This essay treats inequality in access to schooling in demographic perspective. In constructing a brief history of educational inequality in the U.S., the 1962 and 1973 surveys of "Occupational Changes in a Generation" are drawn on heavily. It is found that among men born in the U.S. during the first half of this century, inequality of schooling has declined sharply, even as educational attainment has increased to levels unprecedented elsewhere in the world. Not only has total inequality in the distribution of schooling declined, but both the variability in schooling which may be attributed to differences in social background and the variability which is independent of social background appear to have declined. Moreover, these increases in educational equality appear to have occurred within black and Spanish minority groups as much as in the majority population. There is a mixture of change and stability in the effects of social background characteristics on schooling. On the whole, social origins have become more favorable to high levels of schooling with minority groups, as in the majority population, but large differences in social origins persist among these groups, and in some instances the social origins of majority and minority populations have diverged. For cohorts of U.S. men born in this century, half or more of the variance in schooling must be attributed to the influence of family background. (Author/JM)