Educational Mechanisms of the Inheritance of Life-Chances: From Baby Boomers to Subsequent Generations.

This paper investigates the intergenerational inheritance of life-chances by asking how education-mediated opportunities are allocated across generations. Inheritance involves here transferring of cultural capital (family background), educational opportunities and employment opportunities left from previous generations. The framework is anchored in the baby-boom generation, the expansion of university education, and the allegedly normal transition from home via educational system to labor market. Martin Trow?s classification of elite, mass and universal higher education is also utilized. In the European context we analyze the education-mediated life-chances of three subsequent generations (baby-boomers born in 1945-1950; their offspring born in the 1960?s and 1970?s and the coming grandchildren) by asking 1) how will parents? education be reproduced by their offspring and 2) how does the employment of subsequent generations correspond to the expectations of appropriate employment? Focusing on the baby-boomers? ?offspring generation? we demonstrate by simulations how changes in educational opportunities (1st redistribution of life-chances) produce changes in educational outcome (2nd redistribution of life-chances). There is a kind of intergenerational deception in the air. Graduates? dreams of high occupational status corresponding to educational level inherited from the era of the elite university can hardly be fulfilled in an era of mass or universal higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]