Tilburg University
Nonpersistent inequality in educational attainment
Breen, R.; Luijkx, R.; Muller, W.; Pollak, R.
Published in:
American Journal of Sociology
Publication date:
2009
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Citation for published version (APA):
Breen, R., Luijkx, R., Muller, W., & Pollak, R. (2009). Nonpersistent inequality in educational attainment:
Evidence from eight European countries.
American Journal of Sociology
,
114
(5), 1475-1521.
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Nonpersistent Inequality in Educational
Attainment: Evidence from Eight European
Countries
1
Richard Breen
Yale University
Ruud Luijkx
Tilburg University
Walter Mu¨ ller
University of Mannheim
Reinhard Pollak
Social Science Research Center
Berlin (WZB)
In their widely cited study, Shavit and Blossfeld report stability of
socioeconomic inequalities in educational attainment over much of
the 20th century in 11 out of 13 countries. This article outlines
reasons why one might expect to find declining class inequalities in
educational attainment, and, using a large data set, the authors
analyze educational inequality among cohorts born in the first two-
thirds of the 20th century in eight European countries. They find,
as expected, a widespread decline in educational inequality between
students coming from different social origins. Their results are robust
to other possible choices of method and variables, and the authors
offer some explanations of why their findings contradict Shavit and
Blossfeld’s conclusions.
INTRODUCTION
In their seminal study on the development of inequality in educational
attainment in the 20th century, Shavit and Blossfeld (1993) summarize
1
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Start-Up Workshop of the EDUC
Research Theme of the Sixth EU Framework Network of Excellence, “Economic
Change, Quality of Life and Social Cohesion (EQUALSOC),” Mannheim, December
2–3, 2005; the meeting of Research Committee 28 (ISA) Inequality and Mobility in
Family, School, and Work, Los Angeles, August 18–21, 2005; a meeting of the Inter-
university Working Group on Social Inequality and Life Course, Utrecht, June 22,
2005; and the Euresco conference “European Society or European Societies? Euro-
Conference on the Causes and Consequences of Low Education in Contemporary
Europe,” Granada, September 18–23, 2004. We are grateful for comments and sug-
gestions made at these meetings. The data used in this article were kindly made
American Journal of Sociology
1476
the results under the guiding title Persistent Inequality. In spite of dra-
matic educational expansion during the 20th century, of the 13 countries
studied in their project, all but two, Sweden and the Netherlands, “exhibit
stability of socio-economic inequalities of educational opportunities. Thus,
whereas the proportions of all social classes attending all educational levels
have increased, the relative advantage associated with privileged origins
persists in all but two of the thirteen societies” (p. 22). This conclusion is
based on a metanalysis of individual country studies, all of which adopt
two different approaches to assess socioeconomic inequalities of educa-
tional opportunities: one is to use ordinary least squares to regress years
of education achieved by sons and daughters on parents’ education and
occupational prestige; the other is to regress, using binary logistic regres-
sion, a set of successive educational transitions on the same social back-
ground variables (the “Mare model”; Mare 1980, 1981). Change or per-
sistence in inequalities of educational opportunities is diagnosed
depending on whether or not significant variation over birth cohorts is
found in the regression coefficients linking social background to years of
education attained and the educational transitions considered. While the
two analyses address different empirical phenomena—of which Shavit
and Blossfeld are well aware—the results of both suggest essentially the
same conclusion, which the authors then summarize as “stability of socio-
economic inequalities of educational opportunities.” In the scientific com-
munity, in particular in sociology and in the education sciences, the results
have been viewed as evidence of a persistently high degree of class in-
equality of educational attainment that can change only under rather
exceptional conditions.
Shavit and Blossfeld’s result echoed earlier findings from some single-
country studies,
2
but subsequently several analyses have contested this
finding. They have shown that equalization also took place in Germany
(Mu¨ ller and Haun 1994; Henz and Maas 1995; Jonsson, Mills, and Mu¨ ller
1996), France (Vallet 2004), Italy (Shavit and Westerbeek 1998), and the
United States (Kuo and Hauser 1995). Rijken’s (1999) comparative anal-
ysis comes to the same conclusion. In other studies, Breen and Whelan
available to us by the following people, to whom we are most grateful: Louis-Andre´
Vallet (France), Maurizio Pisati and Antonio Schizzerotto (Italy), Christopher T. Whe-
lan and Richard Layte (Ireland), John Goldthorpe and Colin Mills (Great Britain), Jan
O. Jonsson (Sweden), Bogdan Mach (Poland), Pe´ter Ro´bert and Erzse´bet Bukodi (Hun-
gary), and Harry Ganzeboom (Netherlands). We are grateful to the AJS reviewers for
their careful and helpful comments on earlier drafts. Direct correspondence to Richard
Breen, Department of Sociology, Yale University, Box 208265, New Haven, Connect-
icut 06520. E-mail: richard.breen@yale.edu
2
For Britain, Halsey, Heath, and Ridge (1980); for the United States, Featherman and
Hauser (1978); for France, Garnier and Raffalovich (1984); and for the Netherlands,
Dronkers (1983).
