This paper examines the complex relationship between higher education expansion and income inequality in developing countries using a standard human capital model and empirical data from the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China. We also estimate the fraction of public subsidies going to various income groups in each country. We find that mass higher education expansion did not, in and of itself, appear to have decreased income inequality in the BRICs and that students from families at different levels of the income distribution have received vastly different benefits from the public financing of higher education.