Education and social mobility

In West Africa, there is a lack of understanding regarding the impact of female education on children’s schooling. This is particularly the case in post-conflict states where there is a dearth of knowledge regarding the determinants of school attendance. The current paper uses two indicators, maternal and community female education, to investigate the relationship between school attendance and female education. Multilevel techniques are applied to the 2008 Sierra Leone Demographic and Health Survey to undertake the analysis. Findings suggest that there is a positive association between school attendance and women’s education; the relationship is stronger at the community level than at the household level. The incremental effect of community female education is amplified among older children, children in rural and poorer communities. Both the household and community effects of women’s education did not vary between households and communities respectively, suggesting a consistent positive effect of female education on children’s school participation.

Parental migration is found to have contrasting effects on children’s educational outcomes in countries in Asia and Latin America. Different indicators are used, which may explain some of the divergences, but this also indicates the importance of context. We examine educational outcomes among children in 3 African countries and add to the literature in several ways, by: providing information about African cases, missing in the literature; using several measures of educational outcomes to test if results differ according to indicator used; and providing a cross-country comparison, to understand the role of context-specific factors. A survey is conducted amongst junior and secondary school children in Ghana (N=2760), Angola (N=2243), and Nigeria (N=2168). Educational outcomes are measured as class repetition, level of school enjoyment among children, and an index of pupils’ marks. We control for family, child, living, and migration characteristics. We compare children in migrant and non-migrant families. Preliminary results reveal that in Ghana and Nigeria children are prone to repeat a class when their mother or both parents have migrated nationally or internationally, while in Angola the opposite is observed. Furthermore, the results find limited evidence to link material deprivation with negative educational performance.

This paper studies the effect of private tutoring on academic achievement and educational inequality in Korea. Korea has the largest system of private tutoring in the world along with outstanding performance on international academic tests, such as the PISA. Korea's school system is characterized by limited school choice and low variation in quality and curricula across schools, which provides incentive to use private tutoring for additional educational investment. Out of concerns that wealthier families can choose more and better tutoring, the government enacted various forms of regulation on the tutoring market. This paper seeks to estimate the effect of private tutoring on academic achievement and to evaluate the impacts of a range of government policies. It develops and estimates a dynamic discrete choice model of private tutoring and self-study decisions using panel data from the 2005 to 2011 waves of the Korea Education Longitudinal Study. The data follow 7th graders annually until one year after high school graduation and contain detailed information on private tutoring use and test scores.

Literacy and education constitute a real challenge for the Moroccan authorities.
Although gender inequalities were significantly reduced, huge gaps are seen in education between rural and urban areas, by mother’s level of education and by wealth quintile.
During the last decade, real progress was achieved in terms of primary school enrolment. The net rate of enrolment of children aged 6-11 years reached 90.5% in 2008/09. Milieu and gender disparities were noticeably reduced. The rates registered were: 91% for boys and 90.2% for girls in urban areas compared to 93.2% for boys and 88% for girls in rural areas.
Achievements at primary school remain, however, insufficient and incomplete when other levels (preschool, college, secondary and university) are considered. For example, huge disparities are seen for children who are supposed to be enrolled at the college (age12-14). Indeed, only 44% of this age category reaches this level of education, of whom only 16% of rural girls and 22% of rural boys compared with respectively 68% and 65% in urban areas.
Preschool enrolment shows the greatest gaps between the richest quintile (78%) and the poorest (6%), urban (64%) and rural (10%); and by mother’s level of education (secondary: 74%, illiterate: 26%).

School education provide a base for higher education which is important for human resource building of a nation. This paper based on data from the survey - “Youth in India: Situations and Needs Study”- conducted in 2006-07 in six Indian states. Attempt to address the reasons and factors behind discontinuation of school education. Cross Tabulations and Logistic regression has been used in the analysis. The preliminary findings show that as level of education increases the gender gap in school dropout decreases. There is a significant impact of mother's education on school dropout. Youth from the Muslim religion and socially marginalised groups have high dropout. It is also found that youth from poor households have reported economic reasons, while youth from rural area have reported school related reasons for dropout. The findings suggest that improvement in socio-economic conditions of family and state is necessary to retain the students in schools.

