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The social-origin gap in graduation from higher education at age 30 (after matching for academic achievement at age 16)
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A large literature shows that families with more resources are able to provide better learning environments and make more ambitious educational choices for their children. At the end of compulsory education, the result is a social-origin gap in school-track attendance and learning outcomes. Our paper analyses whether this gap further widens thereaf...
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Context 1
... contrast, we find that in the lowest-status quartile, Swiss respondents have a higher probability of attaining a post-secondary vocational degree than migrants, whereas in the highest-status quartile Swiss are more likely to graduate from applied university than their peers with an immigration background. We further examine the social-origin gap in university completion by gender and migration status by reweighting the school ability of the lower-status groups to the highest-status group (see Table 3). For individuals with similar academic achievement, we find that the university graduation rate among men in the top quartile exceeds that of men coming from the bottom quartile by 26 percentage points, compared to a gap of only 18 points between women from the top and women from the bottom quartile. ...Context 2
... therefore replicate our analysis by replacing PISA literacy scores by PISA maths scores. However, all the results remain unchanged with this alternative indicator of skills (see Tables A.3 in the appendix and W.3 in the web-appendix). ...Context 3
... Note: coefficients show the bootstrapped difference between the social-origin gaps (discrete-change effects) in Table 3, in parentheses are the standard errors. 0.076 means that the social-origin gap in university completion between Q4 and Q1 is 7.6 percentage points larger among men than women. ...Similar publications
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Citations
... A second consequence is that social origin has a particularly strong influence on who obtains a university degree in Switzerland (Becker and Schoch 2018). Young people who achieve the same school grades and PISA test scores at age sixteen are twice as likely to have a university degree by age thirty if their parents belong to the upper middle class rather than the working class (Combet and Oesch 2021). Switzerland is thus one of the European countries where the influence of parental resources on educational pathways and attainment is particularly strong (Pfeffer 2008). ...
This chapter discusses the changes in Switzerland’s economy and society between 2000 and 2020, two decades marked by growth: Switzerland’s economy expanded almost without interruption, employment increased to an extent not seen since the 1960s and the population rose by over a fifth. However, productivity only increased slowly and wages grew much less than in earlier boom periods. Over the same period, Switzerland’s social structure changed fundamentally. Educational attainment rose sharply as both the numbers of graduates of Swiss universities and highly qualified immigrants increased. Tertiary education is thus becoming the new norm in Switzerland, replacing apprenticeships as the dominant level of education. Under the influence of strong immigration, Switzerland’s population has also become more diverse. Increasingly highly skilled immigration from a growing number of countries puts an end to a skewed social structure where foreigners from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ex-Yugoslavia were traditionally relegated to the social hierarchy’s bottom-end. These trends have also altered Switzerland's class structure. Strong job growth in health, education and business services has mainly benefited professionals, managers and technicians. Therefore, the ranks of the salaried middle class expanded, whereas the traditional working class as well as the lower middle class of clerical workers lost ground. The losers of structural change in recent decades have thus not been the middle class, but the working class.
... It is widely recognized that statistical power depends on multiple aspects, including the model that is estimated, the distributions of the variables used in the model, and the proportions of missing data present in the data source (Wolf et al. 2013). Yet multiple prior studies that estimated various analytic models based on the TREE sample or subsamples detected significant regression coefficients with tendencies toward small standard errors (e.g., Burger 2021Burger , 2023Combet and Oesch 2020;Keller et al. 2015). This indicates that the current sample is sufficiently large for a wide range of analyses such as the models estimated here. ...
