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Despite educational expansion and decreasing social inequalities in access to upper secondary education, increasing social inequalities can be found in the transition from upper secondary to tertiary education in Germany. Drawing on Boudon's distinction between primary and secondary effects of social origin, we describe two potential sources which can be considered responsible for the observed pattern: first, an increase in performance differentials between upper secondary graduates from different social backgrounds, and second, a heterogenization of educational motivations and post-secondary plans among upper secondary graduates. We test these hypotheses with a series of datasets of upper secondary graduation cohorts from 1976 to 2002, provided by the German Higher Education Information System and apply a decomposition method in order to test the development of the contribution of various measures of primary and secondary effects. We find that primary effects play only a negligible role for the explanation of increasing social inequalities over time, whereas the growing class-specific differences in the transition to tertiary education are primarily due to increasing secondary effects.

The objective of this article is to compare college persistence patterns among minority and majority students in universities and colleges in Norway with that of the United States. Despite differences in the educational systems and economic regimes, both countries face the common challenge of ensuring educational equity, especially among students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and minority students. Using competing risk event history analysis, this article examines nationally representative samples of students to assess the relative year-to-year risk of dropping out from higher education among minority and majority students. We found that while the US higher education system tends to exacerbate initial socioeconomic inequalities between minority and majority students, there is no difference in the dropout risk among minority and majority students in Norway. Moreover, at the [Bachelor of Arts] BA level, we found that minority students graduate at significantly lower rates than majority students in the United States, even when we control for dropping out. Again, there is no such difference in Norway. This indicates that even though minority students in Norway are also disproportionately from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, they are encountering fewer obstacles in higher education than minority students in the United States.