Attempts to explain the persistent importance of family background for children's educational attainment typically highlight the ways in which parents pass down educational, economic and social resources to their children. However, parental resources may also play a crucial role for preventing family crises from spiraling into cumulative disadvantage. To study such compensation processes, we examine the consequences of a father's death on children's educational trajectories, using a Finnish register-based sample of children born between 1982 and 1987. The results based on multilevel linear probability models both support and contradict our compensation hypothesis. Children who lost their father were not more likely to drop out of upper secondary school, as long as their surviving mother had high levels of socioeconomic resources. Similar compensation processes were visible in the case of entering polytechnic higher education. However, with regard to university attendance, bereavement noticeably reduced the traditional advantage of children with high-resource parents.
Both educational attainment and fields of study have been found to influence individuals' socioeconomic position, but their joint socioeconomic impact has received considerably less research attention to date. Focusing on Finland, the article attempts to address this gap. Using large-scale and mainly register-based cross-sectional data, the logged annual earnings of young Finnish adults are estimated by means of median regression models for the years 1985, 1995 and 2005. Results show that whether or not educational level raises individuals' socioeconomic position crucially depends on the fields of study involved. Educational attainment increases earnings mainly within the same field of study, but not necessarily when comparing the impact of qualifications across different areas of specialization. Furthermore, trends over time in the economic value of educational qualifications are heterogeneous, with stability, decline and growth simultaneously affecting different fields of study within a given educational level. Gender differences in the returns to vocational education tentatively indicate that, at lower educational levels, female-dominated fields of study might be more beneficial for women's earnings than stereotypically male fields, yet this result does not appear robust over alternative measures of socioeconomic status. On the whole, it is suggested that theories of social closure and status competition may be more suited to account for the relationship between education and earnings stratification in Finland than arguments based on personal characteristics such as individuals' productivity.
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