The rules of intake, which determine how educational institutions are accessed, play a significant part in generating intergenerational educational inequalities. Different rules may allow parental advantages to compensate for students’ lack of advantages (such as academic performance) or to multiply and help only those students who are in a position to use such additional advantages. In this article, we study compensation and the multiplication of advantages in the context of the Finnish higher education system. Entrance exams and a dual model (universities and polytechnics) make this system stand out among many other Western countries and hence suitable for this study. Using high-quality Finnish register data, we study the associations between parental education and stratified higher education enrolment across the school performance distribution. Our results show that polytechnics provide access for poorly performing students from higher social origins (compensatory advantage). Polytechnic education also attracts well-performing students from lower social origins, which leads to a situation in which well-performing students with higher social origins have a substantially larger probability of enrolling in university compared to well-performing students with lower social origins (multiplicative advantage).
In this country-comparative study, we ask to what extent differentiation in secondary education accounts for the association between social origins and social destinations in adult age. We go beyond the widely applied formal definitions of educational tracking and particularly pay attention to country-specific approaches to educational differentiation. Our main expectation is that once we factor in these particularities, the degree to which educational differentiation accounts for social reproduction is quite similar across countries. Our analyses are based on national individual-level life-course data from six European countries that span from secondary education to occupational maturity. Our findings show that educational differentiation mediates the association between social origins and social destinations to a substantial degree in all countries. However, we still find some differences between countries in the extent to which educational differentiation accounts for social reproduction.
We study labour market outcomes by formal differentiation at upper secondary and tertiary level in Finland. Using full population register data, we take individuals born in 1976 and explore their socio-economic status and the probability of unemployment by educational qualifications and social origin in early adulthood (age 30) and at occupational maturity (age 40). We differentiate based on the level of maths, the most consequential subject choice at general upper secondary education, and show that subject-level choices divert students to stratified tertiary-level degrees and labour market positions net of prior school performance, social origin and gender. In addition, we show that educational performance and qualifications mediate the association between social origin and socio-economic status by 81-83%, leaving around one fifth to unobserved social origin differences. We also find that there are no major differences between upper secondary school tracks with respect to experiencing unemployment at age 30 or 40. Moreover, further educational degrees do not appear to provide additional protection against unemployment than having obtained an upper secondary qualification.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Subject-level choices at general upper secondary education lead to differences in socio-economic status.</li><br /><li>Vocational qualifications protect against unemployment but lead to lower socio-economic status.</li><br /><li>Further degrees after secondary education do not provide additional protection against unemployment.</li></ul>
Educational transitions are cyclic processes in which re-applications are an essential but understated part of access. We study social inequalities in re-application behavior to identify the extent to which educational intentions are more constrained among students from the lower social strata. We explore applications to universities in Finland, where student selection takes place at the gates of the institutions. With full population register data and discrete-time event-history models, we show how parental education, previous national examination grades and various life-course changes after the rejection, such as entering the labor market and having children, are associated with re-applications. Net of other differences, children of university-educated parents have a 6 percentage points lower probability to stop applying to university after being rejected compared to their counterparts with lower educated parents. We argue that ability-based intake to educational institutions, which is seen to be meritocratic, is not sufficient for reducing social inequalities if staying in the queue is socially selective.
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