Navigating educational institutions Mechanisms of educational inequality and social mobility in different educational systems

Education increasingly determines who gets ahead in society. However, educational credentials are unequally distributed. Children of different socio-economic origins face unequal opportunities to obtain higher levels of education. This dissertation examines the individual- and family-level mechanisms that contribute to this inequality of opportunity in education and how they are related to the structure of the educational system. In particular, it studies two mechanisms: educational expectations of students and their parents as well as parents' knowledge of the educational system. Furthermore, it investigates whether these inequality-generating processes also affect returns to education on the labor market.
The four empirical chapters of the dissertation use longitudinal student-cohort data as well as register data from three educational systems: the Netherlands, Germany and the United States. Chapter 2 focuses on parental knowledge as a mechanism underlying educational inequality. Chapter 3 and 4 study how educational expectations contribute to inequality. Chapter 5 addresses the relationship between educational attainment and returns to education on the labor market.