Intergenerational inequality of educational attainment—typically measured by the association between parental socioeconomic characteristics and filial educational attainment—is of major research interest among sociologists and economists alike. Starting from the seminal work by Mare (1981), sociologists have often analyzed this association as a weighted sum of the associations between parental background and the likelihood of passing each transition that make up the educational pathway. Despite the popularity of this conceptual model, empirical research applying it has generally focused only the inequalities in passing the separate transitions but not assessed the importance of the weights that link the inequalities at each transition to inequality in completed education. Recently, Buis (2017) built on the Mare-model and proposed a decomposition of inequality in educational attainment into inequalities at each transition and the associated weights, and gave these weights a substantive interpretation. We extend the Mare-Buis model to allow for multiple destinations at each educational transition point, as well as multiple pathways into the same educational destination, and use this multiple pathways sequential logit model to estimate trends in intergenerational educational inequality in Finland over cohorts born from 1960 to 1985. Like Buis, we pay particular attention to importance of the weights in accounting for educational inequality and trends therein. We find that intergenerational educational inequality has increased, particularly among women, mainly because of the increasing importance of the transition from compulsory education to academic upper secondary education. This has been driven both by increasing inequality in the transition to academic high school, but also by an increase in the corresponding weight, which captures changes in the volume of education. Changes in academic upper secondary education have likewise changed the share of each cohort eligible for university education, thus increasing the importance of this transition for population-level educational inequality. We also report on how the expansion of post-secondary vocational education has contributed to educational inequality among men by expanding educational opportunities among vocational school graduates, and reduced the importance of academic high school for post-secondary educational attainment. Our results show how changes in educational inequality are driven by inequalities in educational transitions as well as changes in the structural features of the educational system (changes in the volume of education and its distribution across the educational system).

中文翻译：

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教育转型和教育不平等：1960-1985 年芬兰出生队列的多途径序列 Logit 模型分析

教育程度的代际不平等——通常通过父母社会经济特征与子女教育程度之间的关联来衡量——是社会学家和经济学家的主要研究兴趣。从 Mare (1981) 的开创性工作开始，社会学家经常将这种关联分析为父母背景与通过构成教育途径的每个过渡的可能性之间关联的加权总和。尽管这个概念模型很受欢迎，但应用它的实证研究通常只关注通过单独过渡时的不平等，而没有评估将每次过渡时的不平等与完成教育中的不平等联系起来的权重的重要性。最近，Buis (2017) 建立在 Mare 模型的基础上，提出将教育程度的不平等分解为每次过渡时的不平等和相关权重，并对这些权重进行实质性解释。我们扩展了 Mare-Buis 模型，以允许在每个教育过渡点有多个目的地，以及进入同一教育目的地的多种途径，并使用这种多途径序列 logit 模型来估计芬兰代际教育不平等的趋势。 1960 年至 1985 年。与 Buis 一样，我们特别关注权重在解释教育不平等及其趋势方面的重要性。我们发现代际教育不平等加剧了，尤其是女性，主要是因为从义务教育向学术性高中教育过渡的重要性日益增加。这既是由于向学术性高中过渡期间不平等的加剧，也是由于相应权重的增加，后者反映了教育量的变化。高中学历教育的变化同样改变了每个有资格接受大学教育的群体的比例，从而增加了这种转变对人口水平教育不平等的重要性。我们还报告了中等后职业教育的扩张如何通过扩大职业学校毕业生的教育机会而加剧了男性之间的教育不平等，并降低了学术高中对中等后教育程度的重要性。