On the 18th of February 2021, Andrea Forster defends her PhD thesis titled: “Navigating educational institutions: Mechanisms of educational inequality and social mobility in different educational systems” at the University of Amsterdam.

On the 1st of January 2021, Wouter Schakel started as a new postdoctoral researcher. His project will focus on the political, economic and societal factors that explain variation in educational policy across time and space. He will be part of the NWO Vici project led by Herman van de Werfhorst.

On the 1st of October 2020, Ayça Alayli started as a new PhD student. Her PhD project studies the role of standardized tracking procedures in inequality of opportunity at the transition from primary to secondary education and is funded by AMCIS. Her supervisors are Sara Geven, Louise Elffers (Educational Sciences), and Herman van de Werfhorst.

On the 25th of September 2020, Lotte Scheeren defends her PhD thesis titled: “Not on the same track? Tracking age and gender inequality in education” at the University of Amsterdam.

On 1 September, Dieuwke Zwier joins the Educational Systems and Inequality Research Program team. Dieuwke completed a bachelor in Sociology and a research master in Social Sciences, both at the University of Amsterdam. In her PhD research, Dieuwke will study how peer relations affect educational decisions, aspirations, and performance in the transition from primary to secondary education.

Dieuwke’s project is part of the National Cohort Study Educational Careers (NCO) PRIMS project, a collaboration between a team of researchers from the University of Amsterdam and the University of Groningen. She will be supervised by Sara Geven, Thijs Bol, and Herman van de Werfhorst.

We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher in the sociology of education. The description of the job and the application process can be found on the website of the University of Amsterdam.  Deadline for applications is Feb 13th!

On October 10, Herman van de Werfhorst gave the Distinguished Social Science Lecture at the WZB Berlin on the topic of “Educational Systems and the Core Tasks of Schooling”. The lecture has been filmed and can be viewed online here.

Herman van de Werfhorst organized a workshop at the University of Tübingen on 1st and 2nd October as part of his visitorship at the University.

Three members of our team also presented their ongoing work at this occasion:

Anatolia Batruch and Herman van de Werfhorst:
“Education-based meritocracy and personal legitimation of stratification”

Andrea Forster, Anna Katyn Chmielewski and Herman van de Werfhorst:
“Tracking, Student Expectations and Higher Education Enrollment. A comparison between the US and Germany”

Lotte Scheeren and Herman van de Werfhorst:
“Female advantage and disadvantage: The role of educational tracking in vertical and horizontal gender segregation in education”

Andrea Forster will be a visiting PhD student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto in April and May to work on a paper together with Anna Katyn Chmielewski. The paper, which focuses on the role of student expectations on higher education enrollment, will be presented at the Comparative, International and Development Education Center at OISE on April 25.