Analyzing Educational Careers: A Multinomial Transition Model

By R. Breen, Jan O. Jonsson. American Sociological Review, 2000

353 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The logit model of educational transitions has become standard in research in educational stratification. One limitation of the model, however, is the assumption that individuals progress through the educational system in a unilinear sequential mode. Many school systems contain parallel branches of study that are most fruitfully seen as qualitatively different alternative pathways with different probabilities of school continuation attached to them. This study tests a multinomial model of educational careers, that takes previous paths and grade-point averages into account. Applied to a large Swedish longitudinal data set the model tests whether conclusions about class stratification in educational attainment based on a logit model are borne out. Results show that the pathway a student has taken through the school system influences the probability of making subsequent educational transitions. This result is robust to unmeasured heterogeneity modeled using a latent class approach. Furthermore, the traditional logit model tends to deflate class-origin effects at early transition points while inflating them at the transition to higher education. The results give some support to the hypothesis that origin effects are strongest at more “indirect” and unusual pathways.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e36e0e41908883180227544480c2c869726bb3da

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Education

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

First Grade and Educational Attainment by Age 22: A New Story1 (2005, background): “Most studies of educational attainment assume that individuals progress through the school system in a unilinear, sequential mode (Breen and Jonsson 2000).”
Inequality of opportunity in comparative perspective : Recent research on educational attainment and social mobility (2005, methodology): “…model of educational transitions continues to be the main method of studying the origins-education relationship, although it has been extended by Breen & Jonsson (2000) and Lucas (2001), the latter also rebutting some of the criticisms of the identification of the model made by Cameron &…”
Economic Crisis and Inequality of Educational Opportunity in Latin America (2010, background): “…have highlighted the qualitative dimension of inequality, namely, the fact that a given educational level may comprise different subsectors—such as tracks or school sectors—which provide unequal opportunities for further attainment (Ayalon and Shavit 2004; Breen and Jonsson 2000; Lucas 2001).”
When Parents Want Children to Stay Home for College (2006, background): “The main purpose of this study is to assess the extent to which these parental strategy preferences affect students’ chances of applying to college during their senior year of high school, while they still live at home and their parents’ influence is relatively strong (Breen and Jonsson, 2000; Mare,”
Social Class, Ability and Choice of Subject in Secondary and Tertiary Education in Britain (2003, background): “…drop-outs in each of these steps that would make the analysis similar to binomial or multinomial transition models as far as O levels/CSEs are concerned (Mare, 1980; Breen & Jonsson, 2000), for the analysis of the whole career of educational attainments this would fit less well into our design.”