This dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of educational inequality and social stratification, examining how disparities in educational attainment are produced, reproduced, and transformed across spatial and temporal contexts and individual life courses.
Utilising population-level administrative register data from Finland, the dissertation comprises three empirical studies addressing sibling similarity in education at the regional level, the dynamics of performance and choice effects in upper secondary schooling, and the accumulation of educational inequality across early and mid-adulthood.
The first study reveals substantial within-country variation in sibling correlations in educational attainment (0.21–0.39), highlighting that regional disparities in inequality are significantly greater than previously documented in the Nordic context and correlated with the homo- or heterogeneity of the regional socioeconomic structure. Most of the regional variation (81%) in sibling correlations is explained by observed parental education and occupational status, while residual differences show minimal association with regional contextual variables. The second study explores the evolution of educational stratification in upper secondary school choice over the 1990s and 2000s, identifying gender-specific trajectories: increasing class-based differences among females driven by performance (primary effects) and declining inequalities among males primarily due to reductions in secondary effects. The third study adopts a life-course perspective, demonstrating that the offspring of highly educated parents spend, on average, 4.4 years longer as university graduates compared to peers from low-educated backgrounds, with both the timing and duration of educational attainment shaping these stratified outcomes.
Collectively, the findings advance understanding of the mechanisms and processes underpinning educational inequality, revealing how both individual background and institutional structures intersect and evolve geographically and over time—even in a comprehensive and formally egalitarian education system. Methodologically, the dissertation bridges classical and contemporary theories of social mobility with rigorous life-course approaches and introduces the novel measurement of Expected Years as a University Graduate to capture long-run educational inequality.
Lotta Lintunen is a postdoctoral researcher at the MaxHel Center and a Ph. D. candidate in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. Her research focuses on social stratification and social mobility in contemporary societies, with a particular emphasis on educational and health inequalities. She uses quantitative approaches and sociological perspectives to investigate the different geographically and temporally bound institutional and social structures that (re)produce inequalities and unequal life opportunities. Her current work looks at the stratification of mental health in emerging adulthood and how educational trajectories and academic performance mediate the effects of family background on ill-being. Lotta’s other research interests include wealth stratification, the life-course approach, and how the overall stratification of education and health changes with societal shifts.
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