Pillar 2: Education and Social Inequality Across the Entire Life Course

While Pillar 1 has a focus on educational processes in early childhood, kindergarten, elementary school and progression to secondary school, researchers in Pillar 2 deal with inequalities in educational achievements and choices across the entire life course. The major focus is on the extent and origins of such inequalities. Why do gender- and class-specific differences in competence development and educational decisions persist? How do they develop over the educational career? Which processes contribute to a decreasing or an increasing impact of social background over the life course? Why do we observe variation in these matters across educational systems? In addition, Pillar 2 takes up questions of ethnic inequalities in education. Why do immigrants and their children in many cases face difficulties in school? How do social and ethnic inequalities interact? In a third stream of research, Pillar 2 addresses the returns on education over the life.

Doctoral students within Pillar 2 employ a range of innovative approaches to disentangle processes of educational convergence and divergence. They move beyond the cross-sectional design of many traditional analyses by

• taking an explicit and innovative life-course perspective, examining the accumulation of educational advantages and disadvantages throughout the educational career;
• comparing educational choices and achievements across countries;
• combining cross-sectional, cross-country and longitudinal perspectives.

In substantive terms, researchers in Pillar 2 are concerned with a variety of pressing questions, including the structural integration of immigrants and their descendants into educational systems.

More information on Pillar 2:

• faculty members and doctoral researchers
• research projects
• publications
• partners