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This chapter begins with a discussion of the rising demand for more education—especially at the tertiary level—and the internationalization of higher education. It then reviews several theories that attempt of explain why higher education is so tightly linked to occupational and material success. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter provides an overview and analysis of changes in the educational systems of Latin American countries. The first section sketches the general picture of educational inequality in the region, compares income inequality, and distinguishes the different development agendas for the quite different levels of development that exist among the countries of the region. The second section describes the main components of educational reform in the Latin American region for the period 1990–2006, and discusses their impact on the historical patterns of inequality in the social distribution of education. The third section examines available data about years of education and grade completion by countries and social categories, by way of assessing the expansion of access to education by different generations and different socioeconomic categories. The fourth section describes learning outcomes in six Latin American countries and analyses their association with socioeconomic and institutional factors, as well as comparing them with selected OECD countries. This permits an assessment of the region's educational structures in terms of equity of their results. A final section returns to policy issues.

This chapter examines the relationship between social class and university entrance in the People's Republic of China during a period of major economic change towards the end of the last century. The trends of development toward greater equality in educational opportunities were severed into two stages of development that moved in diametrically opposite directions. The first stage extended from the 1950s to the 1970s, and it was characterized by the phenomenal growth of educational opportunities, as well as the movement toward a more equitable distribution of educational opportunities. The second stage extended from the 1980s to the 1990s, and it witnessed both the expansion of educational opportunities and the growth of educational inequality. The turning point of these stages of development came with changes in social, political, and economic conditions, as well as with changes in government policies. The fluctuating influence of family origin on educational attainment demonstrates the strong impact of changes in state policy and ideology on the mechanism of distribution of educational opportunities in China.

This chapter explores the sociological aspects of educational inequality in India. There is little coherent understanding of changing patterns of educational inequality, and few clear-cut pointers to explanations for continued non-participation in, and non-completion of schooling on the part of a significant number of children. The author believes that this state of affairs arises out of the theoretical inadequacies and political conservatism that characterizes much of the study of educational inequality. The author also critiques the new research agenda by analysing the issue of unequal educational access and attainment in elementary education, with a focus on those subordinated by caste, class, and gender, and identifies crucial areas that are missing in our understanding of the influence of social processes in student participation in education and in shaping the educational system. The author points to the need for a critical systemic exploration of the education system as a subsystem of society in which school structure, organization, and processes are to be placed in wider political economy and stratified social structure based on wealth and social status. The author concludes by stressing the need to open up the issue of educational inequality to wider debates operating at the level of economy, polity, and society, and to adopt wider perspectives in sociological studies of the education system.

This chapter applies log-linear models to investigate the effects of fathers' social class on children's educational attainment in South Korea. It shows that with respect to educational attainment, the middle class is the most privileged class among four social classes: the capitalist class, the petty bourgeoisie, the middle class, and the working class. The middle class has the highest odds of going to a general high school instead of a vocational high school. The ratio of children of the middle class who go to general high school rather than to vocational school is even larger than that for the capitalist class, let alone the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. However, the odds of going to university instead of not going to university or to a two-year college decrease for all social classes imply that fathers' class effect on children's transition after high school is weaker than that during the transition from middle school to high school. Children of the middle class are more likely to advance to university than those of other classes.

This chapter focuses on some so-called middle-class losers: seventeen students of a middle-class origin selected from a qualitative study of community-college students in contemporary Hong Kong. They all failed in their previous attempts to follow a traditional route to a local university—passing the required local public examinations—and instead chose an unconventional alternative that became available in Hong Kong in 2000, studying for an associate degree in community college, in the hope that they would transfer later to a university. Based on their personal accounts of educational achievements and failures, the chapter explores the role of emotion in their educational careers to see what we can learn from them in understanding educational inequality.

This chapter presents a comparative theory and an empirical analysis of inequalities in economic opportunities and returns to education across birth cohorts. It focuses on the consequences of economic slowdowns in different types of welfare regimes and analyzes how discontinuities in economic trends produce diverse effects on the balance between birth cohorts. It shows that conservative (France) and the familialistic (Italy) welfare regimes are marked by strong inter-cohort inequalities at the expense of younger social generations. In contrast, social-democratic (Denmark) and liberal (US) systems show less inter-cohort redistribution of resources. As far as education goes, while there is no clear decline in the return to education in the latter countries, the former nations show strong drops in the value of intermediate levels of education. This means that national trajectories of social change have diverged, and we should anticipate the long-term consequences of these divergences.

This chapter examines whether the second generation has assimilated to Western patterns of female advantage in education. In contrast to most industrialised societies, which have witnessed a change towards female advantage in education in recent decades, gender gaps in education in ethnic minorities’ origin countries vary greatly, with persistent female disadvantage in world regions where many of the minorities under study originate. Interactions between female gender and ethnic background are examined for the five educational outcomes analysed in the previous chapters, thus covering the entire educational career. The results show that gender gaps among the second generation are on the whole as large and in the same direction as among the majority population. Thus the female disadvantage found in the parental generation disappears in the children's generation and is replaced by the same pattern of female advantage that is found among majority groups in Western countries.

Chapter Seven summarizes the findings and arguments, ranging from cross-national to inter-organizational to between-group analyses. The chapter returns to the question: what are the features of school environments that make students' of color incorporation in education greater at some schools and smaller at others? It offers some recommendations for policy makers and educators to consider in attempts to uproot the weeds of educational inequality that have long vexed two national systems. Overall, it encapsulates the research discussed throughout Stubborn Roots, maintaining how the obstinate legacy of past injustices can be overturned to weed out the invasion of both overt and latent practices that stifle the growth of equity in schools found within two just, democratic societies.

