomic standing. The parents will find other ways to help kids out if they don't make it in education.
One argument is that if people go to university, they enter meritocratic labour markets where your education matters a lot, not so much your background. But, I think the other way around is more convincing: If people don't have education, then parents are able to help the kids out in finding a job, helping them to start a business, whatever it is that parents can do.
However, what I also showed in my paper is that this simple mechanical explanation – that with more education, this direct association goes down – is not totally valid. It's not simply because of the expansion that society has changed in terms of openness between parents and children. It's also because with expansion, the parameters change. The association between social origin and your own educational attainment weakens. That is the main driver of this whole pattern.
It's really because, if society opens up – say because employers need more educated people, more skills – that process leads to a more fair opportunity system for children of different socioeconomic backgrounds. So, it's not just a simple mathematical inflation of numbers. It's really also changing the things that happen in schools and labour markets.
Some scholars argue that elite families simply "shift the goalposts", finding new advantages within the system. Did you see signs of that happening, or did the data tell a different story?
There's plenty of studies that show this happens. A good example is what they call shadow education nowadays – kids go to additional homework classes, privately financed after school. Of course it costs money, and kids are more likely to go if they are from richer families. We've also shown in a different study that especially if a system has centralized testing, those socioeconomic differences in going to these homework classes are in fact stronger. So, all those processes are there, no doubt about that.
The question is, are they able to counter the broader trend? Even if those processes matter – whether it's active behaviour of parents shifting the goalposts or even unconscious patterns – they still don't counter the trend. We did see that each of those processes were not able to counter it. With more expansion, we see more opportunities. It matters, but it doesn't matter so much that it can counter this overall trend.
You don't just look at education levels, but also at education policies like compulsory schooling and tracking. What do these policies reveal about how education systems shape social mobility?
I do a lot of work on tracking and policies in education. There are two policies worth examining.
One is compulsory schooling laws. If you have to go to school until 16, people will go to school until 16. So, there's educational expansion. It's quite obvious.
Another is tracking. Some systems, including the Netherlands where I'm from – Germany is another example – have an early tracking system. Kids are separated for different school careers at the age of 10 in Germany sometimes, and at the age of 12 in the Netherlands. It's super early compared to many other systems where this happens at 15 or 16. If tracking happens earlier and the future educational career is more strongly determined early in life, the impact of socioeconomic background on educational careers becomes stronger.
So, postponing tracking to a later age helps to reduce inequalities in education and therefore might improve levels of social mobility. That's also what I found in this paper: policies matter.
With compulsory schooling age, there was another advantage – you can use it as a way to get to the causal effect of educational expansion at a societal level. This was a further test of my argument: that it's expansion that drives these changing mobility patterns. Compulsory schooling age is used as what they call an instrumental variable, predicting the level of attainment in society. The results were pretty much in line with my broader finding – that all these goalpost-changing behaviours did not counter the trend.
Public debate today is often pessimistic about meritocracy. Does your research suggest that education has played a more equalising role than we tend to assume?
I definitely think so. But, it's important to emphasise that there are fair critiques of meritocracy when it comes to the personalisation of success and failure. We now cherish and blame people for their achievements, personalise everything: ‘I've done well, so it's all my own responsibility, or I failed, and I'm the one to blame.’ This has gotten a lot of attention lately, especially in the work of Michael Sandel, a philosopher at Harvard.
If people believe that society is meritocratic, they also accept more inequalities because they think it's fair; it's based on merits. The legitimation of inequalities – the fact that society is willing to accept that society has become way more unequal over the past 30-40 years – can be explained by meritocratic beliefs.
My fear is that, despite what I showed for the long run, if you look at the short run – the last 10, 15, 20 years – you see changes within the educational system that have countered the meritocratic ideology. Segregation between schools is going up tremendously by income, even in high schools or primary schools. If those primary schools matter for the further chances of children, this will increase inequalities. All those trends are there, but they're not meritocratic trends. If one wants to critique meritocracy, one should first critique the non-meritocratic elements, perhaps more importantly.
We still believe that there's meritocratic allocation, even if there isn't. That may be a bigger problem than the broader tendencies of meritocracy that we've seen in the 20th century.
Herman van de Werfhorst is a Professor of Sociology at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences. His work focuses on inequalities in and through education, using both comparative and longitudinal data and research designs. More specifically, Van de Werfhorst studies mostly inequalities by socioeconomic and migration background and gender in school careers, labour markets, and civic engagement.