The demographic ageing process in most industrialized countries will reverse the demographic pyramid within the next decades. While the fraction of young people in education will decrease, the fraction of people over the retirement age will almost double within the next forty years. Research in some countries has analyzed the effects these demographic changes will have on educational spending. For Switzerland there is evidence, that per-pupil spending declined significantly in response to the rise of the share of retired people. The existing body of empirical research has so far - with a few exceptions - analyzed the relationship between demographic change and educational spending with cross-sectional or panel analyses of educational spending. Although most results show a negative correlation between the share of elderly in the population and educational spending per pupil, these papers - due to the level of aggregation of the data and the limited number of observable characteristics - do not allow establishing a direct proof that the elderly are less inclined to spend money on education. Therefore, not surprisingly these findings have been challenged by a number of empirical and theoretical papers This study reassesses the question of an intergenerational conflict over educational spending by directly looking at the expressed differences in the preferences for public spending of Swiss voters. The data-set has been expressively made for the purpose of this analysis and simulates public votes on educational and public finance issues. The professional survey institute "Gesellschaft für praktische Sozialforschung" (GfS) was comissioned to collect data from a representative sample of Swiss citizens. The sample contains the data of 2025 Swiss citizens over the age of 25. The data was collected in May 2007 using Computed Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI). The interviews were held in German, French or Italian depending on the language region. Apart from individual socio-economic and family characteristics, respondents were asked to express their opinion on a series of question concerning education and education financing.