In this article, I evaluate whether educational attainment in Germany is stratified by parental wealth and at which transitions stratification emerges. I propose a four-stage model to capture the emergence of stratification in the German education system, which is characterized by early between-school tracking: (i) transition to the tracked secondary school, (ii) attended track in the last year of mandatory schooling, (iii) highest school-leaving certificate, and (iv) transition to vocational or tertiary education. Results suggest that stratification by parental wealth emerges at all four stages, and, therefore, accumulates over the stages. Children living in wealthy households are 20 per cent more likely to attend the highest track in fifth grade and to obtain the highest school-leaving certificate and are 40 per cent more likely to enroll in tertiary education compared to children at the bottom of the wealth distribution. Furthermore, parental wealth seems to be particularly effective in preventing negative outcomes like leaving school without a certificate or not finding a fully qualifying vocational training. Among those who do not obtain the formal requirements to enroll in tertiary education, those with wealthy parents are more likely to start dual vocational training.

Recent research has established parental wealth as an important determinant of children's educational achievement. However, parental wealth is often ignored in research on social inequality in education, or its influence is only considered at later stages of children's educational careers. Our paper contributes to this research by examining the relationship between parental wealth and (1) children's math competences at the beginning of primary school; (2) the development of children's competences throughout primary school; and (3) children's transition from primary to secondary school. We are looking at Germany, where the early ability tracking may make an early investment in education particularly important. Analyzing data from the German National Educational Panel Study, we find that parental wealth has a distinct association with children's educational outcomes that adds to social disparities by other measures of parents' socioeconomic status (SES). Our results indicate that children in wealthy households have higher competences already in the first grade. This advantage remains stable throughout primary school and translates into a higher probability to attend the highest secondary school track. Moreover, children in these wealthy households are more likely to attend the highest secondary school track, net of differences in competences and performance. Our results imply that ignoring wealth as a component of parental SES leads to an underestimation of the level of social inequality in education in Germany.

This paper makes two contributions to the literature on social stratification in vocational attainment. First, we evaluate whether labour market literacy, as measured by knowledge about earnings in different occupations, is socially stratified. Second, we analyse whether differences in expected earnings between high-income and low-income occupations contribute to the social stratification in vocational aspirations and attainment using serial mediation based on data from the German National Educational Panel Study. We find that students are well informed about earnings, on average, but substantially underestimate earnings in some occupations. Students from low socio-economic status (SES) families underestimate earnings more than those from high SES families, particularly earnings in high-status occupations. Therefore, low SES students expect smaller earning differences between high-income and low-income occupations than high-SES students. In turn, small expected differences between high-income and low-income occupations are associated with lower vocational aspirations as well as attainments. Differences in expected earnings of high-income and low-income occupations mediate 4% of the differences in vocational aspirations by parental SES and 2% of the differences in vocational attainment.

Over recent decades, we have seen a delay of marriage and simultaneously an expansion of the educational system and massive changes in the labour market in most Western countries. In this paper, we link these phenomena within the unique historical context of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Making use of data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we analyse the associations between individuals’ current economic roles –full- and part-time employed, unemployed, enrolment in education or training– and the timing of their first marriage for men and women born between 1944 and 1986 in the former FRG and GDR. We find that full-time employees are most likely to enter first marriage, while being unemployed or enrolled in education are associated with a delay of first marriage. However, there are crucial differences by gender, region and birth cohort. Women are more likely to marry when they finish education, while for men it seems to be more important to find gainful employment. These associations rarely change over birth cohorts in West Germany. In East Germany, the situation differs significantly. For the older (pre-reunification) cohorts, we find almost no associations between economic roles and marriage timing. For the younger (post-reunification) cohorts, we find convergence to the West German patterns.

This thematic issue examines the insurance function as a mechanism to underlie wealth effects on various outcomes. The articles in this issue shed an innovative light on the insurance function of wealth concerning a range of topics relevant to social stratification and social policy researchers. This editorial provides an overview of the contributions of this thematic issue and highlights some gaps and remaining open questions. Altogether, the contributions suggest that wealth can provide insurance against adverse life events in various contexts. However, this insurance effect depends on welfare state characteristics, wealth portfolios, and the way families handle their wealth.