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Compensatory advantage is a mechanism of social stratification that complements cumulative advantage and path dependence. In this article, I first discuss the theoretical foundations of the compensatory advantage and path dependence mechanisms and the methodological challenges that complicate identification of their effects. Next, I present a practical demonstration of the use of the compensatory advantage theoretical framework, with a regression discontinuity design estimating the probability of being continuously promoted throughout primary education in France. Results indicate that students born just before the cutoff date for primary school entry, who are consequently the youngest in the class when starting school, face a larger risk of grade repetition. In line with theoretical predictions of the compensatory advantage model, the risk is much smaller for students born to highly educated parents compared to students whose parents have lower educational attainment.

BACKGROUND Children who experience parental divorce have worse long-term educational attainment than children living in intact families. Less clear is the extent to which heterogeneity in the divorce penalty depends on parents' socioeconomic background and contextual characteristics. OBJECTIVE This study focuses on the negative consequences of parental divorce for children's tertiary education attainment, their heterogeneity by parental socioeconomic background, and variation across time and space. METHOD Single-level and multi-level linear probability models are estimated on several data sources in a comparative analysis of European countries and US regions. Different operationalizations of parental divorce are employed, including both marital and nonmarital dissolutions. RESULTS Results show a stronger negative association between parental divorce and the probability of obtaining a university degree for children of highly educated parents. This holds across different birth cohorts in both Europe and the United States, largely irrespective of the country or region of residence, the dataset, and the operationalization of divorce and parental education. Higher divorce and university enrollment rates increase the absolute size of the divorce penalty, but do not substantially alter its pattern of heterogeneity. CONCLUSION Children of high-SES families have more to lose in terms of the family resources relevant to achieving a university degree and are thus more negatively affected by parental divorce. CONTRIBUTION The finding that the association between parental divorce and children's educational attainment is stronger for children of highly educated parents across a variety of social and institutional environments has implications for the role of divorce in the reproduction of social inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, first, we present new evidence on a specific type of compensatory advantage (CA) mechanism in educational transitions and attainment, whereby students from socio-economically advantaged families compensate the negative event of achieving poor grades by ignoring them and disproportionally moving on to the next level of education. Using two independent data sources, we focus on the attainment of an upper secondary degree and the transition from high school to university in Italy, investigating the role of parental education and social class in compensating for an early poor academic performance. Second, we develop a simulated scenario analysis to assess how much of the observed social background inequality is due to the educational outcomes of poorly performing students from high social backgrounds. The results are consistent with the notion that a CA mechanism is in place and show that the advantage of individuals with higher backgrounds over those from lower backgrounds is much larger among students with bad marks in earlier school stages. We estimate that at least one-third of the observed social background inequality in educational transitions in Italy can be attributed to the CA mechanism. This result is consistent across different outcomes, samples and birth cohorts, and is robust to a number of sensitivity checks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Abstract We study the evolution of intergenerational inequality of college attainment in the United States over the 20th century. For this purpose, we expand the Breen-Goldthorpe model of educational investment behaviour and show formally that a rise in the costs of college education and in inequality in economic resources by social origins lead to an increase in inequality in educational attainment. In our empirical analysis we use five different national representative surveys and focus on the chances of college attainment by parental college education for birth cohorts from 1900 to 1987. Our results confirm that relative inequality in college attainment, measured in terms of odds ratios, declined over most of the 20th century with equalization levelling off beginning with birth cohorts in the 1960s. At the same time, the absolute differences in the percentage of graduates among children of college-educated parents and children of non-graduates have remained remarkably stable across the century. Based on our formal model, we finally explore future scenarios for the trends in college attainment inequality. Given high resource inequality and rising costs for college education, our models point to a decline in college attainment of individuals with non-graduate backgrounds and consequently to a rise of relative inequality in college attainment by parental education. While not yet discernible, such a development might lead to a possible U-shape trend for recent and current birth cohorts in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in how the effects of parental separation on children's educational attainment vary with social background. On the one hand, parents with more resources might be better able to prevent possible adverse events like separation to affect their children's outcomes. On the other hand, children from higher social backgrounds might have more resources to lose from a parental separation. A wide range of empirical studies on the issue have come to inconsistent conclusions, with support found for both perspectives. The aim of this paper is to monitor the influence of methodological and operational choices on the different results observed across studies. We focus on aspects such as the operationalization of key variables, the measurement of inequality in absolute and relative terms and the different strategies used to address endogeneity. We study the effects of parental separation on educational attainment for a cohort of British children born in 1970 and find that conclusions change depending on whether social background is measured using the mother's or father's characteristics and whether relative or absolute differences between groups are considered. Results are relatively insensitive to the operationalization of dependent variables and the treatment of missing data. When using data from Understanding Society instead of the British Cohort Study, results also did not change. We reflect on how these findings can explain the contradictory results from earlier studies on the topic, and how heterogeneity in the effects of parental separation by socio-economic background should be interpreted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine whether the presence of non-intact families in society is related to increased inequality in educational attainment according to social background, as suggested by the ‘diverging destinies’ thesis. We analyze four countries, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, that differ in the prevalence of non-intact families and in the strength of the negative association between growing up in a non-intact family and children's educational attainment. We use a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition approach to calculate a ‘counterfactual’ estimate of differences in educational attainment between socioeconomically advantaged and disadvantaged children in the hypothetical absence of non-intact families. Contrary to the diverging destinies thesis, we find little differences between actual and ‘counterfactual’ levels of inequality in educational attainment in all four countries. Whereas growing-up in a non-intact family affects the individual chances of educational attainment, the overall contribution of non-intact families to aggregate levels of social background inequality appears minimal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the British Cohort Study 1970 to show that the proportion of children achieving a tertiary education degree is 8 percentage points lower for the offspring of separated parents than for children from intact families. Moreover, the children of highly educated parents experience a two times larger 'separation penalty' than the children of less educated parents. We find a similar pattern of heterogeneity in effects for the likelihood of participation in academic education (A-Levels) beyond school leaving age but not for school grades at age 16. We test three different explanations for heterogeneity in the parental separation penalty: changes in family relations, changes in income, and negative selection into separation based on unobserved characteristics. We address the potential endogeneity of parental separation by including pre-separation observable characteristics, individual fixed effects models, and a placebo test. Our key finding is that changes in family income, but not those in family relations or selection, explain a large part of heterogeneity in the effects of parental separation. Children with more highly educated parents face a larger decline in family income if parents separate and, in addition, declines in family income of equal amounts entail more negative consequences for their educational attainment. [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]