ABSTRACT
In their seminal study on the development of inequality in educational attainment in the 20th century, Shavit and Blossfeld summarize the results under the guiding title Persistent Inequality. As far as primary effects are concerned, children raised in families in the more advantaged classes encounter better conditions in their home environments that help them to do better in school. They get more intellectual stimulation that strengthens their cognitive abilities, and their parents are more highly motivated and supportive of schoolwork than parents of working-class children. Perhaps the single most striking thing that differentiates the older from the younger cohorts in the data is the massive increase in educational attainment that has occurred. It is not only the educational distributions that have shifted, however. During the course of the 20th century the class structures of European nations underwent major change, with a move away from farming and unskilled occupations and toward skilled jobs and white-collar jobs.