We compared the mental health of higher education students with that of nonstudents. Moreover, we examined whether the mental health of students predicts their probability of obtaining a higher education degree, and whether the extent to which mental health affects educational attainment varies by gender. Drawing on a risk and resilience framework, we considered five facets of mental health that may be implicated in distinct ways in the educational attainment process: positive attitude towards life, self-esteem, self-efficacy, negative affectivity, and perceived stress. We used data from a nationally representative panel study from Switzerland (Nstudents = 2070, 42.8% male; Nnonstudents = 3755, 45.9% male). The findings suggest that overall, the mental health of higher education students was relatively similar to that of nonstudents, although students exhibited slightly higher self-esteem, slightly weaker self-efficacy, greater negative affectivity, and higher levels of perceived stress. The effects of different facets of mental health on higher education degree attainment were mostly statistically and/or practically insignificant. However, positive attitudes towards life had a substantial positive effect on the probability of being awarded a higher education degree. Mental health was equally important for male and female students’ educational attainment.
Supplementary Information
The online version of this article (10.1007/s11618-023-01187-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
... Disadvantages in the educational attainment of youth with a migrant background are often attributed to primary ethnic effects, i.e., poorer academic performance than their majority peers at school entry and at later stages when controlling for social origin (Meunier, 2011;Borgna and Contini, 2014;Contini and Azzolini, 2016;Veerman and Dronkers, 2016;Spörlein and Schlueter, 2018;Kristen, 2019;Nauck, 2019;Becker and Klein, 2021). In contrast, however, advantages in educational trajectories-a higher propensity to opt for academic tracks at upper secondary and tertiary level-have also been observed for migrant groups in many countries when controlling for prior achievement and endowment with family resources (secondary ethnic effects; see Kilpi-Jakonen 2011; Tjaden and Scharenberg 2017;Hadjar and Scharf 2018;Dollmann and Weißmann 2020;Combet and Oesch 2021). The secondary ethnic effect refers to the paradoxical finding that, despite the educational disadvantages faced by young people from certain ethnic groups, migrants are more likely to opt for academic tracks than their native classmates, controlling for social class and prior school performance Salikutluk, 2016). ...
Positive ethnic choice effects, namely a higher likelihood of attending more demanding educational tracks among students of immigrant origin compared to their native peers, are observed in many countries. Immigrant optimism, and thus the striving for upward social mobility, is seen as a key mechanism for explaining ethnic choice effects. However, research on this topic often ignores gendered educational pathways and trajectories. Based on data from German-speaking Switzerland on two school-leaver cohorts, our interest is on whether ethnic choice effects are observable for both female and male students whose parents were born in the Balkans, Turkey or Portugal. In addition, we examine the extent to which aspirations contribute to explaining ethnic choice effects for both genders. To disentangle the direct effect of a migration background and the mediating effect of aspirations on educational attainment at upper secondary level, we apply the reformulated KHB method in our analyzes. Overall, our findings indicate that migrant women have made up ground on their native peers between the two school-leaving cohorts, contributing to the widening of the gender gap within the migrant group of interest. Of particular importance, however, is our finding that ethnic choice effects are observed only for men, while we do not observe any evidence of ethnic choice effects in the sample of women. Consistent with previous findings, our results show that aspirations mediate part of the ethnic choice effect. Our findings support the consideration that the room for ethnic choice effects is related to the proportion of young men and women striving for academic education, with gender differences in this regard being particularly pronounced in education systems with a high degree of vocational specificity.
... Concernant l'effet du statut migratoire, l'étude de Schnell et Fibbi (2016) Ainsi, plus le statut socioéconomique des parents est élevé, plus forte est la probabilité que leurs enfants suivent une formation plus exigeante aux degrés secondaires I et II, entreprennent une formation tertiaire et la réussissent Guilley, 2019;Huber et al., 2019;Kriesi & Leeman, 2020;Buchmann et al., 2021;Combet & Oesch, 2021). Plusieurs études indiquent même qu'une fois le statut socioéconomique d'origine contrôlé, le genre, la filière suivie au secondaire I et le statut migratoire ne sont plus des facteurs déterminants du parcours de formation Combet & Oesch, 2021). ...
