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High aspirations can be an important factor for educational attainment, especially for youth in disadvantaged schools who are otherwise more likely to leave school early. In this article, I study the relationships between pre-migration status, social capital, and educational aspirations among youth in disadvantaged Swedish schools, using data on 960 students collected in 2014. Regression results showed that access to social capital was related to pre-migration status, and that both factors contributed to high university aspirations among children of immigrants, partly through high expectations from parents. The findings consequently show how post-migration resources and outcomes relate to pre-migration factors, challenging the destination country bias that is often present in studies on immigrants and their children.

This article focuses on the school-to-work trajectories of early school leavers in Sweden. I use sequence analysis of population-level registry data covering the first 10 years after compulsory school for 6404 early school leavers to identify four clusters of school-to-work trajectories: an exclusion trajectory characterized by not being in employment, education, or training; an education trajectory characterized by second-chance education and an increasing share of tertiary education; a precarity trajectory; and a career trajectory. Having an immigrant background or being a woman was associated with a lower likelihood of being in the career trajectory than having a non-immigrant background or being a man. Differences in the likelihood of being in the education trajectory between persons with immigrant and non-immigrant background could however be fully explained by parents' education, if education level was measured relative to their country of origin. This highlights the importance of pre-migration factors for post-migration outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we study whether social capital contributes to ethnic inequality in education or whether there is evidence of counter-stratification. We use data from three surveys of Swedish ninth-graders in different contexts to fit regression models for access to social capital and educational returns. Our results show that students with parents from Asia or Southeast Europe had equal or better access to social capital, compared to children with at least one parent born in Sweden. Results for children with African background were mixed. Regarding educational outcomes, we found similar rates of returns from social capital across groups. Better access to social capital thus seems to buffer against disadvantages for some, but not all, groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]