The article by Prof. Em. Ph. Pepka Boyadjieva and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Petya Ilieva-Trichkova, (IFS-BAS) was published in the prestigious journal Higher Education Research & Development, indexed in Web of Sciences and Scopus in Q1.
Abstract:
The present article combines the capability approach with the conceptualisation of opportunity structures to better understand people’s vulnerabilities regarding higher educational attainment in different social contexts. Drawing on data from the tenth wave of the European Social Survey (2021/2022) for 22 European countries and by applying multilevel modelling, it explores the association between opportunity structures at macro level and individual vulnerabilities to unequal higher educational attainment related to social origin. It reveals that the macro-opportunity structures (economic, political and cultural) in a given country have moderating effects on the association between higher educational attainment and social origin which are gender-sensitive and vary for different components of social origin. Women’s higher educational attainment is positively associated with all the examined opportunity structures, whereas for men this only applies to a country’s economic and democratic development. Additionally, in countries with high levels of economic and democratic development and social trust, the differentiating influence of parental education is less visible, especially with regard to paternal education. Overall, this study demonstrates the need to investigate the association between higher educational attainment and social origin as socially embedded and separately for different genders and components of social origin.
The article is open access: Moderating effects of macro-opportunity structures on unequal higher educational attainment: a gender perspective
The article was developed within the Skills2Capabilities project
