Stratification of education systems and social mobility : empirical analyses of the moderating role of the stratification of education systems on the associations of the mobility triangle

Abstract

The thesis investigates whether the stratification of education systems moderates the OED associations. The first empirical article (Chapter 2) is a replication study that shows that the most used indicator of the stratification of education systems (i.e., the index of tracking (Bol and van de Werfhorst, 2013)) is not positively (statistically significantly) associated with either social background inequality in educational attainment or educational gradient in occupational attainment. Besides not supporting the existence of a trade-off between labour market allocation and equality of educational opportunity, the unsuccessful predictive validity test of the index of tracking makes it clear that this strand of research needs new theoretically grounded indicators to measure the stratification of education systems. This thesis’ contribution is to address these requests. First, I theoretically identify the dimensions of the stratification of education systems that are relevant when it comes to investigating the OED associations: the age of first selection, and the extent to which the first selection is based on students’ ability. Second, I collect these two country-level indicators through expert judgements by questioning more than 200 experts who provided information on the education systems’ characteristics of 34 countries. Third, by linking these country-level data to the European Social Survey (ESS), I test whether the two dimensions of the stratification of education systems moderate a) social background inequality in educational attainment (Chapter 3), b) educational gradient in occupational attainment (Chapter 4), and c) the direct effect of social background on occupational attainment (Chapter 5).