Education is one of the most important drivers of regional migration in European countries, and educational expansion has been a major social phenomenon in the last decades. We use decomposition analysis to examine how the expansion of tertiary education has affected intergenerational distance between adult children and their parents in Sweden. We use administrative register data for the complete population of Sweden and examine changes in intergenerational proximity between 1980 and 2010, using couples at the birth of their first child as the study population. An explicit policy goal of tertiary expansion was to widen the geographical access to tertiary education and the enrolment grew at newer regional institutions during this period. We additionally explore if this policy of regional expansion influenced average distance to parents. We find that intergenerational distances increased over the study period and that this was mainly attributed to the increased enrolment at traditional, older, universities. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.