Educational Mobility in the Developing World

This chapter reviews the small but growing literature on intergenerational educational mobility in the developing world. Education is a critical determinant of economic wellbeing, and it predicts a range of nonpecuniary outcomes such as marriage, fertility, health, crime, and political attitudes. We show that developing nations feature stronger intergenerational educational persistence than high-income countries, in spite of substantial educational expansion in the last decades. We consider variations in mobility across gender and region, and discuss the macro-level correlates of educational mobility in developing countries. The chapter also discusses the literatures on concepts and measurement of educational mobility, theoretical perspectives to understand educational mobility across generations, and the role that education plays in the economic mobility process, and it applies these literatures to understand educational mobility in the developing world.

Educational Transitions and Educational Inequality: A Multiple Pathways Sequential Logit Model Analysis of Finnish Birth Cohorts 1960–1985

We developed a multiple pathways sequential logit model for analysing social background inequality in completed education and applied it to analyse educational inequality in Finland (birth cohorts 1960–1985). Our model builds on the sequential logit model for educational transitions, originally presented by Robert D. Mare and later extended by Maarten Buis, which disaggregates inequality in completed education into the weighted sum of inequalities in the transitions leading to it. Although the educational transitions framework is popular among educational stratification researchers, its applications have almost exclusively focused on analysing inequalities in separate educational transitions. Buis presented a unifying model of inequalities in educational transitions and completed education, which gives a substantive interpretation to the weights that link them. We applied this to an educational system in which the same educational outcomes can be reached through multiple pathways. Our analysis of Finnish register data shows that intergenerational educational persistence increased, particularly among women. The main reasons are increased inequality in academic upper-secondary (gymnasium) completion and gymnasium expansion that increased the weight of this transition as well as of the transition to university. We discuss the integration of structural and allocative mechanisms in educational stratification research.

Educational Persistence in the Face of Violence

Latino boys and young men often carry the debt of violence into different spaces. This invisible trauma manifests into disruptive behaviors in schools. It is well documented that violence in urban communities and schools has received significant attention from researchers, but little attention has been paid to Latino male youth as individuals and the various forms of violence they have experienced, and how that impacts educational persistence. This qualitative study focuses on 26 Latino male middle and high school students who are attending two continuation schools to understand the types of violence they have experienced and their educational aspirations after high school.