In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), rapid educational expansion at the primary and secondary levels has garnered much international attention. Policy-makers and scholars often presume that education is a positive force, and much of the empirical literature supports this assumption. However, my work directs new scrutiny at this assumption by examining the oft-neglected social consequences of educational expansion and its implications for inequality across various life outcomes. I treat education as a multi-dimensional mechanism connecting demographic processes with economic inequalities and study its effect using three different perspectives. First, I examine the effect of education as a population composition rather than an individual-level outcome to better capture the effect of shifting opportunity structure in Sub-Saharan Africa at the onset of rapid educational expansion. Next, I examine the effect of education as a positioning process to which individuals continuously anchor and readjust their actions and strategies for social mobility. Finally, I examine the effect of education as a social relation through which people ascribe contrasting values and uses to material resources in order to stabilize marital unions. This dissertation consists of three empirical chapters, exploring each of three dimensions of education mentioned above. I begin by providing a comprehensive analysis on how educational expansion alters wealth inequality in SSA, focusing on the effect of changing educational composition on inter-group and intra-group inequality. Then, I show how education—and people’s life trajectories surrounding it—shapes social mobility in contemporary SSA using street vendors in Malawi as a case study. Finally, I investigate how educational differences in divorce are affected by the different uses of wealth within marriages. The overall goal of this dissertation is to combine demographic methods and perspectives with inequality literature to provide empirical and theoretical insights for those who strive to meet social expectations with their education in the era of Education for All (EFA).