Educational Attainment
1477
(1993) and Whelan and Layte (2002) confirm persistent inequality for
Ireland, whereas for Soviet Russia, Gerber and Hout (1995) find mixed
results (declining inequality in secondary education and increasing in-
equality in transitions to university). For the postsocialist period in various
countries of Eastern Europe, the origin-education association is regularly
found to be very high and is likely higher than in the socialist period
(Gerber [2000] for Russia; Iannelli [2003] for Hungary, Romania, and
Slovakia).
The aim of this article is to reassess the empirical evidence concerning
the conclusion of Persistent Inequality using more recent data and larger
samples from a selection of European countries. In contrast to Shavit and
Blossfeld, we base our conclusions on analyses using ordered logit models
of educational attainment rather than on educational transition models.
The reason is that we are interested in inequalities related to social origin
in completed education, which constitutes the major starting condition
for unequal opportunities in the life course. Another reason for not using
educational transition models is that we lack data on individuals’ complete
educational histories. Indeed, there are no cross-nationally comparable
large data sets that contain complete education histories and also cover
long historical periods. In the absence of information on educational ca-
reers, researchers often have assumed that their subjects have pursued
the most typical paths and have then constructed hypothetical transition
patterns from the observed highest level of education. But, particularly
for countries with a highly differentiated educational system (most Eu-
ropean countries, in fact), such constructions must give a seriously dis-
torted picture of the real patterns of educational transitions (Breen and
Jonsson 2000).
Our results show that there was a clear decline in educational inequality
in several countries over the course of the 20th century. This inevitably
raises the question of why we arrive at such a different conclusion from
that of Shavit and Blossfeld. As we explain below, we believe that there
is a strong prima facie case for expecting decline rather than constancy
in educational inequality. But we also seek to assess the degree to which
our results might be sensitive to questions of method. Ideally we would
have liked to replicate Shavit and Blossfeld’s analyses, but this is not
feasible. The chapters in their volume are, in fact, quite heterogeneous
in both their explanatory and dependent variables. Social origins are mea-
sured in all countries in terms of parental education (though in some cases
this is years of education, in others the highest level of education attained)
and either parental socioeconomic status (using a variety of scales such
as Wegener’s magnitude prestige scale, Treiman’s occupational prestige
scale, and the Hope-Goldthorpe scale) or categorical social class. “Paren-
tal” in some cases means the father; in others it means the parent with
American Journal of Sociology
1478
the higher education and more “dominant” class position. Furthermore,
although all the analyses employ the Mare model of educational transi-
tions, the educational categories, and thus the transitions themselves, are
defined in different ways, which is a consequence of not adopting a com-
mon educational classification across the 13 countries studied.
Such variety not only makes cross-national comparisons impossible (as
Shavit and Blossfeld recognize), but also vitiates any attempts to compare
our approach with theirs, for the simple reason that they do not have a
single approach. In contrast, we compare trends within (and, as we discuss
later, between) eight European countries using a common educational
categorization and, with relatively minor exceptions, a common schema
of class origins. Our methodological investigations take the form of vary-
ing the analytical model (by also employing the Mare model), introducing
parental education as an additional indicator of social background, con-
sidering differences in the birth cohorts and periods covered in the data,
and varying the sample size to match that of the country analyses in
Shavit and Blossfeld’s volume. The object of all this is to investigate the
robustness of our results and, in the process, to shed some light on the
question of why the analyses of their contributing authors led Shavit and
Blossfeld to conclusions different from ours.
In the following sections of the article we begin with a discussion of
why we think educational inequality should have declined during the
20th century. This concentrates on the broad pattern of developments,
around which, of course, specific countries showed some variation. We
then present our data and our results concerning the evolution of edu-
cational inequality in eight European countries. We next turn to meth-
odological concerns and assess the robustness of what we have found to
different ways of analyzing our data. In the conclusion we return to our
substantive finding of equalization of educational inequality, we compare
the extent of educational inequality between countries, and we discuss
the implications of our findings.
REASONS TO SUPPOSE THAT EDUCATIONAL INEQUALITY WAS
NOT PERSISTENT
Differences between students from different social classes in how they
fare in the educational system can, in simple terms, be seen to derive from
differences in how they perform in the educational system (which Boudon
[1974] called “primary effects”) and differences in the educational choices
they make, even given the same level of performance (“secondary effects”).
In both areas, developments in the course of the 20th century would lead
us to expect declining class differences.
