In their article "The U-turn in educational inequality. Why a multidimensional approach matters for measuring social inequalities in tertiary educational attainment", Elias Kruithof and Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe, the authors analyzed the evolution of social inequalities in tertiary educational attainment in Belgium from the post-World War II era to the early 2000s. This research challenges previous findings by identifying a "U-turn" in educational selection: while social inequalities in higher education declined for cohorts born before 1975, a resurgence is evident among those born after this period. Using a multidimensional approach to measure social origins, the study examines how both parental class and education interact to shape educational outcomes, offering a nuanced understanding of social mobility in higher education.
The present study builds on literature that shows the importance of taking multiple measures of social origins into account. It corresponds to different underlying mechanisms that often have diverging evolutions in their consequences on educational attainment. Often, they show the growing importance of parental education and the declining importance of parental social class. By analyzing data from over 13,800 individuals, we reveal distinct patterns in how families' educational and class resources interact to shape educational outcomes. In contrast to previous studies that focused on either parental social class or educational attainment as indicators of social origins, the present analysis relies on a multidimensional measurement of social origins that accounts for interaction mechanisms between parental class and educational resources. The findings underscore the renewed importance of combining parental education with parental social class for generations born after 1975. For those generations, who grew up again in times of growing economic and occupational inequalities, deregulation of labour markets and welfare state retrenchment, we find a renewed importance of relying on the additional class resources besides educational resources of the parents.
The article was published in "Research in Social Stratification and Mobility". The full text is available here.
Citation: Kruithof, E. H., & Verhaeghe, P. P. (2024). The U-turn in educational inequality. Why a multidimensional approach matters for measuring social inequalities in tertiary educational attainment. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 94, 100994.
