This panel investigates the growing tension between the goals of assuring social investment and protecting those left behind in the global competitive race. Education and skills occupy a central role in mitigating social inequalities and stratification. However, as the contributions to this panel show, the capacity of education reforms to contribute to lowering inequality varies across countries and across time period. The papers by Jane Gingrich and Charlotte Haberstroh analyze the debate on school choice and marketization reforms in education from a historical as well as a contemporary perspective. Haberstroh shows how the political conflict about the introduction of comprehensive education in England and France intermingled with conflicts about religious schools. Gingrich complements this perspective by studying the politics of marketization and choice reforms in education in the last decades and their impact on educational stratification. Carsten Jensen and Cathie Jo Martin take up of the issue of educational inequality, considering the rising generational isolation of low-skill (often unemployed and increasingly male) youth, and the implications for rising generational inequality for the social investment state. Finally, Marius R. Busemeyer analyses original survey data of public opinion on social investments, education and more traditional redistributive policies, finding that the popularity of educational investments drop significantly once the fiscal trade-offs with existing social policy programmes are acknowledged. Together, the papers show that reforming education systems remains a crucial factor for reducing inequality, but educational reformers are often faced with political constraints, potentially limiting their contributing to mitigating inequality