Linking the Macro to the Micro: A Multidimensional Approach to Educational Inequalities in Four European Countries

Recent research into educational inequalities has shown the importance of decomposing social origins into parental class, status and education, representing economic, socio-cultural and educational family resources, respectively. But we know scarcely nothing about how inequalities in educational attainment at the micro-level map onto institutional characteristics of educational systems at the macro-level, if we treat social origins in a multidimensional way. Drawing on the rich over-time variation in educational systems in four European countries – Britain, Sweden, Germany and Italy – this paper develops and tests a number of hypotheses regarding the effects of the three components of social origins on individuals‟ educational attainment in different institutional contexts. Our results clearly show that all three components of social origins have distinctive and independent effects on individuals‟ educational attainment in all four countries. But our findings also demonstrate that macroinstitutional setups do matter, and changes in institutional characteristics of educational systems to some extent reinforce or offset social processes that generate inequalities in education at the micro-level.