Effectively Maintained Inequality: Education Transitions, Track Mobility, and Social Background Effects

Abstract

This article proposes a general explanation for social background‐related inequality. Educational attainment research indicates that the later an education transition, the lower the social background effect. While some suggest life course changes in the parent‐child relationship or between‐family competition explain this pattern, others contend the result is a statistical artifact, and that the analytic strategy presupposes agents are irrationally myopic. This article addresses these criticisms by framing educational transitions in terms of students' movement through the stratified curriculum. Students select their stratum, one of which is dropping out. To make these choices, they consider their most recent salient performance. Using time‐varying performance measures to predict students' track placement/school continuation sustains the validity of the educational transitions approach and suggests substantively important social background effects even for nearly universal transitions. Results are consistent with the general perspective termed effectively maintained inequality.