... Concernant l'effet du statut migratoire, l'étude de Schnell et Fibbi (2016) Ainsi, plus le statut socioéconomique des parents est élevé, plus forte est la probabilité que leurs enfants suivent une formation plus exigeante aux degrés secondaires I et II, entreprennent une formation tertiaire et la réussissent Guilley, 2019;Huber et al., 2019;Kriesi & Leeman, 2020;Buchmann et al., 2021;Combet & Oesch, 2021). Plusieurs études indiquent même qu'une fois le statut socioéconomique d'origine contrôlé, le genre, la filière suivie au secondaire I et le statut migratoire ne sont plus des facteurs déterminants du parcours de formation Combet & Oesch, 2021). ...
Cette revue de littérature, basée sur plus de 180 publications, décrit la situation des jeunes femmes en Suisse, qui est observée à travers trois axes thématiques : 1) la formation et l’emploi ; 2) la vie familiale et intime ; ainsi que 3) les valeurs et l’engagement. Elle a été effectuée sur mandat de la Commission fédérale pour les questions féminines CFQF.
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Diese Literaturübersicht, die auf über 180 Publikationen basiert, beschreibt die Situation junger Frauen in der Schweiz, die anhand von drei thematischen Schwerpunkten beobachtet wird: 1) Ausbildung und Beschäftigung; 2) Familien- und Intimleben sowie 3) Werte und Engagement. Sie wurde im Auftrag der Eidgenössischen Kommission für Frauenfragen EKF durchgeführt.
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This literature review, based on more than 180 publications, describes the situation of young women in Switzerland, which is observed through three thematic axes: 1) education and employment, 2) family and intimate life, and 3) values and commitment. It was carried out on behalf of the Federal Commission for Women's Issues FCWI.
... Malgré la forte expansion de la formation, un écart s'est ouvert au niveau de la demande pour l'enseignement tertiaire en Suisse (Meyer, 2018;Kriesi & Leemann, 2020 Une deuxième conséquence est que l'origine sociale a une influence décisive sur les personnes qui obtiennent un diplôme universitaire en Suisse (Becker & Schoch, 2018). Parmi les jeunes qui ont eu les mêmes notes scolaires et les mêmes résultats aux tests PISA à l'âge de 16 ans, la probabilité d'avoir obtenu un diplôme universitaire à l'âge de 30 ans est deux fois plus importante si les parents appartiennent à la classe moyenne supérieure plutôt qu'à la classe ouvrière (Combet & Oesch, 2021). Par conséquent, la Suisse est l'un des pays européens où l'influence des ressources parentales sur les parcours et résultats scolaires est particulièrement forte (Pfeffer, 2008). ...
La pauvreté constitue un risque pour l’éducation et la formation, et une faible formation entraîne un risque de pauvreté. Même dans un pays riche comme la Suisse, ce cercle vicieux est une réalité, en particulier pour un certain nombre de personnes migrantes ou de familles monoparentales. Il faut briser ce cercle vicieux.
Armut ist ein Bildungsrisiko, und geringe Bildung ist ein Armutsrisiko. Dieser Teufelskreis ist auch in der reichen Schweiz eine Realität, besonders bei einem Teil der Migranten und Alleinerziehenden. Er muss und kann unterbrochen werden. Das bildungssoziologische Grundproblem der sozialen Ungleichheit lässt sich mit Massnahmen der frühen Förderung als Prävention von Lern- und Verhaltensproblemen mildern. Wichtig ist, dass die Intervention auf Familien in besonderen Risikokonstellationen zugeschnitten ist, möglichst früh beginnt, intensiv und langfristig angelegt ist, und qualifiziertes Personal eingesetzt wird. Das in der Schweiz etablierte Hausbesuchsprogramm «PAT – Mit Eltern Lernen» erfüllt all diese Kriterien. Dessen Wirkung wird in der longitudinalen Studie ZEPPELIN interdisziplinär untersucht. Die Ergebnisse sind nicht nur kurz-, sondern auch langfristig betrachtet vielversprechend.