This chapter examines changes in the causal structure of racial inequality in South Africa. It derives an analytical framework with testable hypotheses concerning equal opportunity. Using this framework and recent nationally representative panel data, it shows that while opportunities have been substantially equalized, as evidenced by an overall decline in the white-black wage differential, a new form of racial inequality has emerged, operating not directly on income, as in the heyday of job reservation, influx control, and school segregation, but indirectly, through inequality in the rewards for effort (as witnessed by sharply divergent patterns in the returns to education between the races). Differences in the returns to education now account for about 40% of the white–black wage differential, whereas a decade ago this effect was virtually zero.

In this chapter we assess whether changes in educational participation have fostered changes in social fluidity in Italy over the twentieth century. By means of log-linear unidiff models and of multinomial logistic regressions, we show that a significant decline of schooling inequalities during the so-called economic miracle fueled an increase in social fluidity, in a context where the association between education and class destinations weakened only slightly. Direct inheritance also declined to some extent in the postwar period. These equalizing trends occurred for both men and women, but were stronger among women, and involved primarily, though not exclusively, the agricultural classes. However, all these trends have flattened out in the youngest cohorts, where social fluidity is highly inertial. Since the process of occupational upgrading has halted in recent decades, the recent stability of relative mobility involves also the stagnation of absolute mobility.

This chapter investigates intergenerational class mobility in the U.S. during the twentieth century. It describes absolute and relative mobility trends and explores the role of educational expansion in shaping them. Analyses are based on data from several nationally representative surveys (GSS, OCG-II, SIPP, and PSID). As a consequence of massive occupational and educational upgrading, upward mobility increased over most of the century. The role of education in contributing to absolute class mobility changed across time: Class gaps in education as well as class returns to education equalized initially, but became more polarized among recent cohorts. Relative mobility trends differed by gender: After an initial surge in fluidity for both, mobility chances remained stable for women but increased further for men. Rising fluidity among men is mostly due to increasing college graduation rates (i.e., the compositional effect), whereas educational trends contribute little to understanding the stability of women’s mobility chances.

According to the meritocratic principle, the ideological legitimation of social inequalities, educational and status attainment should only depend on achievement and ability rather than on ascriptive factors such as social origin. There is a long-standing tradition of educational policies and reforms which attempted to weaken the influence of social origin and, thus, to develop greater equality of educational and status attainment. This chapter focuses on the impact of institutional settings on the mechanisms of the meritocratic triad, namely the link between social origin (class of origin) and educational attainment, the link between educational attainment and status attainment, and the direct link between social origin and status, net of educational level. Again, the characteristics of the educational system in terms of stratification appear to be influential with regard to educational inequalities and social inequalities, for example with regard to school-to-work transitions.

Inter-group inequality in education is a function of a complex web of factors. As the constraints to schooling are often interrelated and mutually reinforcing, they are therefore not always easily distinguishable. In this context, the challenge that lies ahead is to systematically disentangle the influence of underlying factors and to determine the contribution of individual factors to understand inequality between individuals and groups. Only then it would be possible to understand what actually determines educational inequality between different socio-religious groups and how the mechanism of inter-group inequality works. This chapter tries to uncover this mechanism. In order to understand the complexity, the analysis uses a multi-layered/multi-level analytical framework.

The main objective of this chapter is to theorise how education systems shape inequalities. In the first part of the chapter, we outline an institutionalist theoretical approach and offer an illustrative case comparison regarding the institutionalisation of educational inequalities in Germany and the United States. Although the principle of equal educational opportunity seems almost universally accepted, nations often face seemingly intractable obstacles towards its realisation. In the second part, we adopt a multi-level perspective to better explain the effect of education systems on educational inequalities. Integrating causal influences at the macro-, meso-, and micro-level, we describe how characteristics of education systems at the macro-level and school characteristics at the meso-level influence the relevance of individual attributes (of students, their parents, and teachers) to the educational attainment of students. In a second step, we deal with explanations of educational inequalities at the individual level.

Sweden was renowned for attempting a “middle way” between capitalism and socialism, with a market economy combined with ambitious policies for equalizing both opportunities and living conditions. Did this facilitate social mobility, and was equalization of educational attainment the mechanism behind it? We document increasing social mobility during a period of strong growth of higher class occupations, both for men and women, an increase that, however, tends to level off for cohorts born in the mid-1960s. We also verify that most of this development into a more socially open society was due to the equalization of educational outcomes. However, the very substantial growth of upper secondary and tertiary education also contributed, because this expansion meant that more people in younger cohorts received higher education where, in Sweden, the importance of social origin for class destinations is considerably weaker than at lower levels of education.

This chapter provides a case study of educational fairness or equity in Brazil, focusing on the intake of black and public school students by the elite University of São Paolo (USP). Brazil has long been proud of the high quality of its public universities, both federal and state institutions. Young people from many sectors of society—both the elite and the poor—aspire to enter them. However, admission is highly competitive and depends on a student's score on an entrance exam, the Vestibular. Children from socially and economically privileged families, who typically attend private high schools, tend to do well on this exam. Children from lower class backgrounds do less well and are therefore underrepresented at USP.

This chapter considers class inequalities in Germany for cohorts born in the 1980s and 1990s. It focuses on the transitions from primary school to the classical academic track, Gymnasium and from Gymnasium to university, and relates the influence of primary and secondary effects in the transition to university on the decisions made at previous transition points. The discussion emphasizes two institutional characteristics that are most relevant for understanding inequality in educational opportunity in Germany: first, the early and very consequential sorting of students into stratified secondary school tracks after primary school, where school performance serves as the prime allocation principle; and second, the existence of an attractive system of vocational training that constitutes a popular educational alternative even for those students who obtain the qualification to go on to university.