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Why did America introduce compulsory schooling laws at a time when financial investments in education and voluntary school attendance were high? We provide qualitative and quantitative evidence that states adopted compulsory schooling laws as a nation-building tool to instil civic values to the culturally diverse migrants during the ‘Age of Mass Migration’ between 1850 and 1914. We show the adoption of compulsory schooling laws occurred significantly earlier in states that hosted European migrants with lower exposure to civic values in their home countries. Using cross-county data, we show that these migrants had significantly lower demand for American schooling pre-compulsion.

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This paper examines the expansion of compulsory schooling in fifteen Western European countries over 1950-2000. We show that a convergence process has occurred across these countries since 1950. We argue that the major driver of this phenomenon is the existence of decreasing aggregate returns to education that have limited the extension of compulsory schooling. Then we test whether convergence holds when confronted with other explanations described in the literature. Conditional convergence does hold and we find that openness has been another significant determinant of compulsory years of schooling, reflecting the need of a skilled labour force in an increasingly globalized world.