Educational inequality and the role of parental resources in its reproduction is important strand of stratification research. While different approaches deploy a multidimensional conceptualization of social origin, often one-dimensional measure of parental resources is employed in the research (Møllegaard and Jæger 2015). However, recently the role of interplay and combinations of resources in reproduction of educational inequalities have become the subject of scrutiny (e.g. Buis 2013; Bukodi and Goldthorpe 2013; Huang 2013; Jæger 2007; Erola et al 2016). Guided by these claims our main research question is: How parental resources configurationally secure higher education for their offspring and how these configurations are embedded in wider institutional settings of country’s educational governance?
We use Estonian Social Survey (ESS) 2011 data that had its focus on intergenerational transmission. In total 4,993 households and 11,076 individuals were interviewed and we distinguish between three birth cohorts (1) born in 1950-59, (2) born in 1960-74, and (3) born in 1975-85.
Our research strategy is to use set-analytic principles and the resulting set coincidence measures (Ragin, Fiss, 2016) to analyse how parental advantages and disadvantages combine in their impact on offspring’s educational attainment. First, we explore the patterns of coinciding advantages and disadvantages of parental resources across cohorts. Next, we investigate how these patterns are linked to the attainment of higher education and moderated by the changes of educational governance. How do these patterns combine and reinforce and which links are stronger, the coinciding advantages to enable; or the coinciding disadvantages to hinder the attendance of higher education.
We see our contribution at least twofold: we employ novel approach – set coincidence analysis, in explaining educational inequalities; furthermore, we elaborate on the multidimensional explanations of parental resources in facilitating children’s educational paths.
