In the 1960s, educational reforms have been initiated in Germany to make the rigid stratified school system more permeable. While maintaining between-school tracking in secondary education, several second-chance options have been introduced that established alternative routes to higher education. This study aims to evaluate whether these alternative routes were successful in reducing the levels of … Read more
Diversion or inclusion? Alternative routes to higher education eligibility and inequality in educational attainment in Germany
Analysing Diversion Processes in German Secondary Education: School-Track Effects on Educational Aspirations
Educational aspirations can be regarded as a predictor of final educational attainment, rendering this construct highly relevant for analysing the development of educational inequalities in panel data settings. In the context of the German tracked secondary school system, we analysed school-track effects on the development of educational aspirations. Using data from five consecutive waves of the … Read more
Relative risk aversion models: How plausible are their assumptions?
This work examines the validity of the two main assumptions of relative risk-aversion models of educational inequality. We compare the Breen-Goldthorpe (BG) and the Breen-Yaish (BY) models in terms of their assumptions about status maintenance motives and beliefs about the occupational risks associated with educational decisions. Concerning the first assumption, our contribution is threefold. First, … Read more
Is vocational education a safety net? The occupational attainment of upper secondary graduates from vocational and academic tracks in Italy
This article assesses the employment and occupational outcomes of upper secondary education graduates from academic and vocational tracks in Italy. In particular, we formulate and test the hypothesis that – contrary to some common expectations – academic graduates outperform vocational graduates at a stage of occupational maturity, even when considering individuals without a tertiary degree. Moreover, we … Read more
Gender segregation in higher education: an empirical test of seven explanations
Gender segregation in higher education (GSHE) is recognized as a key factor to explain the persistence of gender inequalities in the labor market despite the reversal of gender gap in educational attainment. Women are systematically overrepresented in fields of study, such as social sciences and the humanities, which offer relatively poor labor market prospects; at … Read more
COVID-19 and educational inequality: How school closures affect low- and high-achieving students
In spring 2020, governments around the globe shut down schools to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus. We argue that low-achieving students may be particularly affected by the lack of educator support during school closures. We collect detailed time-use information on students before and during the school closures in a survey of 1099 parents … Read more
Age at Parents’ Separation and Achievement: Evidence from France Using a Sibling Approach
This paper investigates the link between parental separation and children’s achievement in adulthood. Using a French dataset on “Education-Training-Employment”, I first estimate a random effects model and then examine the differences in age at divorce for children within the same family, to control for divorced family selection. Three outcomes are analysed: number of years of … Read more
Is improving access to university enough? Socio-economic gaps in the earnings of English graduates
Much research and policy attention has been on socio-economic gaps in participation at university, but less attention has been paid to socio-economic gaps in graduates’ earnings. This paper addresses this shortfall using tax and student loan administrative data to investigate the variation in earnings of English graduates by socio-economic background. We find that graduates from … Read more
The role of local labour market conditions and pupil attainment on post-compulsory schooling decisions
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the role of local labour market conditions and pupil educational attainment as primary determinants of the post-compulsory schooling decision. Design/methodology/approach – Through the specification of a nested logit model, the restrictive independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption inherent in the multinomial logit (MNL) model is … Read more
School choice in England: Evidence from national administrative data
We study school choice in England using a new dataset containing the choices of all parents seeking a school place in state secondary schools. We provide new empirical evidence to inform how the school choice market functions, including the number of choices made, whether the nearest school is the first choice and the probability of … Read more