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Defence date: 29 October 2020 Examining Board: Professor Fabrizio Bernardi (European University Institute); Professor Juho Härkönen (European University Institute); Professor Jonas Radl (Carlos III University / WZB Berlin Social Science Center); Professor Leire Salazar (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia) In post-industrial societies, a college education is the main channel for upper classes to prevent their children falling down the social ladder, while, for working classes, it is the best bet for upward mobility. Despite attaining post-compulsory education was equalised and a driver of social mobility in the last decades, inequalities by socioeconomic status (SES) in college graduation, the main social lift, remained relatively unchanged. We are only starting to understand the complex interplay between biological and environmental factors explaining why educational inequalities gestate before birth and persist over generations. Besides, further research is needed to unravel why advantaged students are more likely to get ahead in education than equally-skilled, but disadvantaged peers. This thesis bridges interdisciplinary literature to study how parental SES affects educational attainment during childhood in Germany, evaluating the implications for social justice. It contributes to the literature by (1) analysing the consequences of prenatal health shocks on skill formation; (2) examining the effect of cognitive and non-cognitive skills on the transition to secondary education; and (3) assessing SES-heterogeneity in these associations. Drawing from compensatory theories, I demonstrate how negative traits for educational attainment—low birth weight and cognitive ability—are less detrimental for high-SES children from the early stages of the status-attainment process due to mechanisms like parental investments and aspirations, and teachers’ bias in assessments. The German educational system enforces early tracking into academic or vocational pathways from age 10, supposedly according to ability. Thus, the case of Germany represents an institutional starting gate to evaluate equal opportunity, where compensating for negative traits might be difficult. To test compensatory theories, I utilise the Twin Life Study and the National Educational Panel Study applying quasi-causal empirical designs. The findings challenge the liberal conception of merit as the sum of ability plus effort in evaluating equal opportunity.

The study of aspirations among the children of migrants is critical to understanding the future integration and opportunities of ethnic-minority students. Previous studies on the factors leading to ethnic differences in educational aspirations have provided limited and inconclusive evidence, restricted to only a few specific national contexts. This article uses Spanish data from the General Evaluation of Educational Diagnostic (GEED) (2010) for students with an average age of 14 (N = 19,293) to examine different factors leading to variations in educational aspirations among the children of African and Latin American origin in Spain. Results from multivariate logistic models can be summarized as follows: (1) adolescents from African and Latin American backgrounds have higher college aspirations than their counterparts of Spanish origin, after accounting for their disadvantaged social origin and academic performance, while these differences – especially for the Latin American group – are concentrated among low-performing students; (2) the ethnic gap in aspirations is clearly more pronounced within disadvantaged socioeconomic groups than in more privileged groups, in line with the migrant optimism and social mobility thesis; (3) children of migrants who have recently arrived in Spain have higher college aspirations than the children of migrants born or fully educated in Spain, yet these differences are moderate; (4) speaking Spanish at home among the children of African migrants does not lead to differences in aspirations, compared to their counterparts with African-born parents who do not speak Spanish frequently. We discuss the opportunities and risks associated with such a minority aspiration-achievement gap, and its variations across demographic and socioeconomic groups, while framing the results within current policy and scientific debates revolving around demographic and migration issues.