Parental job loss and the role of unemployment duration and income changes for children’s education
Simon Skovgaard Jensen and others
This article studies the impact of parental job loss, subsequent unemployment duration, and income changes on the results of the final exam in lower secondary education and on the decision to pursue an academic track in Denmark. Drawing on administrative register data we use sibling fixed effects models as well as a before-after-test design to investigate the shorter-term effects of parental job loss. The results show that there are hardly any effects of parental job losses on children’s exam results, while we find a reduction in the transition to the academic upper secondary track, both for maternal and paternal job losses. We find no systematic evidence that the negative effects would be larger if the job loss is followed by a longer period of unemployment or by a loss of income, and no evidence for a moderating role of parental education.
The temporal dimension of parental employment: Temporary contracts, non-standard work schedules, and children’s education in Germany
Bastian A Betthäuser and others
The increasing prevalence of non-standard work and its adverse consequences are well documented. However, we still know little about how common non-standard work is amongst parents, and whether its negative consequences are further transmitted to their children. Using data from the German Microcensus, we document the prevalence and concentration of temporary employment and non-standard work schedules in households with children in Germany. Second, we examine the extent to which variation in this temporal dimension of parental employment is associated with children’s school track. Results show that in about half of all German households with children in lower-secondary school at least one parent has a temporary contract or regularly works evenings or Saturdays. We find that children whose mother always works evenings or Saturdays are substantially less likely to transition to the academic school track. By contrast, we find no significant association between fathers’ non-standard work schedules and children’s school track. We also find no evidence of an association between parents’ temporary employment and children’s school track placement. These divergent findings highlight the importance of disaggregating non-standard work into its specific components and differentiating between mothers' and fathers' non-standard work when investigating the consequences of parental non-standard work for children’s educational and life chances.
The relevance of tracking and social school composition for growing achievement gaps by parental education in lower secondary school: a longitudinal analysis in France, Germany, the United States, and England
Jascha Dräger and others
There is substantial variation in the degree of social stratification in students’ achievement across countries. However, most research is based on cross-sectional data. In this study, we evaluate the importance of social origin, namely, parents’ education, for achievement inequalities during lower secondary school using recent longitudinal microdata form the French Direction de l’Evaluation de la Prospective et de la Performance panel, the German National Educational Panel Study, the US-American Early Childhood Longitudinal Study 1998, and the British Millennium Cohort Study. We evaluate whether country differences can be attributed to different tracking systems or the social composition of schools. We find substantial SES gaps in math achievement progress in all four countries but more pronounced gaps in England and Germany. Yet, within-school SES gaps are similar across countries suggesting that the allocation of students to schools drives country differences. Moreover, we find that between-school tracking in Germany accounts for a large share of the SES gaps, whereas course-by-course tracking seems less important in the other countries. The role of schools’ social composition is similar across countries.
Children’s aspirations, their perceptions of parental aspirations, and parents’ factual aspirations—gaining insights into a complex world of interdependencies
Kerstin Schörner and Felix Bittmann
Children’s educational aspirations have been shown to be highly relevant for their educational trajectories and, therefore, researchers have tried to understand how and when these aspirations are formed. The influence of parental aspirations on the development of children’s aspirations has often been the focus of such investigations in previous studies. Going beyond these earlier approaches, we address the question of how children’s aspirations might be influential for their parent’s aspirations. We also investigate if it is children’s perception of parental aspirations or parent’s factual aspirations, which play a role in the formation of children’s aspirations. This article contributes to the literature, first, on a theoretical basis, by providing a reasoned and interdisciplinary framework about mutually dependent processes of aspiration formations within families. Second, an empirical contribution is given, using data from the German National Educational Panel Study and analyzing the aspirations of 4,511 children and their parents. Our cross-lagged panel models show that children and parents influence each other in their aspirations mutually over time, with children being affected by both, the parent’s factual aspirations and the children’s perception of those. We give empirical-driven guidelines for future research on aspiration formation.
Welfare state policy and educational inequality: a cross-national multicohort study
Kevin Schoenholzer and Kaspar Burger
Proponents of welfare policy have argued that publicly funded early childhood education and care (ECEC), paid parental leave, and family benefits spending can weaken the influence of social background on educational outcomes by providing a supplementary source of early investment that particularly benefits disadvantaged families. We analyze whether the welfare state context in which children spend their early childhood (ages 0–5) moderates the association between parental educational attainment and the child’s educational achievement at age 10. We combine data from two large-scale international student assessments with data about welfare state policies. Results from multilevel models show that countries with higher public ECEC spending and higher family benefits spending exhibited a weaker association between parental education and student math achievement. Countries with longer parental leave exhibited a stronger association between parental education and student math, science, and reading achievement. Findings provide evidence of the mixed role of welfare state policies for social inequality in student achievement.
Social inequality in admission chances for prestigious higher education programs in Germany: do application patterns matter?
