This project examines how and why inequality in education develops between students of different socio-economic status (SES) even if they show similar ability using longitudinal student cohort data from Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. The research looks at how certain family orientations towards education, in particular parents’ knowledge about the educational system and the educational expectations of parents and students, influence inequality, and whether these characteristics have a higher importance in some institutional settings than in others. Furthermore, heterogeneous returns to higher education for students with different levels of advantage are studied, addressing the question of whether students who are more likely to select into higher education are also more likely to benefit from this type of education in terms of wages.

This project was carried out by Andrea Forster and resulted in her PhD thesis titled: “Navigating Educational Institutions: Mechanisms of Educationla Inequality in Different Educational Systems”