Keywords
European higher education
EU-SILC
capabilities approach
education to work transitions
How to Cite
Abstract
Educational expansion, in most general terms, and in the majority of European countries studied, seems to be reducing inequality of access. There are ever more students with lower socioeconomic backgrounds and ever more graduates whose parents had only primary education credentials. The chances of the latter to enter higher education are increasing across Europe but are still very low. The intergenerational patterns of transmission of education are still very rigid across all European systems: the offspring of the low educated is predominantly low educated; the offspring of the highly educated is predominantly highly educated. Structurally similar patterns can be shown for occupations: the offspring of those in the best occupations predominantly takes best occupations, and the offspring of those in the worst occupations predominantly takes the worst occupations, across all European countries (“best” being structurally similar and linked to both middle-class earnings and lifestyles in Europe). Equitable access to higher education in this paper is empirically linked to the social background of students viewed from two parallel perspectives – educational background of parents and occupational background of parents – and studied through the large-scale EU-SILC (European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions) dataset.
Funding
Narodowe Centrum Nauki
projekt Maestro (DEC-2011/02/A/HS6/00183)
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