Claudia Finger and others
Research has shown that admission to prestigious higher education programs varies by students' socio-economic status (SES). Access to these programs is characterized by high competition and often rather complex admission procedures. Thus, access may depend not only on students’ performance and decisions to apply but also on their application patterns: Where and how they apply, which may vary by social background due to differences in educational achievement, aspirations, and constraints. Using applications to highly prestigious medical programs in Germany, we examine whether admission chances are socially selective even among the positively selected group of applicants, and whether this is due to SES differences in application patterns or performance. Based on complete application register data, we identify application patterns through cluster analysis. We then used the resulting cluster model to predict cluster membership in the 2018 applicant cohort, for which we collected survey data with information on applicants’ SES, preferences, and motivations. We find that application patterns vary primarily by applicants’ performance (grades and test scores) and SES-specific geographic constraints. However, our multivariate analyses on admission chances show that application patterns do not mediate SES differences in admission chances. Instead, these differences are entirely due to SES differences in applicants’ performance.
Intensity of educational expansion: a key factor in explaining educational inequality across regions and cohorts in Spain
Dulce Manzano and others
Previous sociological research has indirectly examined the association between educational expansion and inequality by analysing changes in inequality over cohorts during the expansion process. This study tests the impact of educational expansion in Spain by using the proportion of people with a specific level of education in a particular region cohort as a direct measure of expansion. More importantly, this study focuses on the intensity of the expansionary process (of one level of education) as a crucial dimension that influences inequality (in the attainment of the next level). We argue that an intense expansion may strengthen the motivation of advantaged families to increase their investments in their children’s education but limit their capacity to undertake effective educational responses, particularly during the initial stages of the expansionary process. We use the socio-demographic survey conducted in Spain in 1991, which provides representative samples for different cohorts and regions in the country, and employ multilevel modelling to analyse the effect of the phase and intensity of the expansion on inequality. Our findings show a strong positive relationship between the intensity of expansion and the level of inequality that, nonetheless, is less strong at the initial stage of the expansionary process.
Children left behind. New evidence on the (adverse) impact of grade retention on educational careers
Dalit Contini and Guido Salza
This article analyzes the effect of grade retention in high school on later school outcomes in Italy. Grade retention is a strong signal of poor performance, so retained students should revise downwards their perceived probability of success in school. Grade retention also implies an increase in costs. Therefore, we expect a negative effect on future educational careers. However, the evidence from the existing literature is mixed. Using longitudinal administrative data, we propose a matching strategy to assess the impact of grade retention on institutional settings with considerable leeway in promotion/retention decisions. Following this strategy, we can interpret our results as estimates of the impact for students close to the threshold between retention and promotion. Our results add to the existing evidence that grade retention in high school has a negative impact on student’s educational outcomes by dramatically increasing dropout rates. Consistent with the compensatory advantage hypothesis, the negative effects are stronger for students with low educated or immigrant parents. Our findings suggest that alternatives to grade retention should be found to address underachievement.
Spatial inequality in higher education: a growing urban–rural educational gap?
Alexander Zahl-Thanem and Johan Fredrik Rye
Scholars have consistently found that inequalities in educational attainment are most pronounced along social origin and gender dimensions, but urban–rural inequalities have also been evident in recent years. A spatial gradient in educational attainment reflects how rural students are consistently less likely to gain higher education (HE) credentials than their urban peers. By drawing on full-population administrative data on the Norwegian birth cohorts from 1965 to 1989 (n = 1,419,406), followed from age 16 to 30, this article analyses how urban–rural differences in HE have changed over the last 25 years, and furthermore, whether urban–rural disparities have developed in distinct ways based on students’ social origin and gender. The results show that urban–rural disparities in higher educational attainment have become more pronounced for recent birth cohorts and particularly evident for post-1980 cohorts. This applies to students originating from both privileged and less privileged families. However, urban–rural inequalities are more evident for men than women, which over time has led gender differences to become considerably greater in rural areas. The results demonstrate that spatial inequality requires further attention in educational and stratification research, as the outcomes suggest that the urban–rural educational gap is not necessarily consistent over time.
Response to: ‘Signals, Educational Decision-Making, and Inequality’: a comment on the formal model by Holm, Hjorth-Trolle, and Jæger
Anders Holm and others
In this rejoinder, we engage in the discussion raised by Yastrebov (2023) about the assumptions in the theoretical models in Holm et al. (2019) and how the implications of the theory are handled. Our original model proposes that students use signals about academic ability to make inferences about the costs and benefits of different educational options. In particular, we propose that when low-socioeconomic status (SES) student receives a negative information shock in high school, they are more likely to drop out than their high-SES counterparts, and this difference is more pronounced for high-grade point average (GPA) students than for low-GPA students. Here we show that this holds true, despite the arguments raised by Yastrebov (2023).
