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The paper explores the relation of educational performance with social and urban inequalities in the Athens Metropolitan Area during the 2000s. It draws on discussions about education as a mechanism of social reproduction and on work about education inequalities in Greece, and in particular in Athens, where a socially stratified secondary education –compared to the rest of the country– leads to a rather open, but at the same time socially unequal higher education. We analyze how the performance of candidates in the Greek national admissions examination (Panelladikes Exetaseis) relates to the social position of candidates’ families, to the type of secondary schools they attended, to the social profile of candidates’ residential neighborhoods (tentatively) and to their demographic features (age and sex). The object is to illustrate and roughly quantify the function of social reproduction in this socially selective process of transition to higher education.

This paper examines whether the Athenian schools reflect and/or reproduce the social structures that surround them. Methodology consists in the classification of public high schools in terms of educational outcomes and its cross-reference with inequalities observed in their spatial, socio-professional and educational environment. Educational achievement is measured by performance in the National Admissions Examination to Tertiary education. We then aggregate the individual student records at the level of each school in order to demonstrate how their variation may be related to social characteristics. Using a GIS application and multivariate correspondence analysis statistics we produced an indicator for each school’s surrounding socioeconomic and educational profile. This analysis validated the lack of ‘democratization’ in the Athenian educational system. Performance appears essentially related to the occupational scale and the educational attainment whilst ethnic composition and living standards seem to play an important role.