The rich literature on inequality in educational access in the Global North has yet to fully reach the Global South, limiting social demographers’ understanding of processes of social stratification in many world regions. In this paper, I apply the educational transitions model developed by Mare to the issue of class background and educational attainment in Egypt. The aim of the paper is to assess change in the importance of class background as a determinant of educational attainment against the background of the rapid increase in education that has occurred in Egypt at the population level. The results indicate that the magnitude of the association between parental education and educational attainment has declined significantly for cohorts born since the 1950s, largely due to an increase in primary school completion rates. However, both mother’s and father’s education remain significant predictors of educational attainment through advanced stages of the educational system. Furthermore, higher parental education is positively associated with placement into the more prestigious general academic track at the secondary level, and negatively associated with tracking into vocational education. The latter result holds even when measures of school quality are incorporated into the analysis.

In comparison to older cohorts, younger men and women in the developed societies delay their transition to adulthood and follow more complex trajectories. However, within cohorts there remain variations in timing and sequencing of events. Two of the major determinants of life course events related to transition to adulthood, and in particular family formation, are gender and social class. These two characteristics can influence the sequence of events characterizing the transition to adulthood in terms of socioeconomic inequalities through a different availability of opportunities for social mobility. Several studies show that in North America, a higher familiar status tends to decrease the complexity of trajectories or, in other words, to push towards a more “traditional” pattern, i.e. a trajectory in which the end of education and the first job precedes union formation, which in turn precedes parenthood. On the other hand, it has been highlighted that in Europe the familiar status has a different effect with an increasing complexity among higher status.
The aim of the research is to examine in details the sequences of transitions highlighting, in a comparative perspective, how the life trajectories are influenced by parental social class and gender in the US and Italy.

Young people in the 21st century face the transition to adulthood in a very different way with respect to those of the same age in the 1980s. There are also wide differences across countries in the Western world. In this work we analyze the trends in the proportion of young adults working full-time, who achieved some sort of financial independence, and their living arrangements. Using the Luxemburg Income Study we look at six different countries – United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Netherlands – to give a cross-national comparison, and we compare outcomes in two points in time – mid-1980s and 2004 – to have an idea about the evolution of young adults’ behavior over decades. We find a general decreasing trend in the percentage working full-time, and earning a satisfactory level of wages. The situation is more positive for women, who are more active in the labor force in 2004 than in the mid-1980s, suggesting that males and females’ careers become more similar over time. In addition, there are differences across countries that cannot be entirely explained by structural factors and differences in labor markets, and that may be related to other aspects, like cultural and normative shifts.

In this article we draw on insights from traditions of migration, political integration, and assimilation or adaptation in order to make sense of recent historical encounters of two peoples - the Chinese peoples from British Colonial Hong Kong and from the Peoples Republic of China. We discuss both their integration and the possible re-stratification based on a new ethnic enclave. Using Hong Kong Census Data 1991,1996, 2001 & 2006, our analysis offers a mixed message regarding the assimilation of the mainland Chinese in Hong Kong. On the one hand, two important indicators of social integration – place of residence and language – show that new arrivals from the Mainland are well-integrated into Hong Kong. Marriages were also increasingly exogamous from 1991 to 2006. On the other hand, there are persistent gaps in the incomes of mainland-born and Hong Kong native workers, driven in part by lower returns to years of schooling among workers born on the mainland. Further, those born on the mainland were unlikely to have accessed postsecondary education, and this disadvantage increased over the years. We conclude that new arrivals to Hong Kong are socially integrated but economically disadvantaged and lack educational opportunities.

Higher education in China has experienced an unprecedented expansion since 1998. Despite the heated public debate on equity in access to higher education, particularly related to the province-based quota system, only anecdotal evidence has been presented to show the decline of students from disadvantaged backgrounds in enrollment in several elite universities. The examination of the role of expansion and differentiation in higher education and its implications for stratification remain to be seen, mainly due to the unavailability of appropriate data. In 2009, we launched the first wave of the “Longitudinal Survey of College Students,” aiming to collect the panel data on 5000 students from 15 universities in Beijing, tracking their differential experience in career choices, adaptation strategies and subsequent labor market outcomes. This paper analyzes students’ retrospective information on high school experience and admission processes, analyzes show how family background, high school, and preferential policies have channeled students into different types of tertiary institutions. As found elsewhere, the transition from elite to mass high education has also been accompanied by differentiation between elite research universities and less selective colleges of second tiers, with latter increasingly occupied by children of working