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The prevalence of nontraditional family structures has increased over time, particularly among socioeconomically disadvantaged families. Because children's socioeconomic attainments are positively associated with growing up in a two-parent household, changing family structures are considered to have strengthened the reproduction of social inequalities across generations. However, several studies have shown that childhood family structure relates differently to educational outcomes for sons than for daughters. Therefore, we ask whether there are gender differences in the extent to which changing family structures have contributed to the college attainment gap between children from lower and higher socioeconomic backgrounds. We use data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and 1997 cohorts to estimate extended Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition models that take into account cross-cohort changes in the prevalence of family structures and heterogeneity in the effects of childhood family structure on college attainment. We find that the argument that changes in family structures contributed to diverging destinies in college attainment holds for daughters but not for sons. This result is due to the different changes over time in the effects of childhood family structure by gender and socioeconomic background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies document a social-origins gap or direct effect of social origin (DESO) on labour market outcomes over and above respondents' education, challenging the idea that post-industrial societies are education-based meritocracies. Yet, the literature offers insufficient explanations on DESO heterogeneity across education and different labour market outcomes. Little is also known about underlying mechanisms. We contribute by answering two questions: (i) How does DESO vary when comparing college-degree holders with non-holders? (ii) For which specific parental and children's occupations is the largest DESO observed? We focus on Spain, using a large new dataset (n  = 144,286). Firstly, we find a larger DESO on socioeconomic status among non-degree holders, and on income among degree holders. We propose the notions of compensatory advantage in occupational attainment and boosting advantage in income for high social-origin individuals to explain these opposite patterns, drawing from 'downward mobility avoidance' and 'effectively maintained inequality' theories. Secondly, we map origin and destination micro-classes where DESO is largest. High-grade managerial and professional parental occupations, characterized by social closure and influence in large organizations, are the origin micro-classes exerting the largest DESO. We also find that compensatory advantage for low-educated children from advantaged origins is related to their higher chances of accessing managerial occupations, while boosting advantage on income among college graduates is observed for high-grade managers and liberal professionals, suggesting that micro-class reproduction may partially account for boosting advantage. We conclude by discussing the generalizability of our findings to other countries and their implications for research on DESO, meritocracy and social mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines trends of social inequalities in educational attainment in the second half of the twentieth century in Italy, comparing two approaches. The traditional approach uses years of education as a dependent variable and implicitly looks at the absolute/nominal value of education. The second approach refers to education as a ‘positional good’ and it captures its possibly changing occupational value over time. In this article, following this second perspective, two measures are developed and used: the Educational Competitive Advantage Score (ECAS) measures the value of educational degrees on the basis of their incidence in the population (credential inflation perspective). The second is an effect-proportional scale of education based on the average occupational prestige attained by individuals in each qualification (demand–supply balance perspective). Using data with large sample size from three waves of the Istat Multi-Purpose Survey (1998, 2003 and 2009), the article shows that inequalities based both on social class of origin and parental education declined between 1940 and 1980 birth cohorts, but the effect of parental education reduced less and it is stronger than that of social class in recent cohorts. Considering education as a positional good does not change the main findings obtained using years of education as outcome in the Italian case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have shown that social background inequality differs among educational transitions and it is stronger for those transitions that involve a higher risk of social demotion. This paper focuses on two processes that may account for part of the observed differences in social background inequality across educational transitions. First, it studies how the family of origin might compensate for a `false step' in the early stage of young people's educational careers. This compensatory effect of social background can be described as the likelihood of having `a second chance' for unsuccessful educational transitions. Second, it focuses on two unobserved factors that might potentially bias the effect of social background across educational transitions. These are the students unobserved cognitive and non-cognitive skills and their unobserved anticipated choices of dropping out of the education system. Two issues - the compensatory effect of social background and selection bias in educational transitions - are addressed by estimating a probit model with sample selection for the transition to post-compulsory education in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses inequalities in educational outcomes (IEO) by class of family of origin in Italy and Spain for five 10-year cohorts born from 1920 to 1969, using the cumulative logit (ordinal regression) model. In both countries the question is whether, as education expanded, the class IEO's remained stable or diminished. The dominant view in the 1990s was that, with the exception of a few countries, inequalities persisted. In the current decade the consensus on this is changing, and decreasing class IEO is now more often found. Italy has been given as an example of educational expansion while maintaining class IEO. Spain was not included in previous analyses. The results show clearly that class IEO diminished in Spain as well as in Italy; differences in the timing of expansion and change in IEO can be accounted for through the different institutional settings of the two countries. A more contained reduction of IEO is found in Spain than in Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies whether a better educational performance enhances the chances of success at entry into the Italian labour market. Two indicators of educational performance are considered: the final grades in the diploma achieved and the speed with which a given educational qualification was completed. It is argued that the Italian educational system is highly standardized, in terms of the curricula and the examination system. Thus, it provides employers with information that can be used when making decisions about whom to employ. Therefore, educational performance should be rewarded by employers. At a theoretical level, a queuing model of the functioning of the labour market is specified and the need to distinguish the processes that lead to dependent employment and self-employment is highlighted. The empirical analysis is based on the Italian Household Longitudinal Survey and consists of an event-history analysis of the duration of first job search and a regression-type analysis of the prestige score of the first job. The results suggest that (a) individual educational performance increases the chances of success at entry into the labour market, (b) the importance of educational performance is greater in the youngest cohort of school-leavers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]