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Teachers are the evaluators of academic merit. Identifying if their assessments are fair or biased by student-ascribed status is critical for equal opportunity but empirically challenging, with mixed previous findings. We test status characteristics beliefs, statistical discrimination, and cultural capital theories with a pre-registered factorial experiment on a large sample of Spanish pre-service teachers (n = 1, 717). This design causally identifies, net of ability, the impact of student-ascribed characteristics on teacher short- and long-term assessments, improving prior studies' theory testing, confounding, and power. Findings unveil teacher bias in an essay grading task favoring girls and highbrow cultural capital, aligning with status characteristics and cultural capital theories. Results on teachers' long-term expectations indicate statistical discrimination against boys, migrant origin, and working-class students under uncertain information. Unexpectedly, ethnic discrimination changes from teachers favoring native origin in long-term expectations to migrant origin in short-term evaluations, suggesting compensatory grading. We discuss the complex roots of discrimination in teacher assessments as an educational (in)equality mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neo-Weberian occupational class schemas, rooted in industrial-age employment relations, are a standard socio-economic position measure in social stratification. Previous research highlighted Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero (EGP)-based schemas' difficulties in keeping up with changing labour markets, but few tested alternative explanations. This article explores how job tasks linked to technological change and rising economic inequality might confound the links between employment relations, classes, and life chances. Using the European Working Conditions Survey covering the European Union (EU)-27 countries, this article analyses over time and by gender: 1) the task distribution between social classes; and 2) whether tasks predict class membership and life chances. Decomposition analyses suggest that tasks explain class membership and wage inequality better than theorised employment relations. However, intellectual/routine tasks and digital tools driving income inequality are well-stratified by occupational classes. Therefore, this article does not argue for a class (schema) revolution but for fine-tuning the old instrument to portray market inequalities in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although preterm birth is the leading cause of perinatal morbidity and mortality in advanced economies, evidence about the consequences of prematurity in later life is limited. Using Swedish registers for cohorts born 1982–94 (N = 1,087,750), we examine the effects of preterm birth on school grades at age 16 using sibling fixed effects models. We further examine how school grades are affected by degree of prematurity and the compensating roles of family socio-economic resources and characteristics of school districts. Our results show that the negative effects of preterm birth are observed mostly among children born extremely preterm (<28 weeks); children born moderately preterm (32–<37 weeks) suffer no ill effects. We do not find any evidence for a moderating effect of parental socio-economic resources. Children born extremely preterm and in the top decile of school districts achieve as good grades as children born at full term in an average school district. Supplementary material for this article is available at: . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research suggests that beliefs about inequality are often biased in ways that serve people's own interests. By contrast, people might uphold system-justifying beliefs, such as meritocratic beliefs. We test these assumptions against real-life experience of highly selective university admission. Using panel data on German medical school applicants allows us to measure belief changes through experiences of success or failure in admission. We find support that self-serving bias in beliefs outweighs the motivation for system justification: success strengthens the belief that admission depends on effort, while failure reinforces the belief that admission depends on luck. These patterns partly manifest themselves in beliefs about societal inequality. Additionally, we argue that previous experiences (long-term experiences of social upbringing and short-term experiences in university admissions) provide a frame for new experiences, examine respective effect heterogeneity, and discuss implications of our findings of diverging paths in inequality beliefs of winners and losers for the persistence of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Often second generation young adults and their immigrant parents aspire high and towards general education despite a modest socioeconomic background. Little is known about the interrelation between educational aspirations and institutionally co-structured educational pathways. These interrelations are particularly important in an early tracking and a highly segregated education system like Switzerland, where – in contrast to many other countries – vocational education and training is highly valued and frequently attended. We evaluate how educational aspirations amongst young adults of the second generation and Swiss natives change as young people move through the education system – and thus through different educational contexts. We analyse how these changes interfere with group-specific reference systems, educational pathways and structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While students of immigrant origin often face difficulties during their school career, their educational aspirations and expectations have been found to be relatively high. Less is known, however, about the aspirations and expectations of students of migrant descent in more recent countries of immigration. Furthermore, occupational expectations have received less attention in the literature. Drawing on data from a nationally representative longitudinal study of Irish children, this paper provides the first investigation of the Irish case by comparing the educational and occupational expectations of Irish teens across five ethnic groups. Additionally, it explores how these expectations might translate into entry into third-level education by linking them to subject level choice in secondary school. The results suggest that expectations and subject level choice may be surprisingly similar across the groups, with no evidence of any substantial differences being found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-immigrant hostility continues to rise throughout multicultural societies. Building on segmented assimilation theory, in this manuscript I examine whether anti-immigrant sentiment might decrease school performance of immigrant children using the case of California, the state with the largest population of immigrants in the United States. I find a negative association between an increase in anti-immigrant sentiment at the community level and academic performance of immigrant students. This finding has broad implications for our understanding of immigrant educational experiences. It is also especially relevant at a time when multicultural societies are struggling to incorporate immigrants successfully into their economic, social, and political spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]