This study finds that lower educated couples are more likely to separate than their better educated peers, because they experience strain across multiple aspects of their life, including work, finance, social relationships, health and housing. The research shows that lower educated couples are not in themselves more likely to separate, but rather face a range … Read more
Why do lower educated people separate more often? Life strains and the gradient in union dissolution
Editorial: Introduction to “Mechanisms of educational stratification”
A large body of literature has been devoted to the question of how the design of educational systems influences the formation and intergenerational reproduction of social inequality. An important feature of educational systems is their level of educational stratification or differentiation, i.e. the separation of students into separate groups, tracks or streams for instructional purposes … Read more
Understanding the effects of Covid-19 through a life course lens
The Covid-19 pandemic is shaking fundamental assumptions about the human life course in societies around the world. In this essay, we draw on our collective expertise to illustrate how a life course perspective can make critical contributions to understanding the pandemic’s effects on individuals, families, and populations. We explore the pandemic’s implications for the organization … Read more
The lost ones: The opportunities and outcomes of white, non-college-educated Americans born in the 1960s
White, non-college-educated Americans born in the 1960s face shorter life expectancies, higher medical expenses, and lower wages per unit of human capital compared with those born in the 1940s; men’s wages declined more than women’s. After documenting these changes, we use a life-cycle model of couples and singles to evaluate their effects. The drop in … Read more
Like parents, like children. Does the stratification of education systems moderate the direct effect of origins on destinations?
Using data from the European Social Survey, this study asks if selective education systems can moderate the effects of our origins on later success in the labor market while controlling for education. It finds no effect, regardless of the extent to which selection is based on the student’s abilities. The sample consists of nearly 40,000 … Read more
Parental age in relation to offspring’s neurodevelopment
Objective: Advanced parenthood increases the risk of severe neurodevelopmental disorders like autism, Down syndrome and schizophrenia. Does advanced parenthood also negatively impact offspring’s general neurodevelopment? Method: We analyzed child-, father-, mother- and teacher-rated attention-problems (N= 38,024), and standardized measures of intelligence (N = 10,273) and educational achievement (N = 17,522) of children from four Dutch population-based cohorts. The … Read more
Gestational age, parent education, and education in adulthood
BACKGROUND Adults born preterm (<37 weeks) have lower educational attainment than those born term. Whether this relationship is modified by family factors such as socioeconomic background is, however, less well known. We investigated whether the relationship between gestational age and educational attainment in adulthood differed according to parents’ educational level in 4 Nordic countries. METHODS … Read more
Deepening our understanding on the ways in which social origins shape our lives
Family background influences our lives in multiple ways: from genes to work-life connections, the role that parents can play in their children’s lives is almost ubiquitous. Yet these relationships are far from deterministic. Institutional contexts shape the strength and manner in which the influences take place. Even the way that genes shape our lives depends … Read more
From social origin to selective high school courses: Ability grouping as a mechanism of securing social advantage in Israeli secondary education
This paper focuses on ability grouping in middle school as an important mechanism enabling students with privileged social backgrounds to increase their likelihood of enrollment in the most selective and prestigious high school programs, thus paving the way to higher academic degrees and more lucrative occupations. Using data from Israeli national standardized tests administered in … Read more
The effect of COVID-19-related school closures on students’ well-being: Evidence from Danish nationwide panel data
New research from Denmark suggests that in some respects students’ wellbeing improved during the Spring 2020 lockdown, and that this effect was strongest among students of lower socioeconomic status. The study used data from the Danish Student Wellbeing Study, which is carried out nationwide on an annual basis. It compared responses from students aged 12-15 … Read more