The Educational Aspiration Gap between Second-Generation Immigrants and Ethnic-Majority Students and the Moderating Role of Gender : A Comparison between Germany and Sweden

Sammanfattning

Educational inequality research has established that students’ aspirations are an important predictor of later educational outcomes, yet aspiration research often examines predictors (e.g., migration background, gender and education systems) separately. This thesis advances knowledge on their interplay by examining the educational aspiration gap between second-generation immigrants and ethnic-majority youth and how gender moderates this relationship, comparing Germany and Sweden as contrasting cases of high- and low-stratified education systems. Drawing on rational choice frameworks and the immigrant optimism theory, three hypotheses are tested using multilevel regression models based on the first wave of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey (CILS4EU), which comprises 3,283 students in Germany and Sweden. The results show that second-generation immigrant students have significantly higher odds of aspiring to a university degree than ethnic-majority students, consistent with the immigrant optimism theory. The aspiration gap between second-generation immigrants and ethnic-majority students is smaller in highly stratified Germany than in low-stratified Sweden, suggesting that ability tracking constrains students’ aspirations overall. Notably, the distribution of aspirations in Germany is reversed compared to Sweden, with below-upper-secondary aspirations dominating in Germany and university-degree aspirations dominating in Sweden. The influence of migration background on aspirations varies significantly by gender: the gap is almost entirely driven by significantly lower aspirations among ethnic-majority boys, while ethnic-majority girls and both second-generation immigrant boys and girls aspire at comparable levels. These findings indicate that in countries with highly stratified education systems, immigrant optimism is restrained and that the aspiration gap is a problem of the ethnic-majority boys’ disengagement rather than exceptionally high aspirations among immigrants. The results, therefore, shed light on a necessary change in the understanding of immigrant advantages in educational aspirations to a disadvantage for ethnic-majority boys.