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This article bridges the literature on educational inequality between and within families to test whether high--socioeconomic status (SES) families compensate for low cognitive ability in the transition to secondary education in Germany. The German educational system of early-ability tracking (at age 10) represents a stringent setting for the compensatory hypothesis. Overall, previous literature offers inconclusive findings. Previous research between families suffers from the misspecification of parental SES and ability, while most within-family research did not stratify the analysis by SES or the ability distribution. To address these issues, I draw from the TwinLife study to implement a twin fixed-effects design that minimizes unobserved confounding. I report two main findings. First, highly educated families do not compensate for twins' differences in cognitive ability at the bottom of the ability distribution. In the German system of early-ability tracking, advantaged families may have more difficulties to compensate than in countries where educational transitions are less dependent on ability. Second, holding parents' and children's cognitive ability constant, pupils from highly educated families are 27% more likely to attend the academic track. This result implies wastage of academic potential for disadvantaged families, challenging the role of cognitive ability as the leading criterion of merit for liberal theories of equal opportunity. These findings point to the importance of other factors that vary between families with different resources and explain educational success, such as noncognitive abilities, risk aversion to downward mobility, and teachers' bias.

BACKGROUND Minority students were found to have high educational aspirations, considering their background characteristics. This finding is often attributed to 'migrant optimism.' Yet, whether socioeconomic, educational, or demographic differences between and within ethnic groups mediate and/or moderate students' educational aspirations remains an inconclusive question. OBJECTIVES This study investigates the educational aspirations of children of African and Latin American migrants in Spain, looking at four critical factors: (1) family background, (2) educational performance, (3) years lived in Spain, and (4) language used at home. METHODS Data comes from the 2010 General Evaluation of Educational Diagnostic (GEED) on lower-secondary students aged 14 (n = 19,293), on average. Multivariate logistic models are applied using mediation and moderation analyses. RESULTS Results show that (1) minority students have higher college aspirations than students of Spanish origin after accounting for parental socioeconomic status and educational performance; (2) ethnic differentials in aspirations - especially for pupils with Latin American origin - are concentrated among low-performing and disadvantaged students; (3) recent arrival in Spain is not significantly associated with differences in educational aspirations within minority groups; (4) speaking Spanish at home does not lead to differences in aspirations for pupils of African origin. CONCLUSIONS Migrant optimism, as opposed to family language use and years of contact with the Spanish culture and society, seems to be an important factor for the high (net) educational aspirations of students from African and Latin American backgrounds. CONTRIBUTION The article provides new evidence on ethnic heterogeneity in educational aspirations, being the first that uses representative data from the whole Spanish educational system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]