ABSTRACT
In their seminal study on the development of inequality in educational attainment in the 20th century, Shavit and Blossfeld (1993) summarize the results under the guiding title Persistent Inequality. In spite of dramatic 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 educational 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 regression, a set of successive educational transitions on the same social background variables (the “Mare model”; Mare 1980, 1981). Change or persistence 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 community, in particular in sociology and in the education sciences, the results have been viewed as evidence of a persistently high degree of class inequality of educational attainment that can change only under rather exceptional conditions.
