Socio-economic Background and Early Post-compulsory Education Pathways: A Comparison between Natives and Second-generation Immigrants in Switzerland

Abstract

This article investigates the differences in post-compulsory education pathways between natives and second-generation immigrants in Switzerland. It analyses to which extent the socioeconomic background explains the different post-compulsory education trajectories of children of Swiss and second-generation immigrants. Using data from the Transition from Education to Employment survey (TREE), we use Optimal Matching Analysis to identify typical transitions encompassing the 7 years that follow the end of compulsory school and logistic regression to analyse the differences between native-born children and second-generation immigrants. In the first part of the article, we show that second-generation immigrants from low-skilled waves of migration are more likely to follow lower vocational tracks and to have an early transition into working class occupations. We also find that second-generation immigrants present higher likelihood of transition into ‘Not in education, employment, or training’ (NEET). In the second part of the article, we show that the early transition into working class occupations is entirely explained by socio-economic factors. We also demonstrate that, for the children of Portuguese, former-Yugoslav, Albanian, and Turkish immigrants, the socio-economic background plays a minor role in explaining the transitions into NEET. In this case, a disadvantage persists even after socio-economic background is taken into account in the model.